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Jay said last week that it’s the busy month for the coffee shop, and I’m glad their shop is busy. I’m glad someone is busy. I was not busy with eBay last week…not even slightly. It was the slowest week I’ve had since I started selling online full-time two years ago. Slower than any weeks where I was on vacation or not really paying attention to eBay. I think it was slower than the last year or two when I still had a day job. So maybe my slowest week in five years. Maybe even longer. I already went over my theories why this happened in my sale of the week post, but I’m curious what everyone else’s numbers looked like last week. I hope I was suffering alone but if your sales were bad, know that you had company!
When things get slow, you can either doom and gloom or use the time. Don’t get stuck in negativity. List just two or three more items today, even if you’re not sure what to price something at or what the title should be. Mess with prices or titles on old listings, or end them and relist or sell similar. Reorganize your inventory. Donate a pile of stuff that’s just taking up space. Or spend some good time on yourself or with the people in your life.
Sell trash, be free.
10/29/2023 to 11/4/2023
Listings: 371 (down from 407 the previous week)
Items sold: 9 (9 via best offer (yes, all 9), 0 via seller initiated offer, 5 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $441.57 (down 75% from one year ago)
Net sales: $167.17 (down 84% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $49.06 (down 13% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $100.75 — Ray Lewis 2002 Donruss Classics Super Bowl ball and lace relic card ##/25
I don’t even what to think about what my weekly numbers would have been without this sale. Whoops, too late. Fortunately, this is a big month for my trading card consignment sales. The site I use (COMC) runs a big Black Friday promo every year, so sales really pick up in October and November. I’ve been running progressive sales for the last month and I’m up to a 50% discount, so things are really starting to fly. But how low will I go? I have just under 14,000 items in my port, and it will be very interesting to see how many sell by the end of this month and this year.
Lowest price sold (net): $10.75 — Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan book Volume 20
This book sold to a repeat buyer who’s bought three or four Bernard Lonergan books from me this year. Always a month or two apart. I like to think that he waits to buy the next book until he finishes the one he bought. Very disciplined and focused. I have one more Longergan book in my store and one other item related to his theology and philosophy writing. At the same sale where I bought all the Lonergan books, I found an academic journal which was about Lonergan. It’s listed on my eBay, but no offers or bites. It belongs with this buyer. If he buys the last book, I’m sending him the journal as a lagniappe. It feels like the right move.
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Week Ending 11/4/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $519.75 (eBay $220 / Etsy $300)
Net Sales: $468.89
Total Items Sold: 9 (eBay 8 \ Etsy 1)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1198 \ Etsy: 565
Cost of Items Sold: $67.83
COGS Percent: 14.47%Highest Price Sold: $299.95 Train Set
Average Price Sold: $57.75
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $125.08
Sold via promoted listings: 4Average Days Listed: 326
Longest Listed: 962
New items listed: 9
New Listings Value $414.55Etsy sale for $300 really saved what was otherwise a bad week. The sale was for a 1939 O-scale American Flyer train set. I only had this up a few weeks. Bought from an online auction for $45. I was surprised to have gotten this one as these usually go to the collectors.
I mentioned last week that I ended and relisted a good portion of my old inventory to see if that generates any sales. 2 of the sales from last week were from the relisted items. Both low-dollar sales. It does seem to have increased the traffic to my store according to eBay metrics, but it isn’t resulting in a lot of additional sales.
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Thanks for starting this thread Craig. It’s refreshing? to see that even you can have a slow week! I know it’s pat of life in our store. Question: what percentage of your eBay inventory is trading cards vs other stuff. I wonder if you’ve been offloading your cards to that consignment company so your eBay store is becoming like most of ours: old weird stuff that’s long tail?
Otherwise, we had one of the best weeks we’ve had in a long time. Sold a lot of items for good prices. You just never know.
Total Items in Store: 9622
Items Sold: 40
Gross Sales: $2,014.71 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,424.02 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $112
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $135 (vintage light switches)
Average Price Sold: $35.60
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10-
It’s refreshing? to see that even you can have a slow week! I know it’s pat of life in our store. Question: what percentage of your eBay inventory is trading cards vs other stuff. I wonder if you’ve been offloading your cards to that consignment company so your eBay store is becoming like most of ours: old weird stuff that’s long tail?
I also thought it was kind of refreshing to have such a slow week as well. It gave me some time to get myself organized and think ahead to next year without taking time away from enjoying my life.
Right now I have 50 out of about 400 listings which are weird long tail stuff outside of the trading cards category. Mostly media items. Less than I thought. It was much higher percentage of weird long tail stuff after my Chicago haul…but a lot of that haul is already sold, and I haven’t really been scavenging much outside of the trading cards I buy each week.
Actually, I have spent most of my reselling time on the trading card listings. Both eBay and the consignment site. With eBay, I have been focused on making my curated lots. I’ve been trying to do 20 or 30 new ones each week. I’ve figured out a good formula to make them. It really helps to include a card or two of players who are in the news — the hot new rookie or the old time player who recently passed away. I would say at least half of them sell to buyers who are in the same state as the team or their username relates to their fandom. Then after a few weeks, if they don’t sell, I send them to auction at 50% of my BIN price. If they still don’t sell, usually I’ll lower the price a few bucks. It’s a nice routine.
With the consignment site, they run a big Black Friday promo every year which leads to a lot of extra traffic on the site. To prepare, I’ve been repricing a few hundred cards each day and running progressive sales over the last few weeks. I’m at 50% off right now and will go 55% the rest of this week. It’s a bit daunting running that steep of a discount, but it’s working. I had about 15,000 cards in my port a month ago and now I’m down to 13,600. I’d love to get under 10,000 by the end of the year or even the end of the month. I’m holding off on sending new submissions for a few weeks because part of the promo this year is a discount on submission fees for the month of December. It should be a great month of buying and selling.
Nice to see you had such a strong week of sales. The end and relist is nice to get an immediate boost in sales in the first day or two after, but I’ve also seen a similar little boost in sales the next week or two. Definitely something to keep in mind with Black Friday coming up…even if eBay doesn’t run any promos (and they haven’t in a few years, so it’s not likely they will) there will be more people buying online that week than most other weeks. So may as well try every trick of the trade possible to boost sales right now — end and relist, run a sale, slash prices, run auctions.
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Total Items in Store: 1,089
Items Sold: 11
Gross Sales: $478.00 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $222.32 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $54 (several items ours)
Highest Price Sold: $50 (New bed skirt)
Average Price Sold: $43.45
Returns: 1 + one partial refund $25
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $54 RA + about $15 flea market
Number of items listed this week: 46Slow week for me and it felt discouraging. I listed most of the items at the end of the week, rather than daily which probably didn’t help things. I ran into a fellow seller this week with an antique booth and he said he’s having to work harder for the same money, and that seems to be a consensus with sellers these days. I feel like consumers are feeling progressively poorer. I know this is true for our family, though for us it’s more from having extra big kid expenses than economy related.
I started running a 20% off sale yesterday and got to make some more offers, which is cutting a little bit further down from my usual bottom on things. I’d like to get something going before the slow downs in December and February. I did have good sales yesterday so perhaps it helped. Last time I ran a 10-15% off sale it didn’t seem to help at all.
This week I discovered a guy on Youtube called the bearded picker. He doesn’t have anything new to say – it’s similar to practical SL advice – but it’s funny to hear things about selling on Ebay given in his country style delivery. He constantly has animals interrupting him and such. He describes Ebay promoting other sellers’ items as a physical violation that I won’t repeat. LOL.
There is a lot of talk about sell through rate. I’m kind of focused on getting items up right now but I think during the slow times I will start tweaking some old listings and checking on prices and sell through rate. Some Youtubers are saying you need to tweak the listings and not just sell similar. I like to keep picking and it’s plentiful here so gotta move out more of this inventory. I don’t have a warehouse or basement and definitely could use the money. I’m doing a gradual organization of my inventory and it’s clear that it’s growing.
I’m happy to say that I should finish the photos on the final estate sale items today. I’m not sure I can handle that volume picking on a regular basis but it was fun. I’m still backed up here looking at maybe 20-25 items to be listed in my work space.
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This was a great post, a lot of interesting topics for discussion.
As far as sale prices go…what’s your floor as far as offer settings and running sale prices? Do you figure it out based on what you paid? Value compared to other sold listings? List price? These factors are what make this art as much as it is science.
I auto-decline offers below 60% of my BIN price, and when I send offers I usually do 20%. I get almost no responses at 15%.
I am thinking about running a little pre Black Friday markdown sale this week…I am saving my monthly auctions to end on cyber Monday on the off chance eBay runs a promotion this year. Maybe I will try 25% off markdown sale this week and see how that goes.
I think to myself sometimes…25% that’s a pretty big discount…then with fees we’re at like 40% off of “my price.” But we have to make these decisions sometimes! Do I want to hold out another month (or year) for the perfect buyer who wants to pay “my price” or sell now for a little less than my target price? It’s all about considering what your goals are.
Like you, I’m space limited and could use the cash. So I’ve been in sell mode. Or donate. Or lot up. Or trash. It’s easiest with the cards I sell on that consignment site because they’re not in my possession anymore and no shipping involved. Just slash the price until it sells.
But you’re comfortably over 1,000 items in your store now. So you have some wiggle room. You could run a significant sale (like 40% off) on a selection of your inventory (say 100 oldest items) and clear some space / make some cash that way. We talk a lot about the flexibility eBay provides (especially when life is busy) but the customization is nice too. Very easy to run different types of sales for however long you like.
I hope you have a great week of sales this week…at whatever discount you choose!
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@Craig since Terapeak has become available, for an item without any condition issues I price at or around the highest sold in 24 months, then generally I’m allowing and auto accepting 10-15% off that price, usually at a round number someone would offer.
However, I do take a look at actives and the range of solds when making a decision. The auto decline I decided on after finding that most buyers don’t come up too much or go back and forth with counters, plus it annoys me a bit. It also keeps people from double dipping if I’m running a sale.I’ve been thinking of looking a little harder at the item sell through rate and setting the offer % lower. I have new RA items in my store though and the margins are thinner there and I would need / want to exclude those probably. Other items I paid very little for and some things I’m more willing to hold out longer on than others because I think they are special. I also factor in that sometimes a person is just looking for an item because they broke it that day so it has to wait in my store at whatever price until that happened or someone finds it on Pinterest.
The 20% sale I ran this week seemed to help. I ran it in the whole store. Sold more new items than used.
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I almost forgot that I had a rare customer issue this week. An experienced Ebayer bought this expensive but obscure brand chocolate brown bedskirt from me. It was new in the open package with all of the labeling. She wrote and claimed it was not the size stated on the packaging in a lecture type way and said she might be able to use it anyway. I asked what partial refund she though was fair and gave her half the price back (I only paid $6, so I was ok). She made a hint at wanting an additional break on the shipping but I reminded her it was calculated. Long story but I knew she was being manipulative and familiar with Ebay backing the buyer. I avoided the INAD, was polite, and promptly blocked her.
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Another pretty crappy week for me; I expect that the crazy state of the world now has something to do with it. Otherwise, the economy is OK.
I’m currently looking for a place to sell the Persian rug I discussed in a separate post. Sotheby’s sent me to an European auction site, which could work, but I hesitate listing it there. I’m looking into Ruby Lane and 1st Dibs as possible sites, but I haven’t had the time to contact them and see if they are viable for a one-off seller like me.
Week of Oct 29 – Nov 4
Total Items in Store: 1759 eBay, 36 Etsy
Items Sold: 8 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $5 + $34 Commission
Total Sales: $166.80 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $36 for 4 Dinner Plates with Scalloped Edges Made in Italy
Average price: $20.85
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $41.36
Number of items listed this week: 18 -
Not the most exciting of weeks… I ran a 70% off sale on my oldest listings and things still didn’t move much. I ran a few 99 cent auctions (with free shipping!) on a few pieces with missed flaws as an experiment. A pair of jeans with a hole (and not the good kind) in the back took off in a bidding war and sold for $20 with great feedback. I then got a little over-confident and ran a few more cheap auctions and lost a few $’s on the shipping for several more pairs of jeans and a shirt… I won’t be doing that again anytime soon. When I cranked up the Promoted Listings, I started getting some traction… when I lowered it again, things slowed way down. Still listing every day and trying to find my happy medium. Intentionally passing on some good items with a lower ASP… it’s hard to do, but hoping it will pay off longer term.
My Store Week October 29-November 4, 2023
Total Items in Store: 842
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $820.96 ($650.86 ebay, including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $391.83 (minus eBay fees, shipping, taxes, returns)
Cost of Items Sold: $51.04
Highest Price Sold: $37.95 (NWT Nike Sweat Pants)
Average Price Sold: $23.66 (inc. shipping)
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $88.24
Number of items listed this week: 37$ Amount Listed this week: $905.78
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Interesting stories from your week, thanks for sharing them. I haven’t run a markdown sale in a long time, but a few years ago when my store was much larger i used to run them every 6-8 weeks. Usually 20 to 30 percent off, sometimes 40 percent. What I found is that some weeks they are really successful and others not so much. So don’t let one good (or bad) week affect you too much.
Auctions are a fun trip. Those bidding wars are so rare, but fun to see.
You made me think that cranking up promoted listings for Black Friday week might be a really good idea. I promote at either 5% or 7.5% right now, but I might try a little experiment at 10% and see if that does anything. 10 percent! That seems like a crazy amount to pay in fees!!!
But this is the game of eBay now. No sense in romanticizing the past. Just have to adapt. And I’m not going to care about higher fees if I’m selling more.
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Total Items in Ebay Store: 317
Ebay items Sold: 7 for $588
Total Items on Facebook: 52
Facebook Items sold: 2 for $340 (two wine racks and a table)
Cost of items sold: $11
Total Sales: $928 (9 items)
$0 spent on new inventory
I had a 50% sale on older clothing but only sold one tie for $18. I did end and sell similar all listings older than 2 weeks and sold a jacket for $50. I scavenged a solid wood sofa table/console and three wine racks on Nov 1 which sold immediately on Nov 2. I scavenged four pairs of Lucchese cowboy boots on Halloween and listed that day. They were free on side of road. One pair of boots sold for $415 on Nov 2.
This Tuesday I only had time for one neighborhood trash day and scavenged for about 45 minutes driving around. I found a small antique dresser, solid wood with lovely detailing and great distressed corners. I posted it for $85. It only needed wiping down. That same house had a painted distressed nightstand which I posted for $35. This week I also worked on staining a beat up MCM bookcase to a dark mahogany, and repainted a baker’s rack. I’ll list those on FB tomorrow for $170 and $75.
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Wow, what an incredible score on those cowboy boots! I assume the other boots will net you a nice profit as well putting your total somewhere in the vicinity of $1000. Is that the best haul you’ve found for free?
Who leaves nice cowboy boots out at the road for free? As Jay and Ryanne always used to say…we live in a country with more waste than anywhere else. Nice to see you saved something from the trash (or the elements) and made a nice profit on it too…
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Items in Store: 2785
Items Sold: 32
Total Sales: $2,016.00
COGS: $239.00
Total Profit: $1,777.00
Average profit: $55.53
Average sales price: $63.00
New Listings: 35
Items scavenged: 0
2023 weekly new listings Avg: 44Busy week – we did a haunted house in our front yard this year for trick or treat. I planned a last minute ‘day job business’ trip which had me putting my store on time away starting Thursday night. Sales definitely slowed down after that with NO sales on Sunday.
No scavenging as we had things to do and also packing/leaving to go on trip. Listing was also light as I just didn’t have time to finish taking photos. I also went down on Thursday due to a massive migraine. I wasn’t able to get my shipping done and got hit with a pile of late shipping defects. Still have top rated seller though, for what that is worth (Not much!)
Premium cumulative numbers
Total COGS: $12441.00
Total Sales (minus fees): $16527.61
Items Sold: 171
ASP: $111.42
PROFIT!: $4086.61
Sold 8 items for $1243 this week. I listed a couple pair of shoes this week. I need to get back to listing the clothes too soon.
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