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I seriously feel like I’m playing whack a mole today in terms of answering customers shipping questions on all the venues I sell on. As soon as one question on one site is cleared out, another one pops up on another.
Try selling primarily books that go out media mail during this time of year! Hardly any have been delivered over the past 2 weeks from any of the sites I sell on, but at least all of them show last scans back to the 16th at the latest. A lot of them are being rerouted thousands of miles away from both the origin and destination points.
I’m not looking forward to the inevitable avalanche of INR cases and negative feedbacks – I’m already fighting one I received on Etsy today for an item that is in transit but won’t arrive in time for Christmas – not that I promised it would be!
I stopped creating new listings on any of my venues 10 days ago and will continue to not list anything new until the first or second week of January. I’m just doing ship outs 6 days a week of items already listed. I have a 2 day handling time but have been consistently getting all shipments out within 1 business day over the past few months.
I’ve got 2 ebay stores. My main store is a premium store with nearly 14,000 listings. My second store is a basic store with nearly 4,000 listings. 2 completely separate and different inventories. Thanks to the free listings for collectibles/books/music, I only use about 50-100 listings per month outside of the free allocation for my main store. I actually use more in my basic store, maybe 100-150 per month in “paid listings.” I pay less than $100 a month in listing fees for both stores. I had an anchor store for years and years before the changes this year in free listings. Thanks, Ebay!
In all of my years of buying and selling on Ebay, I have never seen it this bad with the USPS. This might make March/April initial pandemic shipping of this year look like nothing. Couple that with the fact that we’re about to get a major snowstorm in the NE and this season’s going to turn into a wash.
For the first time during a holiday season, I’ve gone on a listing break. I don’t want to ship out items that may or may not get there. I’m continuing to have daily mail pickups 6 days a week for items that are already listed and sold, but I don’t want to add on any additional holiday type items that will probably get to their destinations by January at this point!
Yeah, all of those would do great on ebay, etsy and possibly poshmark with the right keywords. Those are all cute patterns/design styles that someone will love. If you have closets full of them, the better. You might also want to try selling them outright to a vintage clothing dealer in bulk.
Sales $$ are down for the past few weeks, but sales volume has stayed consistent. Nearly 120 items shipped out last week. 3 bins of mail ready to go out tomorrow, with an additional bin’s worth of mail that needs to be packed tomorrow morning.
I’ve been slacking it over the past few months. My numbers could be much higher if I had put more work into it for Q4, but I didn’t feel like working very hard. I’ve just been riding on a large listed inventory with a few new items added each day in order to keep the store “active.”
I managed to listen to the podcast this week. It was a good one, like always! Thanks for staying consistent during the pandemic.
I feel like doubt, and a general sense of unease just permeates everything these days. What should be a normal expansion of business is just complicated by what will life be like post-pandemic. It is just another layer added to the normal question of “will this work out?” There’s always a normal level of anxiety when one starts a new line of business. It’s completely understandable to feel more anxious than normal when starting a new line of business now.
Sales have remained consistent over here, no matter how much I list. 120-150 orders each week on all venues. I did not experience a summer slowdown this year, but I also didn’t experience much of an increase either. It has stayed oddly consistent. This year is an odd one.
Since not much is changing, I’ve slacked on listing as much over the past few weeks. Each day feels like another day to work or not work. Sometimes I just work in the morning. Sometimes I work all day. It’s hard to do this full-time and not work, there’s always guilt but I am starting to get used to it and not feel as bad. I find it is healthier to just take more breaks these days and not stress as much over the business, or anything sometimes. Everything is going to be more difficult no matter what. Just have to take it easy.
I’ve been full-time reselling for 16 years without a car. Here’s how I’ve managed:
Bring a rolling suitcase with you, or a rolling backpack with an additional backpack stuffed inside of it. Get to thrifts via public transportation or uber during the pandemic. Leave your bags up front, be friendly with the cashiers and they will let you put your bag(s) behind the counter.
Haul your stuff back via public transportation. If it’s too much, get an uber. If it’s too much for an uber, get an uber van. I’ve never learned how to drive, so a rental van is out of the question.
If you believe your haul is going to be too much for 1 uber van (you plan to go to an auction), bring someone along (a friend or significant other) to get a 2nd uber or uber van to haul off the excess. Tip well. Be kind. Thank everyone.
It sounds like the buyer is trying to get a partial refund.
I would apologize and let them know that I would be happy to accept a return for a full refund. They’ll either at that point return it, ask for a partial refund, or do nothing. When offering a return option, I would just not even mention the smell, because it is like you’re admitting that there was indeed a smell when you sent it (who knows?). I would just say “I apologize that you are unhappy with this order. I would be happy to accept this vintage item back for a full refund” and see what they do from that point. I just wouldn’t engage and get into an argument with the customer over a smell (non-existent or not).
It’s easy to have a generalist store on Ebay and a specialized store on Etsy/Instagram. You can do both. There are also a lot of generalist sellers on etsy/instagram and they still have good followings. It doesn’t seem to matter as long as people like your stuff.
I see down in the thread you talk about buying and selling antiquarian books. There are a lot of book dealers on etsy/instagram that focus on that sort of aesthetic. It’s really anything goes.
You’ve got multiple options here. You can sell the collection complete with a high shipping cost on Ebay to another dealer or collector. This will allow them to do the work of splitting the lot up and doing all of the work, but depending on how much you paid for it, you should be able to do really well just by selling it complete and not having to worry about the nitty gritty of putting work into it.
You can create smaller lots of the slides and sell them that way. Prices will vary depending on location and years.
You can do a combination of the above and do additional research into areas where individual slides will do well – people will pay up for vehicles and transportation ones, as well as some locations depending on the year. For example, if you have any slides from China, they might do really well individually if the locations are identified. Street photography from China from decades ago does really well on Ebay.
I have multiple slide collections that I am going through myself right now, but I haven’t had the chance to deal with them in a few months. It’s one of my favorite things to do when I get the time to work on them.
I’ve only been out sourcing once in the past 6 months. That’s it. I went from sourcing sometimes 3-5 days a week (I do this full time) to never. The one time I did go out I managed to get 25 boxes of stock. Most of it has been listed, I think there are only 7 boxes left to go through. I let it sit in quarantine for a week before listing any of it.
The last time I went to a thrift store was in mid-February. The last estate sale was mid-July. It is now almost mid-August. I almost went to an estate sale this weekend, but instead stayed in and worked on the backlog because I didn’t see enough of the items I’m interested in to risk going. I got up 20 listings from the backlog today and created drafts for another 10 items to get listed tomorrow.
I pretty much have plans to just list through the backlog until next spring, or through until summer 2021 if I have to.
Just catching up on the podcast for the week. I don’t know if anyone has answered your question about how to find out how many collectibles you have listed, but you can find that here:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/Collectibles/1/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=&_ssn=ryannesvintage
You currently have 1,765 active items listed in collectibles, if that link doesn’t work.
Agreed. They should’ve just given it to everyone in all categories in order to encourage more items listed over the entirety of Ebay.
I really feel like in this case Ebay is giving the shaft to long-term sellers that sell in these categories. My “yearly” subscription for an anchor store was renewed in May or June. That is why I am looking at a $900 “fee” to go down to a premium store to take advantage of the overall lower subscription fee. If Ebay had stated their intention to do this a few months ago, I would’ve gone to monthly ($349.99 a month) for my anchor store for a few months while I waited for this to happen in August.
However, other sellers in books, dvds, collectibles, etc,. that list elsewhere (such as on Mercari, Amazon, etc,. this is obviously to draw sellers away from those sites) will look at this new fee structure on Ebay and think “wow, I can get a premium store for $59.99 a month and list 50,000 (essentially unlimited listings because very few sellers have 50,000 items in their stores) items! What a great deal, I should get on there!”
Yay, I did it! I removed all of my restricted listings off of Ebay and have signed up for managed payments.
I also took a look at my inventory count of items that are outside of the “free” listings categories – I currently have less than 200 books and pieces of ephemera that are listed outside of the newly created free categories. These items could be easily moved back to the books and collectible categories, making my paid for listing count practically 0. With nearly 14,000 items still listed on Ebay, a premium store would be ideal for me at this point with the new fee structure. I’m really hoping that Ebay will provide a few weeks for people to change their store subscription levels for free, because clearly a lot of other booksellers and collectible sellers are in the same boat.
