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Felt like a normal week of steady sales. Lots of fun weird items. Today we sold a magazine for $25 that we found in the trash. This is the most exciti
[See the full post at: The Numbers: Week of September 17-23, 2023] -
Items in Store: 2690
Items Sold: 45
Total Sales: $2,778.00
COGS: $214.00
Total Profit: $2,564.00
Average profit: $56.98
Average sales price: $61.73
New Listings: 47
Items scavenged: 45
Listing 2023 weekly Avg: 43Even if there are only a couple people on here, it is fun for me to post my numbers. I occasionally talk about this stuff with my wife, but (no joke) it puts her to sleep. She’ll sometimes ask me to ‘talk ebay’ if she is stressed and can’t sleep. So even if only one other person posts here I’ll still do my weekly post.
A huge week of sales! 7 items accounted for $1700 of my total sales so it was a big ticket item heavy week. Yard sales on Saturday were a bust – back to what I expected for late September in my area.
I didn’t do any listing this weekend. I spent my work time this weekend doing major cleaning/organizing in my ebay garage office. Thankfully I made sure to photograph 5-10 items before work each morning during the week so my listing numbers stayed up. It is always nice to claim back floor space and have things much neater in my work area. I was also able to add another folding table so I have a dedicated listed items station instead of just leaving bins in the floor all week. Sunday was a wash as I ended up going to purchase a new(used) living room set. I had to load up the old huge sectional couch to take to the dump this morning.
In true scavenger style, the deal came with some real nice coffee and end tables that I had no room for. I have them listed on FBMP for $500, which will recoup almost half the total purchase price. These tables sell for $1000 in furniture stores! Why spend $4-6000 for a real leather living room set when you can buy a barely used set for $700 after the tables sell. A similar real leather set I just looked at at the furniture store on clearance as a floor model with damage was still $4k!
Premium Hoarder update:
Sold 11 items for $1306. One pair of shoes sold for $450 – awesome. My favorite sale was a pair of wool tuxedo pants for $200.
I did buy some more this weekend from the hoarder collection but not as much. They weren’t able to bring over as much clothing as in the past, and their baseline prices are high enough that I passed on quite a few items. At this point I don’t want to pay $8-10 for the $30 items. I only spent $436.
They had some interesting hard goods this time. A Bose speaker set for $25 that I’ll sell for $200. The potential big ticket item this time were these ornate stone/wood decorative boxes by Maitland Smith . I know they’re worth a minimum of $100 each. I’ll have to do some serious research as some of the larger boxes by this brand can sell for thousands. I have 2 sets of 2. Each set are matching but different size. I haven’t been able to find one that looks exactly like these, but ones that are similar have solds in the $500-1000 range.
With the huge week in sales and the new purchase I’m already back in the profit…by $3.18. LOL!
Today I just crossed $10k in total premium hoarder sales.
They’ll do one more weekend of having a yard sale and then the waiting game on a complete buyout begins.
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We also have been picking up furniture for cheap locally and reselling on Facebook. One woman basically just gave up a storage unit full of stuff she wanted to get rid of. That’s our kind of deal. Just the kind of situations you luck out on.
I’m amazed by your Premium Hoarder updates. Do you know who this woman was that spent tens of thousands of dollars on clothes/shoes? This is in WV? West Virginia isnt the place you’d expect such extravagence.
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It was a man. He inherited alot of money. Also owned a bar in Charleston. The woman selling everything is a family member. In talking with the family, he was flamboyant and was always wearing flashy clothes, shoes and jewelry.
Alot of this stuff was purchased in Southern Florida – many of the receipts I’ve found in the shoes are from Florida.
I assume he just ended up developing a hoarding issue later in life.
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It’s the perfect score for you. Always weird coming across these people had some kind of hole in their life where buying was the solution.
My grandmother spent the last year other life buying junk off the Home Shopping Network. After she died, there was a steady stream of packages for several months afterwards.
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Total Items in Store: 947
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales: $319.21 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $206.70 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $49
Highest Price Sold: $59 (New Scentsy wax warmer)
Average Price Sold: $45.60
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $40
Number of items listed this week: 43Kind of a disappointing sales week. I plan to list a lot this week and do less shopping. Working toward 1000. Thanks for keeping the forum alive. I am grateful.
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Shopping is the fun part! But listing/selling is what makes this a business. Always glad to see you post.
How is retirement these days from being a lawyer? It’s been over a year now, right?
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Yes shopping is the fun part. I started out barely listing in the old days. The balance is pretty good now and I am able to throw all my hauls into the pipeline and get back to the piles periodically. However, I need to try harder to start listing daily. It’s doable.
I miss the income but nothing else about the job. I have a child who has been struggling hard post-pandemic and I’m very hands on with that still. Lots of ups and downs. They offered me my job back twice but I’m not out of the woods with that. This business keeps me sane and stimulated plus helps with some “extra” expenses. Currently though we are strained with a few too many extras involving summer kid travel. It will be a quiet fall season with hopefully a lot more growth to my store. As a student I always worked in retail, mainly a surf store and wanted my own gift shop someday. So now I kind of have that in a no stress and liberating way.
I never watched much TV before. Now in retirement I escape with a bit of a series now and then. That’s kind of a fun change. Just finishing the Walking Dead. Unfortunately I’m not one of those who can list and listen at the same time.
By the way, I listen to the Pure Hustle podcast. They mention you a lot. Only about 10% of the content is good and relevant to me but they do talk about Ebay current news and changes. Where is My Cottage? 🙂 I miss a few people from the forum but it’s so great that you all are here while I’m ramping up my store.
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Owning your time really makes you feel like a millionaire when you can be there for your family or just for yourself. That job/career will always be there. Easy to get work where you clock hours. But never a way to get this time back once its gone.
Your kid will make it through. I see the same issues in our cafe staff in their late teens and early 20’s. They missed a couple years of socialization because of COVID.
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This website & forum has been such a big part of my resale journey; I don’t know where else I would go for the discussion and comradery. Sure, it is smaller, but it’s just a cool and calm place to talk about your eBay/resale business.
My auction for my neighbor is going well for this point in time. It closes on Thursday, so we still have three days to go. The items that I thought would get good bids are the ones that are the highest so far. There are always a few surprises at the end, so I’m excited to see what will happen. I’ve invited my neighbor over for dinner so that we can watch the end of the auction together.
https://bidder.maxsold.com/auction/84317/bidgallery
We were able to remove the listing for his refrigerator. We would have had to disconnect the water line prior to pickup, and it didn’t have an easy turn-off switch. My neighbor’s agreement with his buyer is that he can leave whatever he wants, and they will take care of it. MaxSold was able to remove it since there were no bids on the listing.
For sales, another blah week.
Week of Sept 17 – 23
Total Items in Store: 1721 eBay, 38 Etsy
Items Sold: 10 eBay, 0 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $0 + $59 Commission
Total Sales: $200.99 eBay, $0 Etsy; includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $43 Set 4 Bagshaw Placemats from St Lucia
Average price: $20.10
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $2
Number of items listed this week: 23 eBay + 7 Etsy + 143 MaxSold-
I scanned through that auction. You did a lot of work! I know this has been a months long adventure helping your neighbor. Maybe this starts a new business for you doing estate sale.
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I can see where it could be part of my business, but I don’t think it will be. I need a owner who doesn’t really care about how much their items go for and is willing to share the profits. And, plenty of time to set the auction up.
Normally, MaxSold charges $1250 to catalog all the items and then a tiered commission of 35% to $7000 and then 25% after that. Assuming someone has decent values in their items, my taking a 50% commission instead of the $1250 is probably not as good of a deal for the owner.
That $1250 went up from $800 when I ran my first one about five years ago, so maybe it is a better deal now. A true transition planner first does an estate sale, then MaxSold, and finally helps with the sale of the house (either bringing in a real estate agent or being one his/herself).
I did find out that another neighbor has sold their house and needs advice on selling her stuff. I talked to her about MaxSold, but I’ll just make the first call and refer her. But, yeh, she could have been another customer if I didn’t have my part time day job.
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Does MAxSold come take all the photos and list them? Or do you do that work and the $1250 is just to post to their site?
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You have a choice between MaxSold or seller managed.
MaxSold charges the $1250 to come to the house, take & upload all the photos, and write the descriptions. The owner is still responsible for organizing their stuff into auction lots.
For seller managed, which is what I did, you don’t pay the $1250.
Their commission fees are the same whether it is MaxSold or seller managed.
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I’m just a part-timer but hanging in here and learning something every time I show up. I’ll add my thanks to Ryanne & Jay for keeping at it and to everyone else hanging in, and to those at least visiting now and again to this definitely “cool and calm place.”
Week of 9/17 – 9/23
Total items in Store: 422
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $208.33 (before eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $41.06 (including consignment commissions but not the original cost of family castoffs)
Highest Price Sold: $40 plus shipping (Office of the Under Secretary of the Navy Challenge Coin)
Average Sales Price: $20.83 (before eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 17-
We are also grateful for this group. Scavenging is in our blood so who knows how this thing will evolve and morph into something else. This is why we love talking about the new ideas and things we’ve learned and seen out i the world. Always new ways to scavenge.
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Hi Everyone, It has been a few YEARS since I posted here, but I have been following this group since my eBay journey started in 2015/16. You guys inspired me to begin eBay when I quit my full time job to stay at home and raise my kids. It has been life changing for me. I would like to start posting my numbers again more regularly. I stopped posting because I felt that I just wasn’t where I wanted to be in my business. Despite always working and spinning my wheels I was never making it to the next level and could never figure out the ‘magic formula’. Now, I have taken a long hard and humbling look as to WHY NOT, and the truth of the matter is that I was laser focused on getting my store number to above 1000 items (at one point I was almost up to 1300) but the more I loaded my store up with “stuff” it seemed the less my sell through rate became. I was filling my store with a few cool vintage items but also a lot of crappy stuff, sometimes just free stuff I found anywhere and everywhere like junky kids toys or worthless books, that had little or no value and it wasn’t anything that anybody wanted. My store was stale and experiencing no growth. SO… now in 2023 I have changed my course. Now, I am actively paring down and niching into clothes. (Super easy to source with kids – I have a thrift route and I can grab good cheap items extremely fast before the school bus comes, without a lot of time or thought. Listing is very quick and easy and packing is even better… no more glass that takes 45 minutes to construct custom double boxes, just slap the jeans in a poly mailer in 2 seconds, haha!) Also I am really focusing on certain brands and styles. My goal is to consistently list at least 5 items every single day… (wish it was more, but 5 is even a struggle because our schedule is so packed so I don’t always hit my goal.) I have less items in my store than I have had in years, but my numbers are looking the same or better than when I had more items. I am finding that I absolutely must rely on Promoted Listings in order to maintain good sales for clothing. (On a personal note, I found out I was pregnant in 2021 with #6 during Covid… at the young age of 46!!! My son was born with Down Syndrome which has been a journey in itself. Ebay had to take a back seat while coming to terms with the diagnosis and also we have physical and occupational and speech therapy at least 3x a week so this takes away A LOT of my listing time. My son is now 2 and thriving! He is along for the eBay ride everyday, from sourcing to “helping” me pack and especially trips to the post office! This Summer, my husband was also diagnosed with prostate cancer, so we are now adjusting to a “new normal”. Life sure does throw curveballs. But eBay has kept me sane through it all. I know everyone in this group can understand that.)
Anyway, sorry for the novel, but here are the NUMBERS 🙂
Week of 9/17 – 9/23
Total items in Store: 827
Items Sold: 24Gross Sales: $474.40 (including eBay fees, shipping and taxes)
Net Sales: $225.95 (minus all eBay fees and shipping costs)
Cost of Items Sold: $30.50
Highest Price Sold: $28.45 plus shipping (Kids North Face Jacket)
Average Sales Price: $19.76 (including eBay fees, shipping and taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $32
Number of new items listed: 17-
@ebaymom good to hear from you. I totally hear you about all the appointments. Stay strong power mom.
Have you tried sell similar on your old listings? I do it once every 9-12 months. I am able to make a lot of offers right afterward. Also get a few sales out of it. Only problem is that it breaks all of my Pinterest board links. I do believe EBay has tweaked the algorithm to kind of further bury stale listings. I have some older listings with a lot of views and a poor sell through rate. I should probably take a look at their comp prices one day.
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Hi Christine, Nice to hear from you again! Yes, I have done the “end and sell similar” many times for very old listings.. with some success… but at this point I have developed a morning coffee routine where I look through all the listings that are about to end for the day… and anything with “0” views I manually end, then tweak and relist as I have time throughout the day. Lots of the really old listings have bad titles, too-high pricing, no item specifics, etc. and once I “fix” it the items will start getting views and many times sell after the update. This way I figure I am slowly making improvements to the listings that are out of date or irrelevant in some way. I do know that the algorithm likes activity. It’s interesting that often times I will see a zero-view listing that has a discrepancy (like a return policy that is defunct, or it was a pair of men’s jeans listed in womens, haha – no wonder it was suppressed… I figure if it has gotten zero views in several months, it needs a closer look to fix what is broken!)
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Great idea! Last week I tried to list at least 3 items in the morning before my kid is up. I think it did help my sales.
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Christine, I love those days when I get a few listings in before the kids get up… it always makes for a great day! Keep it up! I forgot to mention, but came back here to tell you that after our conversation on this thread, I went back and checked and could see that it had been a little over a year since doing a bulk “end and sell similar”… I used to do it so frequently that it stopped losing effectiveness. However, I DID IT that day and holy cow, I had a massive spike in impressions (like almost 100% increase for a day) and my page views doubled. (The number is gradually decreasing now to normal levels.) I did get a bunch of sales on the stale old listings too! So, there is definitely something to it. Thanks for the suggestion.
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Awesome! I think annually is right for me on refreshing. I’m hoping Ebay’s beta social media experiment will allow you to pin multiple listings to a pinterest board at once. Right now, you can only pin one thing at a time.
I changed some prices on my listings coming up for renewal with no views this week. Thanks for your suggestion on that.
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I haven’t had much time for posting on the forums this week because I had another batch of auctions ending this past Monday (will be in next week’s numbers) and I missed it. I enjoy reading everyone’s stories throughout the week. It gives me that little boost of motivation knowing that there are others who enjoy this life (and this podcast) enough to still hang around here. And everyone is doing things slightly differently. It is supposed to be a rainy weekend which usually leads to me spending some extra time organizing my workspace and reflecting. I am looking forward to squeezing in a few posts (OK, maybe more than a few) in between all that.
9/17/2023 to 9/23/2023
Items sold: 26 (15 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 19 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $980.48 (down 68% from one year ago)
Net sales: $630.84 (down 69% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $37.71 (up 16% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $75.31 — Willie Mosconi JSA authenticated signed pool stick
This was a scavenge of the week in May, cost me $30. Then it sat on one of my shelves until last week. Got it listed and it sold within 24 hours for my full asking price of $100. Probably could have priced it a little higher, but I was happy to get it packed (unscrewed the full size stick and wrapped each half in bubble wrap, used a 30″ x 10″ x 5″ box). Never let fear of shipping a weird item get in the way of actually getting it listed.
Lowest price sold (net): $11.31 — Chicago Bulls lot of 10 basketball cards
I have sold about 250 of these 10 card lots organized by team since the beginning of this year. This has been a new way of selling for me; I only sold about 50 of these lots all of last year. I make between $5 and $15 profit on each lot. I have developed a really good system to organize my inventory, create each listing, and price them so they either sell or I change out the cards. Some days I make 5 or 6 of these lots and that’s my eBay time for the day.
It will be interesting to see how many of these small lots I can sell next year. Would it be possible to sell 500 in a year, which is about 10 a week? Not sure, but it seems like a nice round number to shoot for.
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Have you noticed any change in the rading card market now that COVID buying is over?
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It’s very different now compared to a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic all of the consignment and grading companies had wait lists that were months long (seriously…3 to 6 months to grade a card or get it shipped from your consignment port to your home) and manufacturers sold out of everything. Of course that was never going to last for a million reasons — speculators found other ways to gamble, stimulus money ran out, people went back to “regular” forms of entertainment, too many sets. Topps even came out with a Bob Ross styled set recently! That one did sell out, but at this point it’s a few large companies (wholesalers and box breakers) buying up most products.
But all the cards that were bought and sold the last few years didn’t just disappear. Eventually the grading companies got their backlog graded 100% accurately (lol not at all) and consignment companies worked through their death piles of cards and listings and all the important people at these companies made lots of money.
Meanwhile lots of speculators who received their graded cards were disappointed because they speculated in some second-rate rookie backup player because that’s what sports card influencers told them to do, and the prices crashed after the weirdness of spring/summer 2020. Or people bought cards at peak 2020 prices and cut their losses in early 2021…or bought in early 2021 and cut their losses in 2022. Some cards went up too, it’s not all down. In fact, the National show set attendance records for the third year in a row and new sets continue to be produced at a feverish pace, hundreds of sets each year. There are more quality niche sets than there were before the pandemic — European soccer, wrestling, women’s sports. There are always bargains to be found when people sell cards at auction, no matter how they do it.
The consignment site I use runs a big Black Friday promotion every year. I have slowed down my buying a little bit since my Chicago trip and considering running a large sale — 50% or maybe higher. Not a panic sale or anything like that, just trying to use common sense about my scavenging life. My inventory there has grown pretty sizable, and once you get big enough, you can experiment. Worst case, everything sells and I have enough money to do some cool stuff. Isn’t that what life is really about?
And there will always be more stuff to buy.
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I’ve got a vintage mains transformer on auction- it’s on consignment from a friend who bought it a couple of weeks back from a purveyor of electronic junk for £5. The last two transformers I sold for him went on BIN to Chinese buyers. This one’s on auction- two bidders from China have driven it up to £184 with about ten hours to go. This is stuff from the 1960s- I have no idea what they’re doing with these transformers.
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@jay According to my friend a dangerous one! He wanted me to put a warning in the listing as to how only those who know how to work safely with high voltages should consider purchasing it. I didn’t- I thought it would just encourage the wrong kind of bidder, the type who’d build their own lethal electric fence.
Still got it- the high bidder (from China) hasn’t paid yet; the second highest is from Indonesia (no GSP) and the third highest is Australian. I’ve paid my friend the £75 he suggested, so I might hang on to it if the top bidder doesn’t cough up the £190, and find out a bit more about what it was actually made for. In general Partridge (the makers) made transformers for valve amplifiers.
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@Sharyn – Holy S***! $5400 for the art lot! Did they even realize they had a Warhol in their possession? Good thing more than one bidder recognized the signature. I sure wouldn’t have. Someone still got a pretty good deal. I’d love to hear the story on how they got that in their possession.
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No, I had no idea. I told my neighbor that I did not do the research, but that it might be worth something, might not. The signature really doesn’t look like Andy Warhol even though the Google image search is telling me that this is his design (that I’m doing after the fact).
Now I understand. We were wondering what was going on, and why it went for so much, thanks for clearing that up.
My neighbor’s wife did go to auctions at one time, which was evident from some of the other items I listed. The Agam prints (which I immediately recognized) were from auctions.
I do like Andy Warhol. After all, we both grew up in Pittsburgh!
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@ebaymom – Welcome back to the forum. Sounds like you’re doing what needs to be done to get the business where it needs to be. I’m sure finding your niche makes things easier and more interesting for you.
Sorry to hear about your challenging times. As a parent of a special needs child, I can say it mostly gets easier with time. Two steps forward, one step back, but progress over time. Wishing the best for your husband. Hang in there.
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Week Ending 9/23/23
Gross Sales(w/o shipping $ tax): $770.49
Net Sales: $639.31 (eBay $561 / Etsy $79)
Total Items Sold: 17 (eBay 12 / Etsy 5)
Total Items in eBay Store: 1185 / Etsy Store: 502
Cost of Items Sold: $57.66
Highest Price Sold: $120.00 Anchor Hocking Cannisters
Average Price Sold: $45.32
Returns: 1Average Days Listed: 198
Longest Listed: 864
New items listed: 15
New Listings Value $2,294.00Where did the week go? Feels like Wednesday. Week would have felt better had I not had the one return request for my big$600 sale from the previous week. Fortunately, I was able to talk the buyer into taking a partial $250 refund instead. It was for an antique nautical spyglass. Buyer new a lot more about them than I did and educated me about them more. Fortunately I didn’t have much in it so still doing OK.
Spent most of my week researching some recent artwork acquisitions. I purchased a lot of artwork for two vintage Winnie the Pooh illustrations. Turns out they weren’t worth much ($40), but several of the other works were more interesting. Three works from Asia that took me too long to identify. I can really get lost down the rabbit hole with stuff like this and I definitely did. Really put image search and Translate to good use and managed to identify one artist for sure, and subsequently sold their work for $100 a few hours after posting it. Funny thing, there was another print in the frame behind that one and I have it up for much more. Wasn’t able to exactly identify the artist but image search found two previous sales. Ironically, both previous sales were attributed to different artists and I don’t believe either is correct based on my research. Interesting piece of art though. I am shooting high, but you never know: Ji Xian 吉限 Antelope Buck and Doe Asian Wood Block Print 13×19 | eBay
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@Lukas great job on that print. I love to buy smaller midcentury art but honestly would have passed on this, as I do with most Asian items. Good for you!
I’ve pretty much gone with a 10-15 minute limit policy on research with pottery and art. Probably will miss something that way.
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Retro – I am speechless from your premium hoarding adventures… you are killing it! One never knows exactly what you will do or find next 🙂
Sharyn – You finally completed the auction! Congratulations! And very exciting about the Warhol! That must have been so exciting to watch the end of…
Lukastreasure – Thanks for your words of encouragement!
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