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11/19/2019 at 1:35 pm in reply to: Any way to send an offer to a buyer when another offers still active? #70829
This actually makes a lot of sense and is the least complicated way to deal with it.
11/19/2019 at 7:57 am in reply to: Any way to send an offer to a buyer when another offers still active? #70799This isn’t a glitch. It happened a few weeks ago with a buyer I sent an offer to. They asked if I would sell it at a lower price, I thought yes, and then I wasn’t able to revise the price in the listing or send an offer through the message.
I had to tell the buyer that Ebay wouldn’t let me revise the listing for 48 hours, but once I was able to I would change the price and then message them that the price had been lowered. My buyer was patient and waited. It was a collectible item.
There’s a really round-about way to find out how long a sent offer has until it expires. I’m not on a computer now, so I can’t see how I determined the exact length of time.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast.
Still feeling like Q4! I have 50 items shipping out today, 25 packed & ready to ship tomorrow. 3 items to go out Wednesday. 22 or 24 items shipped out Saturday. I try to ship out items as quickly as possible, but without a car and relying on Uber for larger ship-outs I reach a limit on how much I can ship out in 1 day.
Sales were down by 10 orders from last weekend. I slowed down severely on listing this past week, so I’m to blame. No worries. I might try to list more like normal this week.
Buying woes for the week: tried buying 20 boxes of books from an online auction. With 8 hours left to go, they were at $50. I thought yay, I can probably snag these for $100! Nope. They went for over $500. Nothing special. Just decent Amazon stock. With estimated delivery fees, buyer’s premium, tax, etc,. I would’ve paid roughly $800 for the stock. I don’t know what the highest bid was even. It could’ve easily been $900. Only a few books were even visible in the photos, so it would’ve been risky to bid that much money blind. I passed.
We spent nearly $600 on stock a few weeks ago that has paid back nicely with 3 boxes left to list from, but at least I knew exactly what I was buying. For this? No way. We suspect it was most likely shill bidding, as other items went for nearly Ebay prices. It was crazy.
Went thrifting this past weekend and another thrift store has raised prices on books. This one is now mainly $5-10. I still bought stock, but I’m having to be super picky.
There are other places to source from, so I’m not worried about running out of stock or having to pay exorbitant prices forever. It’s just really annoying how expensive everything has suddenly become. I admit that it’s easy to get used to sources that have otherwise been good, so a lot of it is just laziness on my part. Still, I have suspected that a lot of these places would eventually go up in price or close and I’ve been slowly changing the way I run everything just in case. Just in case is here.
I’ve done really well sourcing over the past few months otherwise, and I believe the new stock & backlog is now up to roughly 90 boxes of stock. Still have new stock coming in. It’s not all bad. Just have to shift the way I run all of my businesses in case these changes are permanent. I will work more through the backlog as well as the newer stock obtained while prices were cheaper and wait out all of these price increases. I’m patient. I’m sort of grateful that my Amazon stock hasn’t sold, as I thought it would be cheap and quick to build up a small fast-moving inventory. Nope. At this point, it would take a lot of work and time to build up to even 5,000 listings with these expensive buying conditions.
Yeah, Amazon seems way more unstable than Ebay at this point. Any book can be gated for any reason, whether by the publisher directly or so-called pricing errors. Entire categories of books I just list straight on Ebay now to avoid any potential hiccups.
I guess you weren’t impacted by the Spring 2018 glitch on Amazon. Sales just slowed to a crawl for absolutely no reason. The glitches on Amazon are just as bad or worse than Ebay.
As a f/t bookseller for 15 years, I can say that the heyday of Amazon is long over. Yes, you can still make money on it, and there are of course good books still to be found for it. However, if you don’t want to give up a bulk of your profits to FBA, it is hard. I won’t even go into the detrimental effects of over saturation. Even the days of having a PDA/scanner combo were a bit of a barrier for newbies. Now you can just download an app on your phone, if you so choose. Many sellers are too cheap for that and just use the Amazon Seller app, hah.
That article was painful to read. Giving gift cards to thrift stores in lieu of presents. Great. That’s part of the reason why prices are so high – too expensive for us to resell, but a bargain for those who would’ve bought new and are newly enchanted by the idea of buying used.
I would say a lot of thrift store pricing is on par or maybe even more expensive than going to a vintage shop for clothing at this point?
I actually have plans to write up a similar post to yours in a new thread at some point this weekend or next week, but I wanted to let you know that I agree with many of your points. What’s scary is when you realize that this is when the economy is “good!”
It depends on what you sell and how common/uncommon it is. If you have items that steadily sell on Ebay with lots of active listings/solds, Ebay search alone will suffice. If there are less common items with fewer actives/solds, Terapeak along with Ebay should work. Terapeak is free with an Ebay store subscription. If you find you are constantly running into items with hardly any results ever and you can see previous sold ones listed in Worthpoint, a Worthpoint subscription would make sense at that point.
I believe you’re supposed to pay taxes on all money earned over $400 or $600?
If you’ve made $4-$5k in a year, you should be able to have deductions that 0 that amount out, or make it a very small tax bill.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by
almasty.
11/12/2019 at 5:20 pm in reply to: Baller Busters: exposing scammers who lie about how much money they make #70575Hahahah. I never saw that post. From what I can tell, it’s an account created by one of the “gurus” to call out other “gurus.” It’s a guru ouroboros and it’s all so ridiculous.
11/12/2019 at 10:54 am in reply to: Baller Busters: exposing scammers who lie about how much money they make #70556YES! I love articles like this. Thanks for posting.
The closest person to calling out resellers is “ResellerRealityCheck” on Instagram, but there are rumors that even that Instagram is hosted by one of the scam “Gurus” as well.
I find the cult of personality around these resellers so fascinating. Tens of thousands of legit youtube subscriptions, money thrown at them during live youtube sessions (is it still like that?), paid facebook groups, even paid yearly meet-ups. What are these people “learning?!” Who are the people that find them interesting to follow everyday on facebook, youtube, instagram and hang on their every word?
The “gurus” themselves all have relatively low Ebay feedback, lower priced items, not many sales, not many years of selling online. That would be fine, I don’t diss on anyone’s business model, but if you’re letting people pay you to “learn,” you better know what you’re doing and do it well! Not just be a new seller in the past 2-5 years trying to “explain it all.”
Sales are good right now. 50 packages went to the PO on Saturday, and I have 60 packages all ready to go out tomorrow. Another 3 have come in that will have to wait until Wednesday to go out (2 day handling time set-up on Amazon & Ebay).
Ebay sales were slow at the beginning of the week. I ran a small sale to get some action in my store, since I don’t end/relist my listings. That seemed to work. I am also sending offers throughout the day. I’m going to hold off on anymore sales until Black Friday/Cyber Monday. I think a lot of people are saving up right now for Black Friday sales. I’ve also been seeing a lot more Thanksgiving/Black Friday spam than usual since October 31st, so people might be buying “Black Friday Month” offers right now instead of waiting until actual Black Friday. Who knows?
Thrift stores are insane where I live right now. One thrift that used to price books 5 for $.50 (which is an anomaly, especially in my area) now individually prices most books. I had to pay $8 for a $55 textbook, which is fine, but it’s not how it used to be. Most books are priced $5-10 and worth $4 online. A $25 atlas was priced at….$20. Yeah, no. I used to get 25-50 books at a time from this place, now I just get maybe 3 or 4 and pay more than I used to for just that small amount. I don’t actually mind paying higher prices, but there’s no turnover anymore. If the books are priced that high, yes, everything else is also crazy high. Clothes are usually $5-100 per piece. Shirts are usually $7-20, dresses are $20-50, coats are $50-100. It’s not even worth buying anything for yourself anymore, let alone to resell.
The local Goodwill has been a huge miss for the past 6 months. I’ve seriously walked out empty-handed every single time I’ve gone. There was never that much to find, but I’ve never seen it this bad before. Actual junk is priced extremely high, and people are just flinging it in their carts. I don’t know if they’re resellers or just people shopping for themselves. I’m assuming most of them are resellers, but I’m not sure how they make any money? I see the items in their carts and it doesn’t look like they got all the amazing stuff because they got there before I did. It’s the same junk as on the shelves. It’s odd how a store can be so full of items, yet so empty of anything interesting at the same time. The Goodwill in my area has several online stores (Ebay, Amazon, ShopGoodwill, I think they sell on OfferUp now), but still, good stuff has always fallen through the cracks. Not anymore.
Watching film reels on 8 mm is really fun. Turn the lights off, find clear wall space and then just watch short films you can’t see on Amazon Prime/Hulu/Netflix. It’s really magical.
I got a barely used Brownie 300 Film Projector off Ebay a few years ago that works like a champ and takes up very little space. They are cheap little champs.
If people want to make an offer, they’ll make it. Even if you don’t have best-offer as an option on your listings, they will message you and let you know what their offer is LOL.
11/07/2019 at 11:23 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 435: List and Forget, Still Works For Us #70250As a bookseller, if you’re not FBA it would be dumb to just stick to Amazon. You have to list on Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, Biblio at a minimum if you’re doing it yourself. Alibris has about 50 sites it crossposts on for you, so at least you don’t have to do all 50+ yourself. These sites include Barnes & Nobles, Textbooks.com, a lot of tiny sites that only get sales during the 2 textbook seasons. There are also other smaller sites you can list on, but it’s not necessary with those main sites combined.
Some sellers cross-post their inventory to Ebay. I don’t. I maintain a separate inventory on Ebay.
I do find it exhausting maintaining individual inventories – at this point, there are 4, but only 2 serious ones – Amazon and Ebay. Amazon is both the easiest & most difficult to maintain. There are less items out there suitable for the site than for Ebay (with all the gating and competition), but when you do find good items for them, it’s incredibly easy to just let them sell themselves. I don’t have the fight in me to go out there like I used to in the beginning to stock it on a daily basis. I have actually been quietly trying to sell off my Amazon inventory over the past few weeks to fellow booksellers, but I haven’t gotten any bites yet. It takes time. My asking price is spot on, so it’s not that. I do really well on the site, it’s not dregs by any means, but I don’t have the time/space/necessary attitude to run it as well as I would like to, and that means everything for maintaining a long-term inventory full time. If your heart’s not in it anymore, it’s hard to just keep at it, no matter how good the money is. I am also eyeing the bookcases full of Amazon stock and thinking “I could fit so much Ebay stock in place of these items!”
To really do well on separate inventories on separate listing sites is an insane amount of work. Most people can’t get a good handle on 1 listing site, let alone multiple ones. It is easy to say “I can just go over there,” but it takes YEARS of effort to get up to the point of matching even the lows of what you can do on your original listing site. It’s not easy. It’s not instantaneous. It’s like going back to the beginning of setting up your initial reselling business when you were working f/t – you have to put f/t hours and effort into 2 venues.
I am really enjoying selling on Ebay, so I’ve moved most of my focus to Ebay. It’s working. It’s fun. That’s why I shake my head when I read a lot of negative posts or see the titles of youtube videos that are negative about Ebay. It’s all click-bait. The majority of the people making the negative videos make the majority of their money on Ebay. It’s nonsensical. If you are willing to work hard on Ebay, you will do well. That’s it. Stop blaming any and everyone else for your own problems. Ebay is wonderful compared to Amazon.
I don’t know anything about cross-posting non-books between sites. I would think if they were vintage, one-of-a-kind items, that whatever site you picked to host them on would work as long as the site had the right visibility for your items. That’s part of your job, to figure out which one works best for you.
This is incredibly annoying to deal with during Q4. Time should be spent listing and shipping, not figuring out a new column to add to your spreadsheet for bookkeeping. Ugh.
I’m looking at my financial summary from Paypal for the past 6 days, and it doesn’t show anything about sales tax in the fees section. Is it combined with the normal fees? Is it 0’d out? I’m really confused. I do this manually without GoDaddy Bookkeeping, so I’m not sure what to do right now.
Go into each individual sale and log the sales tax as a separate fee? Or is it 0’d out and not a fee? Will it show up on the 1099k?
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by
almasty.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by
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