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I prefer listening to really loud music if possible while working, mainly 60s-70s classic rock, prog, current rap. Also 60s-current pop songs if I’m exhausted and need to get a certain number of listings up. Just pull up music on youtube and shift through different types of music while working. I used to have a record player set up in my office to an amp, but I haven’t done that in a few years and I think it might’ve been too loud (sorry neighbors!)!
I did the podcast route for a few years, but the voices put me to sleep.
01/28/2020 at 3:32 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 447: 2 Month Free Shipping Experiment #73403Yeah, I’ve seen people talking about PirateShip for a long time now, but I can’t be bothered to use it. I already use Endicia for the majority of my shipping for Amazon/Ebay/Etsy/other venues. Sometimes FedEx shipping through Ebay for my “general” store (not international), sometimes Etsy’s shipping for international or expensive items. To me, that just seems like too many different shipping places to use to add even one more into the mix.
I have kept international shipping on all of my other venues outside of Ebay. The main reason I did this is because I do not experience the problems I do on Ebay when it comes to it. People on other venues will just pay the shipping price with no problem.
Sometimes international buyers will buy an item and then complain the listing said free shipping – yes, if you indicate you’re in the US it will show free shipping. If you’re outside of the US, it will list a shipping rate. When I don’t back down and provide free shipping to these international buyers, they ask me to cancel. I do.For the ones that do want to buy something internationally, they will sometimes email beforehand and complain about the price. I tell them it is the true cost of shipping an item from the US. They continue to complain, but some will buy. Others will say, “if in the future you can ship this for a lower rate, please let me know.”
I also feel like items shipped internationally go missing more frequently than other venues. Yes, of course some items do go missing, get stuck in customs for an exceptionally long time, or get set back because the customer didn’t want to pay the additional taxes for their country. That still costs me every time it happens, and it happens way more frequently for me on Ebay than Amazon.
So, I’m done. If people internationally want to buy, they can pay more through GSP for it. I am relieved to just ship it to a place within the US with tracking and/or insurance and that’s that. If Amazon had a similar set-up, I would 100% ship that way through them as well. What I do see on Amazon are people using forwarding services; they will use a forwarding service mainly through NYC, New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Florida to get their items shipped to them internationally. If people on Ebay want to do that, they can feel free.
Speaking of, I haven’t had a sale through Shop Airlines America in a really long time. Do they even still exist?
01/27/2020 at 1:01 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 447: 2 Month Free Shipping Experiment #73353I’ve finally shut down my international sales on Ebay after the latest shipping increase this past weekend. It cost $26 for me to ship a book to Japan, and I had only charged $22 for it. Yikes. Postcards will now cost $16.50 to ship. It was bad enough when postcards cost $13.50 to ship internationally, but I’m done now with this increase. People from the UK have been especially upset over the $13.50 shipping charge over the past year – can’t you just ship it at letter rate for $4?! Yeah, we don’t have that here in America, sorry! I will also not risk shipping a postcard without cardboard or protection so it will potentially get damaged in shipment – you know customers will become upset if you ship it their way without protection and they receive it damaged!
I started allowing for GSP sales over the past few weeks, and did have a GSP order a few weeks ago. I’ve expanded it so all of my listings are now available for GSP. I currently still have Canada and Mexico available as shipping options for the time being, but I might eventually change it to everywhere. I still have international shipping available on Amazon and other sites I sell on.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to the full podcast yet, but I can say that free shipping works well with books, clothes, ephemera, smaller 1st class items in general. With larger shipping, I can see it working well if you ship using Fedex Ground or UPS, but not when USPS is offered.
This has been an unusual January for buying – normally there isn’t too much out there, but it feels like the summer out there with collections. I have one collection coming in this week and then I’m mainly done buying until the spring. Just time to list, my backlog areas are full.
Almost feels like we’re coming onto the next recession? The winter is an unusual time of the year for people to be selling this many collections – spring & summer are usually the best times of the year for buying. I guess I’m also feeling anxious because of the coronavirus, which I haven’t heard any resellers talking about for some reason? It might cause the Chinese economy to contract and push us into a worldwide recession. Yay 2020.
These “declined” offer messages are really annoying. Considering the batched way they are coming in, they are more likely just ignored offers that have expired after 48 hours. I don’t believe there even is an option to decline an offer that was sent in this way?
Huh. Wow. I can’t believe Ebay would enter into an agreement with a payment processor without knowing what sort of items they allow. That’s crazy.
Yeah, I guess I’ll just wait to find out before making adjustments. If they try to manually push my account into managed payments, I’ll go on Ebay for Business facebook and let them know that it’s a no-no for some of the items I sell.
Also, if they’re looking for another payment processor that can handle those sort of items, why don’t they just stick with Paypal? Weird.
Usually they require you to commit to a year at that store level. If you reduce or get rid of your store in the next year, you’ll have to pay an fee. If you think you’ll be selling on Ebay through January 2021, it would be worth it. If you think you might stop selling online, or keep your store at the basic level size, it’s not worth doing.
If you do get the new store level, make sure you use your existing Q1 shipping supplies coupon first. You’ll probably also get $50 in shipping supplies for Q1 for bumping up to a premium store on top of the Q1 shipping supplies you’ve already received for the basic store – unless the promotion excludes that for some reason.
Welcome to the forum! It sounds like you had a great start during Q4. At the same time, it doesn’t prepare you for what the rest of the year will be like – especially during the summer! Part of the fun of reselling is figuring out how to even out all of the peaks and dips in order to get more steady sales year-round. Just have to learn as you go.
I’m not on the reddit forum because I personally don’t like it, but I do like to pop up on this forum sometimes throughout the day. I’d say people who are on any forums like this potentially all day are on it because they are either bored at work – I used to go on Myspace when I had a f/t desk job, so that dates me – or need a break from listing, or do this while listing or any other myriad tasks that us f/t resellers do throughout the day. No matter what, we’re just good multitaskers. 🙂
Wow. I remember when thrifts would have boxes full of them and just have a sign on the box that said “10 for $1.” That’s crazy to me that they’re bothering to individually price them!
01/22/2020 at 8:20 am in reply to: Travelling to Japan – any suggestions of what to buy for resale in the US #73159You can get certain Japanese Kit-Kat bars in Asian supermarkets around America. If you source those, you’ll want to make sure you get the ones that are never imported to America. You can split them up and create packs of them for $1 per individually wrapped piece on Ebay or Amazon.
The common ones I’ve found in America are green tea, some “dark (it’s not) chocolate that features a Japanese pop band on the cover, strawberry, and a few others. If there are any seasonal variations available when you visit, I would try to get some of those. I actually ordered a specific type of fall seasonal tea one off Amazon in December that I’m still waiting to get in the mail!
Some flavors are so-so, but I would recommend the green tea if you can find it. Very rich flavor compared to the American version of kit-kat. Still, those can be found in America, so it’s not worth wasting suitcase space on. They’re normally $6 a bag here, but I’ve found them on sale for $3 a bag sometimes and stocked up.
Same goes for Japanese books, cds and magazines. There are specific shops in a few major cities in America that you can pick them up for relatively cheap. You’ll want to make sure when you pick them up that you aren’t competing against resellers here that have already sourced them for cheap.
01/20/2020 at 4:15 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 446: Interview with Dan The Diner, Fellow Scavenger! #73114Welcome back T-Satt!
Yeah, I feel like selling online currently involves working harder, sourcing more, paying more for items, listing more, and shipping more just in order to break even or make less than the year before. Fun times out there.
01/20/2020 at 4:06 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 446: Interview with Dan The Diner, Fellow Scavenger! #73111After hemming & hawing about going to a sale all day yesterday, I finally went to one during the last hour. IT WAS A SUCCESS. I never manage to get to sales in the last hour out of anxiety due to fomo, but it was worth it for me in this case. Several boxes of stock in my niche. YES. I’ve been listing through one box all day and should have it done by tomorrow. To make it easier on myself, I’m just going to create a lot of auctions to move stuff out. The more interesting items will be listed individually. Hoping to get a majority of this done in the next 2 to 3 weeks while I juggle all of the usual listing/shipping/reselling activities around it.
Prior to that, I was listing more of my auction finds from last month. This has been my first big buy since that auction, so it’s okay. The collections all fit together nicely, so I don’t have to disrupt my listing routine too much to go from one to the other. I’ve also been working aggressively through my backlog over the past month, with 6 bankers boxes of stock from mainly 2016 & 2018 listed. This is actually the sort of stock that I can’t buy anymore due to to the large price increases where I live, so having the backlog to make up for my inability to source in one type of item is working out well for me.
Getting better with non-niche items. Thrifted an action figure on Thursday, listed it on Friday afternoon, sold it Saturday evening. Woo! I find the silliest looking ones, like movie figures or shirtless wrestling figures, but they all move quickly. Eh.
This has been a surprisingly good holiday Monday. Strong sales on both of my Ebay stores, as well as Etsy. This weekend has also been busy. It felt like the typical strong January sales weren’t coming in at the beginning of this month, but it has picked up on all of my venues.
Yeah, I got lucky with the mags and most still had their centerfolds/posters attached. Well, I was bad with 1 of them by separating the poster from the magazine – sold the magazine by itself, kept the poster. I figured it was ripped on one edge and had fallen out anyway. 3 panel centerfold of Queen. That one was too cool to just give away. Also kept a page from another magazine that featured Freddie Mercury sniffing a rose. The collection was in really good shape other than a few of the Queen issues, I’m not sure why. I also hoarded a few of the prog issues for myself for a few years, started going through my personal stuff this summer and listed a few. The values have definitely come down over the past few years, but still good enough for me to list.
I’ve got several boxes of fashion mags to list that I picked up 5 years ago, but nothing as good as yours. Mainly 80s-early 2000s more common titles, but foreign versions. $10-50 apiece depending on the cover. I actually don’t even know where I put them in storage – I’ve been selling paper for 16 years 🙂 and have built up a large backlog, but I’m working through it. 😄
I did at one point have an early 1900s Vogue – maybe 1920s? I don’t remember. Paid $30 for it and sold it for $80 or $90 and it was in the worst condition ever.
I dug around in the Paypal forums and found a solution for this. Just tried it and it works!
It turns out that Sales Tax IS itemized in the Activity Download report:
Click on Activity
Click Download in upper-right corner
Specify the date range and file format
Refresh and download report
Sales Tax is column T in my spreadsheetOh wow, those National Enquirers look minty. I’ve tried buying lots of those in the past to break up, but they always go high. People love their vintage gossip! Oddly enough, I hardly ever see them out in the wild. I think most estate companies toss them out. They probably think no one would pay for them. Weekly World News is a fun one. I’d probably just keep those and read through them. I’ve been trying to buy this collection of The Onion newspapers for over a year now from someone that constantly posts it, but I never get a response from the guy when I contact him. Ahhh. I’m not sure what’s going on.
Did the Circus magazines come from the same buy? I have made a mint off of those in the past. I fell into a large collection of Circus/Creem/other similar magazines a few years ago and am still selling them to this day. I got lucky and got them in a few years ago right when a major musician died and prices went through the roof for them. I’ve only found Circus in quantity once since that purchase, but only like 10 at that time and they were all falling apart.
Interesting there were also fashion magazines mixed in. Just an all around hoarder.
Nice sale on the Sophisticates magazine!
I’ve just hit 600 items sold over the past 60 days on my main Ebay store. I still don’t use promoted listings. I have been running constant sales on my store since Black Friday. The last one just ended a day ago, so I’m going to see how well I do now without running a sale. I am sending offers to every single “watcher” I get, some of which result in sales right away.
I don’t mind selling a lot of low-value inventory at the moment. It all helps to pay down the massive Paypal Working Cap Loan I got out a few months ago. Almost at the 50% point of paying it down, and with the way it is going I should be able to pay it off way ahead of schedule. As long as the low-value inventory sells, I’m fine with it. Still hovering around 13,000 active listings right now.
I could’ve gone to a library sale this weekend, but I skipped it due to how bad the Flu is here. I really don’t want to risk getting sick just to get more stock in. So, I’ve been working on the backlog and fulfilling orders. I love just staying in during the winter and listing as much as possible. Looking forward to hitting up sales again when it gets warmer out and everyone has stopped coughing!
Here are my last 10 Ebay sales start dates. I am now in month 18 of not ending/relisting items. The last time I did so was July of 2018:
Start time: Jun 13, 2018 04:43:48 PDT
Start time: Jul 12, 2019 14:11:08 PDT
Start time: Apr 30, 2019 08:49:53 PDT
Start time: Nov 11, 2018 11:25:47 PST
Start time: Jun 13, 2018 04:43:47 PDT
Start time: Nov 07, 2019 11:34:34 PST
Start time: Jul 10, 2018 03:55:17 PDT
Start time: Oct 10, 2019 12:48:07 PDT
Start time: Oct 13, 2019 11:49:07 PDT
Start time: Jan 12, 2020 10:20:18 PST (sold within a few hours of listing, yay) -
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