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A quija board involves luring a ghost with queso.
Seriously jealous of this haul!
01/03/2019 at 10:54 am in reply to: Listing items you are completely not interested in listing #54443In my case, part of the problem is the hindrance to an already established workflow I have going on. I have the processes down so much to list what is in my niche that to work on something outside of it must be pretty darn good or at least somewhat interesting to get me out of the work I am used to doing.
01/03/2019 at 6:18 am in reply to: Listing items you are completely not interested in listing #54430I think the new forum is a really good idea! Now that I’ve come to terms with not ever wanting to list these items, I wish I could fill a huge box full of them and send them off to another scavenger. I figure just the box alone would cost $30-50 for all my boring items thanks to the size and weight of the boots? Meh. Might as well thrift for cheaper similar items, if someone’s interested in those type of items.
01/03/2019 at 6:16 am in reply to: Listing items you are completely not interested in listing #54429First estate sale of the year tomorrow! I wish I could be like “Can I trade you some boots for books?”
01/02/2019 at 4:02 pm in reply to: Listing items you are completely not interested in listing #54405Thanks everyone for your input. I feel much less bad side-eyeing these 2 boxes of “junk” (junk to me, good stuff to people that look out for this sort of stuff). I’m just going to shame myself by saying what they are, because they are GOOD items, just not “good” for me: North Face Jacket, NIB Carolina Boots, some rare hats, a few other items scattered about that were all incredibly cheap. Stuff that everyone makes a big deal about, but I’m just “meh.”
I agree it becomes a problem if all you have are items you aren’t interested in listing. I just purchased items during a few months of experimenting with items outside of my niche that I never got around to listing. When I thrift now, I only buy items outside of my niche that I KNOW I will list. It has to be interesting to me. I leave a lot of “good” stuff behind that I just know I will never ever deal with after I have bought it, no matter how much it is worth.
At the very least, I did get 40 new items listed today, photographed another 10 items to be listed, priced 20+ items from my backlog to get listed in the next week, and purchased 30 more items in my niche I’ll be happy to list. I LOVE LISTING.
Just.not.these.darn.bolo.items.that.are.boring.Here are the very basics of my numbers. I had to list all of my individual stores because my spreadsheets for COGS for Ebay now include both Ebay stores, Etsy AND poshmark. If I said COGS for Ebay, I meant COGS for all. The 2nd store had some personal items sell, which brought up the COGS to more than they would be normally. COGS for all the venues below were: COGS: $2,824.72.
Surprisingly, I DID get a poshmark sale yesterday, so that goes into the mix. Still keeping up my strategy of absolutely no sharing, liking, advertising, etc,. I’m a grinch! I hope to get something new listed on Thursday or Friday.
Numbers here sometimes include shipping, sometimes don’t. It depends. I can’t display shipping fees here because it includes shipping for Amazon.
I think I added 2,000-4,000 new listings in the main ebay store this year? I don’t know. The 2nd ebay store was only at 75 listings at the beginning of the year, so that’s a few hundred there. Etsy and Poshmark didn’t exist last year, so those numbers are all new. It is funny I listed as much as I did this year, because I slacked a whole bunch.
COGS are super low, so even items with shipping included had low cost shipping ($2.66-$3 shipping for the most part for most items).
Fees last year were around $8.5k, so I assume they are around $9-10k this year for all venues.
Main Ebay Store:
Current Listings Active: 10,100
Transactions: 1,852
Sales: $28,221.76
ASP: $15.242nd Ebay Store:
Current Listings Active: 194
Transactions: 122
Sales: $3,424.40
ASP: $28.07Etsy:
Current Listings Active: 24
Transactions: 11
Sales: $234.75
ASP: $21.34Poshmark:
Current Listings Active: 1
Transactions: 1
Sales: $22
ASP: $22COGS: $2,824.72
01/01/2019 at 10:51 am in reply to: How do you spend your quarterly eBay Subscription Coupon for Shipping Supplies? #54296Seriously, Ebay??
Congrats! You are buying from a seller in eBay’s new managed payments experience.
This seller accepts payments through eBay’s new managed payments experience.
PayPal is not yet available, but you can pay securely with a credit or debit card.
Your payment information will never be shared with sellers.Grrrrr…
I guess I’ll put my order in later! Who has their credit card on them at all times in order to constantly input it in to buy on Ebay? This would be a real hassle for buying on the phone.
01/01/2019 at 10:47 am in reply to: How do you spend your quarterly eBay Subscription Coupon for Shipping Supplies? #54290I always buy a ton of the 9.5″ x 13.25″ bubble mailers.
I usually buy a box of the 8.5″ x 10.75″ bubble mailers.I sometimes buy the 14.5″ x 18.5″ poly mailers, but I find the savings is better on the bubble mailers overall than the poly mailers. If I run out of the huge poly mailers, I am better off just buying them from another seller.
12/31/2018 at 2:45 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 392: No Alarm Clocks – We chat with Troy aka T-Satt about the eBay Lifestyle #54245Just finished listening to the podcast. Lots of interesting points brought up throughout, definitely worth listening to again or three times for anyone considering going f/t from p/t.
While it is easy to do this p/t, the scaling to a f/t level is a whole other story. What works today will really not necessarily work even 3 months from now, let alone a year or two. You can never get a break – you have to be constantly shining a light on what will sell now, what may sell in the future, even a year from now, all simultaneously. Living expenses have to play a key part. Sourcing expenses are high on the list. Do you not spend for a month and list down what you have, or do you continue to spend when good stuff is out there?
Since I am at the very early stages of poshmark, I sorted through a few bags of clothes I have sitting around the house to list and realized they have gone up even more in price over the past few years. I am glad I just waited. I’ve found 2 shirts alone that even a few years ago would have sold for $30-50 apiece. Since I waited on them, I can now ask $100-200 per shirt OBO on both poshmark and ebay (yay, guess I’m going to have to cross-post to both). Expanding is good. Being niche is good. They are both good. I will not expect these shirts to pay my bills, but they are a nice “bonus” that I wasn’t expecting.
A lot of this really depends on what you like to do. Selling p/t for fun is “fun.” When it becomes a f/t job, it can be just like another f/t job. It depends on how much of a self-directed person you are in general. If you do not have even that basic trait, this is probably not a good choice. If you cannot spend the day just packing orders, or just sourcing items, or doing whatever you need to do at that very moment to keep the business going, it will not go well.
What is “fun” can lead to f/t, as it has for many of us. There just needs to be so much more to stand on than just that. Ebay was my “fun” apart from Amazon. Now, it is another income stream in addition to Amazon. I turned fun into work. My 2nd ebay store, my etsy store, and my poshmark are now my “fun.” If they turn into another legit income stream, cool, great. If not, they will just be there for when I find good items for them. It’s all fun. It’s all work.
Happy New Year, everyone!
12/31/2018 at 10:43 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 392: No Alarm Clocks – We chat with Troy aka T-Satt about the eBay Lifestyle #5421630 minutes into the podcast. Thanks for the shout-out, T-Satt!
Already a lot to think about in terms of numbers. This has inspired me to look at some of my data for the year so far. Sales are simultaneously up & down across all venues. It looks like it has overall either evened out or actually gone up, unexpectedly.
Of course, this is the first year in a long time I have taken a significant chunk of time off from my main venue, started to focus away from just 100% books and ephemera and the odd weird item of interest, and started ventures outside of reselling entirely.
I believe there comes a point when you can juggle multiple hats simultaneously somewhat well, but you have to have a good foundation and know implicitly the main focus of what you do. Then, there comes time for an offshoot. Once you have mastered that offshoot, another offshoot. And then, again. You can’t just do it all at once. You have to master each offshoot before moving onto the next one, or get to a level that you are comfortable enough with an offshoot before moving on. It’s comforting to know that it’s there for you to fall back on if something else unexpectedly fails, or does not do as well as you had hoped.
Time to bring the mail in!
Alright, I started a poshmark store today. So far, I’ve got 1 listing up. Within 10 minutes, I got a like on the item and there are new people “following” me every minute. I’m now over 100 followers, but I’m not following them back because why? The whole “following” thing is pretty amusing. I’m also not liking any items other than ones I want to purchase for myself. I don’t intend to share any of my items or anyone else’s ever during the course of this store, either.
This is pretty much going to be my experimental clothing store of putting 0 effort into it other than listing the darn items. Poshmark actually works out great for me because the listing process is easier than any other site, and I’m already too busy with books/ephemera on ebay to deal with another serious stream of income.
I’m going to try to add an average of 1 item every 2 or 3 days over the next few weeks to see how that goes, instead of “sharing” or any other normal poshmark “work” to keep listings active.
Adding Poshmark as a very limited income stream was a 2019 goal of mine. Already made 1 goal!
20 minutes per item seems high? I only tend to spend that much time on an item if it’s really something special, and expensive. For cheaper items, it is just the normal processes of minimal research/list/sell/repeat. Most items are pretty normal and not worth a lot of time spending on.
I wonder if the problem with listing on these venues is the cross-posting? Yet at the same time, if you can make $860 a month per 1k items on Etsy for the same items on Ebay, it shows that there is a greater dedicated audience waiting on Etsy to buy those items than one may think. That is a significant amount of shoppers only looking at Etsy, when they maybe used to also look on Ebay.
If there wasn’t such a clearly high split between the venues, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. It would be easy to just list on Ebay and call it a day. Yet, those numbers show there is a significant declining audience for those items on Ebay that are waiting to see them on Etsy.
Still, when you have an inventory that is already great in numbers without cross-posting software, I think it is best to just have a dedicated inventory on each venue. I could not cross-post 10k items onto Etsy from Ebay. I would not want to even if I had the software. Instead, I carefully pick out items that people may be more interested in on Etsy and just list them straight to Etsy instead of splitting them from Etsy to Ebay.
I think this comes down to whether you are in control of your inventory, or whether your inventory is in control of you. Do you have certain types of items that you are buying with dedicated audiences on each venue – or, are you at the whim of what you find out in the wild, and having to figure out the easiest way to get them listed across all venues in order to eke out the maximum amount of profits per venue?
What?! You went out of your way to be nice to her, and she still leaves negative feedback?! That makes me feel better for blocking people with weird questions outright, haha.
Yikes. I can’t even believe they put you through that. They probably thought you would’ve given up at some point out of frustration, because that is just nuts.
Ebay has the worst customer service. I’m actually more surprised that you were able to get through to people so often in order to discuss your issues. Even with anchor support (whatever that is), there are still sometimes up to 2 hour waits. I don’t even bother calling them anymore unless it’s absolutely necessary. I know you can have them do the call back feature, but even with that, it feels like a whole other job just trying to get in contact with them in order to resolve issues.
Buyers that don’t read…eh…I never understood that. If you’re going to buy something expensive, don’t you want to know exactly what you’re buying? Especially with shipping that high? People have become so accustomed to brand new/buy it now/free shipping from Amazon prime and other websites that they don’t really understand there are items for sale out there that are used and may have defects.
What type of books did you find?!
In the future, you might want to consider taking a lyft or uber back with large unexpected hauls. I’ve taken an uber for 3 blocks before, but that was for a few boxes of unexpected finds. I have no shame. 😀
Just tip well!
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