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Wow, 17,000 magazines. That is a dream. Are they mainly sci-fi/music/comic magazines? I would love to fall into a large collection like that. The only problem would be storage space, but I’d make it work somehow. I spent $600 on a similar collection that consisted mainly of comic magazines & graphic novels from an estate sale in October. I’ve been doing well with them, but I definitely would’ve bought way more stock if it was available. Just down to a few boxes of unlisted stock that’s not as desirable from that sale. The comic magazines were mainly from the late 90s/early 2000s. Several from the 70s, but surprisingly the best were from the 90s. Some went for $40-60, some for $10. I’ve got a bunch to lot up that go for $4-6 apiece free shipping. Meh. Sales that good rarely come up, and when they do everyone wants to throw money at them.
01/13/2020 at 10:50 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72880Your strategy is 100% correct for your business. Just junk the cheap stuff and focus on the more expensive pieces. If you’re paying all of your bills and are able to live, there’s no reason to work any harder. Enjoy yourselves. This Calvinist work ethic Gary V and co espouse makes for a pretty horrible quality of life.
I’m in my late 30s, so I’m having to work really hard at the moment in order to pay bills, save a little bit, pay down loans and try to squeeze some time for myself outside of reselling. If I can pay down my current loans (none for reselling, I have no problem buying stock based on sales), I will be back to my “lazy” self. Should be pretty soon now to get at least 1 off my back and make life easier.
My Etsy store for the past 18 months has been my build-up to an eventual shopify store. If you look at your stats, see how your traffic is doing. If you’re producing your own traffic mainly outside of Etsy, it’s time to move onto a shopify store. If the bulk of your sales come from Etsy, just stick to Etsy. I’m currently at 83% Etsy, 17% my own traffic, so I also have a ways to go before I move over to shopify. That being said, I really do enjoy having an Etsy store. It’s currently up to 150 listings. I might try to get it up to 250-300 listings by the summer.
It’s also refreshing to have items sell at full price on Etsy. I feel like a ton of Ebay orders at this point need a nudge either through a sale or a “send offers to watchers” in order to get them to move at this point. Buyers expect something for their trouble of buying your items! đ
01/13/2020 at 10:39 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72878Remember when the only reactions to reselling online were “You do what?! No way! What do you really do?!” Now everyone wants a piece of it and they all believe themselves to be experts right off the bat.
01/13/2020 at 10:37 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72877Hi Sonia,
I apologize if I caused personal offense. I honestly didn’t mean to. If anything, I was more thinking of booksellers (my niche) than clothing. It is just easier to say clothing because the instagram and youtubers in that specialty outnumber those in books (just barely). The FBA sellers are also multiplying exponentially on both Youtube and Instagram and will probably catch up any day now. They had waned during the FBA changes a few years ago, but seem to have overcome it now and are back to creating content again.
As a full-timer who has had to go through enormous changes several times throughout the past 15 years, much more so in the past couple of years, it was just a way of venting. I wish reselling could be 100% positive all of the time, but it is very frustrating sometimes when this is your full-time income and the only means you have to support yourself and you see someone on Youtube come very close to spilling one of your specific niches in a niche that you use to live off of. I don’t think it’s right to sugarcoat everything all of the time, and to be like what they are doing is 100% a good thing for everyone. I’m happy that the content they provide provides you with a means of living, but for me personally I feel like I’m constantly having to work hard and position myself well ahead of what everyone is talking about now in order to continue buying food and pay bills. It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted.
01/12/2020 at 11:04 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72808Online arbitrage only exists on Ebay due to the laziness and incompetence of many sellers on the platform. From bad pictures to incomplete descriptions. Bad keywords. Bad pricing.
BOLO lists only exist due to the laziness of resellers. If they just did their own research on Ebay solds/Terapeak/Worthpoint, there would be no need for BOLO lists. If resellers just went into stores and looked at what was for sale and determined on their own what a “good” item is without having to watch Youtube videos telling them, they wouldn’t need to watch the Youtube videos in the first place.
Sharing of information is fine if you’re a generalist seller, because you’re not dependent on one specific form of income. The clothing sellers are posting nonstop on where they source from, what brands they buy, how much they pay for items, how much they list them for, what venues they’re selling on. They are practically holding the hands of newbie sellers and begging them to do exactly what they do in the exact way they are doing so, and eager new sellers are like “okay, thanks, I’ll do exactly what you do because you’re a full-time seller making a lot of money!”
01/12/2020 at 10:56 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72807I can’t knock the $12-20 hustle, especially with items that cost maybe $.25-$1. Those sort of sales do make for good cash flow. As long as those items are consistently selling, it’s not the worst way to make a living. Now, having to go to the Bins for at least 1-2 hours a day, plus 1-2 hours a day of photographing and listing, plus an additional hour for shipping does make it a grind. If the items are selling, it can be a decent way for a full-time seller to make a living. I personally dislike the Bins and wouldn’t want to make a living that way, but whatever works.
From what it sounds like, even this strategy isn’t really working for people anymore. That’s because they’re all posting youtube Goodwill Outlet hauls and sharing the exact brands and styles they’re getting. This leads to more competition. They’re all out at Goodwill Outlets across the country buying the same stuff and making even less than $10 apiece free shipping on the items, and then all having to tell each other to make youtube videos to share how “successful” they are to bring in viewers and make money that way. Even those “multiple streams of income” really don’t make sense in a long-term sustainable way when you think about it. It would be awful to have to be in the middle of that way of selling/marketing yourself as a brand in order to bring in what may or may not be a decent income. Working yourself to the bone in order to help out your direct competition and help them to pieces of your own income.
01/11/2020 at 7:59 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72785I guess it depends on if they want to move to the suburbs once they hit their 30s/40s. A lot of them are forced to live in cities with roommates and barely any living space because thatâs where the jobs are. Even renting a room in a desirable part of downtown Seattle will cost $800-1500 a month. 10 years ago, you could rent an entire apartment for that much.
All of the smaller cities with even some jobs are being built up and rents are going way up. $1,000+ a month to rent in Phoenix. Even Boise is expensive.
I think a lot of young people are saying that they are intentionally living this more âenvironmentally conscious â way to make themselves feel better about how sort of lousy their lives are. Large student loans, jobs that donât pay that well for how much they paid for the degrees, tiny expensive living spaces.
01/11/2020 at 7:46 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72784I donât understand why, but the Instagram resellers are telling each other to have youtube channels as well as an additional stream of income. It doesnât stop with the clothing sellers. Even the FBA âbooksellersâ are posting videos of hauls and all the steps that go into running an FBA business. They post on Instagram their stacks of books and have screenshots from scanning programs to show how much theyâll make on their books. Heck, sometimes they even post the thrift stores they found the books or clothes in with pinned map locations directly in the posts themselves. In turn, theyâre attracting new sellers and telling them to have youtube channels. When will it end? I donât know. They seem to be happy creating their own competition.
Social media can be used to help increase sales. They are doing it wrong. They use it to brag about finds, post about where and how to shop, and post how much money they may or may not be making. They donât know how to market the items they have for sale because they donât actually know what they are selling.
There are still a ton of collectors out there. Whatâs good is that most of them are now able to use the internet well enough to know how to search for what they want. Your generic instagram/youtube reseller will most likely not know what or how to sell to them because they donât know what theyâre selling or even talking about.
Pennsylvania Dutch
01/10/2020 at 4:03 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72761Alright, as a very very very occasional clothing seller, here are my feelings in regards to most clothing dealers:
A lot of them have come into reselling by way of watching youtube videos. They don’t know the first thing about clothes. They wouldn’t know what’s popular, either vintage or modern, if they didn’t have BOLO lists shoved in their faces. They don’t know what 20 year-olds are wearing. They don’t know what 30 year-olds are wearing. As long as someone tells them what to look out for, they will create a mental checklist in their heads of these brands and lookout for them while looking through racks at the Goodwill.
Once they do find these brands, they don’t know the market well enough to know where to list these items. So, they cross-post. It doesn’t matter to them as long as they make a sale. Ebay, Poshmark, sure, whatever.
Once they have listed an item, they don’t know how to describe it. They can’t keyword it right, describe the condition well. Heck, they don’t even know how to properly clean the garment prior to selling. They don’t know how to display it well for photos. They just mimic what everyone else is doing, describe it incorrectly, price it incorrectly, and then complain when they don’t get sales because their gurus told them that those brands would be profitable, gosh darn it.
These people may be selling clothes, but they really have no clue what they’re doing. I think this could be extended to most resellers of most items, not just clothing. If an Ebay search, or an Amazon search, tells them to buy it, they buy it. They are not specialists, they don’t care to be. They are barely even generalists, they are just decent enough at data entry to enter a brand into the search on Ebay, photograph the item, ship it, and then move onto the next item. That’s all.
Uhhh, Goodwills have the stock, infrastructure, space and employees to do what most resellers only dream they could do:
This has been a difficult Q4/Q1 for Media mail. Media mail is always the lowest level of priority when it comes to shipping out packages at the PO. If there are more express, priority, first class packages to go out and no room left on the truck, media mail will not move. If it doesn’t move, there are no scans to update its progress.
While books may normally arrive within 2-5 business days most places, this past Q4 has resulted in packages taking 2-3+ weeks to arrive with no scans along the way. This is not technically unusual for media mail, but the shipping speed has improved over the past several years. It is a bit of a bummer to see delays happening again and it stretching back to its outer shipping limits. Some of the books I shipped the first week of December did not arrive to their destinations until a few days after Christmas. Any other time of the year, these packages only take 2-5 business days to get across the country. Even last year was better for shipping media, at least for me.
I don’t use Fedex or UPS to mail books. If the book is expensive enough and I don’t want it getting lost in the media mail maze, I will upgrade it to priority mail. Also, if the book is light enough, you might be better off shipping it first class. Depending on the zone, it might only be $.50-$1 more to ship vs. media mail if it’s light enough and not going too far.
I don’t see why you would be responsible for refunding it if it doesn’t arrive on time? It’s not unusual for media mail to take a few weeks to get delivered.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by
almasty.
I have used these for the past few years to ship larger books, records, laserdiscs, etc,. with no problems:
I’ve actually got a box of them on my porch I need to carry upstairs, just need to get up the nerve!
01/07/2020 at 9:36 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 444: Is Cross Posting The New Reality? #72601That story is absolutely insane and exactly why no one can rely on Amazon for 100% of their income anymore. Amazon doesn’t care how much money you are making on their site – there are always a million other third-party sellers to replace whatever income you have generated. You can be easily replaced. Even if you have been selling on their site for 15 or 20+ years, you won’t get any sort of acknowledgement for it. Third-party sellers are treated exactly like warehouse workers – expendable and of little significance.
12/31/2019 at 10:39 am in reply to: Could someone with a Worthpoint account check some prices for me please? #72301Link #1: SOLD FOR$40.00
Link #2: SOLD FOR$207.00
Link #3: SOLD FOR$74.95
Looks like some do better than others due to content. Of course using Vignelli as a keyword for an architecture journal will increase interest in a single volume vs. lots with bad keywords.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by
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