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08/19/2019 at 6:28 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 424: 1 Year Later, Our New Rental is Done! #66594
Yay on the rental! Pics look great. Wish I could go on vacation, but there’s always work to be done.
Last summer was a break from sourcing and relaxing. This summer has been crazy with work for my other business, plus working through the backlog. I haven’t seriously sourced in over a month and a half, but I have started buying stock again on Ebay and listing through huge chunks of backlog at a time to make up for it. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve even been in a thrift store since late June. Who even am I?! I almost went thrifting today, but just knocked out a bunch of backlog instead and fought the urge to thrift. I am going to make it a goal to start sourcing again out in the world in September. Sort of feeling FOMO about it at this point.
To continue with this “mentorship” discussion, if people do want to learn, a mooc in general business courses would probably do a lot of resellers some good. I’ve been taking non-business classes through edx that are just free straight up college courses, including some at the grad level! There’s no need to pay anyone to learn, especially something as easy as just listing random junk on Ebay.
Yeah, I was wondering about the legalities of all of these mentorships/”sales accelerator” type courses all these resellers provided. They seem to tread the line of legality/illegality. They should add a disclaimer “for the purposes of entertainment only,” like fortune tellers.
Personally, I do not like these type of programs because I feel they take advantage of people that may be down on their luck. While the WSJ video states “this is meant for part-time people, those already employed,” it does sucker in a lot of people that are down on their luck and trying to get out of their minimum wage customer service jobs, or unemployment, or debt. They see videos promoting easy money made on weekends “I made $580 at garage sales this weekend!” sort of videos and it looks like a Shangri-La compared to their normal drudgery and low pay. Continue to watch the videos, hear about mentorship programs, and then it’s like, “Oh, I too can become like these happy, care-free people I see on the internet. I too can eventually buy a Tesla if I just pony out $375 for a mentorship course just this once.” It’s really slick advertising, and there are a lot of people doing this on youtube, not just these people of course.
Since the videos are condensed down to 10-20 minute snippets of just the procuring of items, not the actual process of listing/selling/maintaining processes on Ebay, it LOOKS really easy to an outsider down on their luck. The eventual reality of reselling online, well, we all know what that’s like. No one wants to pay up for the actual reality, just the dreams.
I am seriously waiting for the day a reseller combines the current new age/reseller fads and creates youtube videos on how they don’t source when Mercury is in Retrograde.
I don’t doubt that someone extremely motivated could make that sort of money after reselling for only a few years. I do question people that make that sort of money with only 2 employees, a small warehouse, and time to create multiple youtube videos a week, plus the time to “mentor” people and buy and sell wholesale specifically for those people. There are only so many hours in a day. You can only do so much.
Like, I see the wholesale products on their ebay store, and you can extrapolate that with additional ebay & amazon stores they are doing really well, but still. Not THAT well.
I also realize it’s showmanship, so it is easy to be wowed by large numbers that can put you in the illusion that you too may rake in those numbers after taking their wholesale course. Obviously not the case.
The WSJ video said they’re making (gross? profit? idk) nearly $500k a year. The only motivation anyone would have to reveal numbers like that and create more competition for themselves would be because of the potential gains from increased youtube views/mentorships/sales direct to students. I get it. It’s their hustle. It’s a way of life for a lot of resellers; those who can’t, teach.
Wow. Did you take their mentoring program before or after they started selling wholesale lots directly to their students? It looks like they’re generating a lot of money that way as well.
Was there at least a discussion board, or facebook group for people to go and run ideas off of each other?
I just looked into it, and it looks like the Dymo 4XL is the only thermal printer they have that uses 4×6 labels. It currently goes for $211 on Amazon, brand new.
I just spent like 30 minutes with my mac trying to get my extremely old zebra eltron printer hooked up to it with a new IEEE cable I just got in. It worked! It is not intuitive at all, and I had to use CUPS to get the printing sheet dimensions right, but it worked! Yes! So happy I don’t have to spend $160 on a rollo & $20 for an additional label roll holder to do the same thing my reliable zebra can do. So happy.
I’ve started working on my first thorough inventory in 5 years. It feels good to get rid of a lot of bad inventory, watch my inventory numbers decrease, and know the stock I keep is the stock that will move. I estimate this will take 2-3 months to do in my spare time. I am currently hovering around 11,700 listed items and would like to get down to 10,000-10,500 items with the items I delist and normal sales that will come in by November.
What I have noticed is I am finding 1-2 unlisted items per 100 items I go through. A few of these can be attributed to items previously sold that I originally couldn’t find, but many of them have just disappeared. This has previously been a huge problem with my Amazon inventory, but I didn’t think it was so bad with Ebay. I was wrong. I guess free new stock to list? =/
I’m also hoping to rearrange and free up enough space to expand up to 15,000+ items listed on Ebay without worrying about where to store it. With my current configuration, I am nearly out of space. If I have a ton of empty space available, it will be easier for me to list without worrying about where everything will go.
I have enough free space to list around while I work on this project, so I’m not too worried about listing and playing Tetris with the stock at the same time.
My experiment failed with connecting the Zebra Eltron to my mac, but I think my cable is extremely old and not compatible with current macs? Waiting for a new one to arrive in the mail so I can try the experiment again.
I usually order a box of 20 rolls with 250 sheets per roll for $60-75 with free shipping. It’s almost a year’s worth of shipping labels for me. Maybe 5,000 sheets? For a Dymo printer, looking at Amazon prices, you can buy 8 rolls of 4×6 for $42.95 with free shipping. At 220 sheets per roll, that’s 1,760 sheets. If you ship a lot, the Zebra printers are much cheaper (and I’m assuming the Rollo printer, which I believe can take similar labels, but I could be wrong).
The Rollo printer is $170 new, but it looks like plug & play from what I can tell. It looks like the current Zebra printers are priced at $80 used. They used to be much cheaper back in the day ($30-50 apiece), but I guess they’re starting to get harder to find.
Arch Linux, youch. 🙁 That is some serious dedication.
I’m going to attempt to hook up a Zebra Eltron Thermal Printer with my Macbook this weekend. Wish me luck! =/ Really hoping I don’t have to buy a Rollo printer for it (I’ve read that there are proprietary issues with DYMO labels, so I don’t want to mess with that.).
Chromebooks are fun to use to surf around on the web and check email, but that’s about it. Chrome is not a real OS, and I don’t think developers take it seriously enough to port anything over to it. I tried to make it work with a cheap Chromebook years ago, but sometimes you really need a mac/windows/linux to be able to use peripheral devices and just do normal things.
tbh, cdrs like that are still being made. burnt cds like that are commonly sold by the artists themselves on the street, at shows, on public transportation. could be from the 90s, could be from today. probably originally sold for $5. i wouldn’t bother listing it (and i list most things).
08/05/2019 at 1:28 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 422: Ready for a Recession at Any Time #65913Very timely podcast! Especially with the DOW being down over 700 points today due to the trade war with China.
All I’m doing is keeping my head down and listing, when I’m not working on my other projects. I managed to get over 140 items listed last week between Ebay & Etsy, which I’m very happy with. I had only planned on getting 50 items listed last week. I’m going to make this week the same goal of 50 listings. If I go over it, great. If I can’t make it over 50, still fine. I won’t stress about it either way.
This is definitely the time of year to get up Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas items. I am already starting to run low on stock for Christmas, and the season has barely begun. I’m getting up a lot of Halloween related material on both Ebay & Etsy, so I need to re-focus and find some more Christmas stock to get listed. That is, when I’m not just listing normal stuff. I feel like people are going to be really focused on the holidays this year more than ever due to the political/economic/normal news being so negative. Anything that is positive to look forward to will sell well.
I’ve currently got up nearly 60 items on Etsy. I would like to make it a goal to get up 80-100 items by the end of August.
08/02/2019 at 9:12 am in reply to: HUGE lot of Vintage Toys – Need Help Before Seeing/Offering #65785I’ve been wanting that Big Foot board game forever. Looks like the price has come down from what it once was. Sometimes board games can do well even with missing pieces, but there aren’t any that look THAT good in this lot. Mall Madness does well with all its pieces. Chutes away looks good, if it has all its pieces. Weapons & Warriors, other games like that are good. Samurai Swords is just a clone of Shogun, which is actually very valuable and I have a complete copy of in my collection. There’s some good stuff in this lot, it’s just already priced at retail.
I don’t sell clothes (I have 3 personal clothing items I’ve managed to list on poshmark in the past year, that’s it). For what I do sell, this is how it is trending for me. Expensive items are not selling, cheap items are. It is hard out there right now.
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