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I’ve currently got a vintage t-shirt listed that is more stains and holes than shirt for $100 with several watchers. Another vintage t-shirt sold to Japan a few years ago for $150 that looked like it was shredded and unwearable, and I still got positive feedback. I wouldn’t entirely exclude clothes for condition issues outright.
10/22/2018 at 2:02 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 382: Treasure Hunting with a Fishnet #50555I think the real take-away from the podcast is if you don’t have to 100% depend on your income from selling online, what should you really be doing with the time you spend sourcing and listing for internet sales? Should you continue as you have always been? Or, should you start shifting your efforts to make more money on less items, if you have the money but not the time?
I think the answer’s different for everyone in terms of what is a lot of work, time or money. Everyone runs their businesses in different ways with different strategies that fit them.
Also, the thought processes are different for people who have been doing this for 10+ years f/t. What “works” now might not be necessarily what really “works” in the long-run. Or, it may work, but other methods of selling might have to come into play to realize that what works is fine, it’s just you getting bored (speaking to myself). After my summer of slightly becoming more of a generalist, I’m turning my back on it and even more firmly delving back into my niches. Other people might be generalists, but realize after so much time they want to have a few focuses, either in terms of monetary value or fields they find the most interesting.
Part of what’s exciting about this life is that you get to make the rules up as you go along, for yourself. What you find exciting, you focus on. It could be the best or worst idea in the world. Who cares? All that matters is what you get out of it. It is a learning experience, and it keeps the overall monotony of buy, list, sell, ship, repeat worth continuing in.
10/22/2018 at 7:20 am in reply to: Bidder trying to get discount and free shipping after auction ended #50498If you haven’t heard back from her and she hasn’t paid yet, she most likely will not pay. I would either cancel the order now, or do a NPB claim as soon as possible.
If you do go through with the transaction, Ebay should hopefully have your back when it comes to this if a problem does arise. Your auction stated that the bottle was not 100% full in the listing. Still, I would not be surprised if she tried for a partial refund or a return if it got that far.
I remember researching this a few years ago when I was trying to figure out why USPS rates from China are so much cheaper than America’s. There was an e-packet program created by the USPS and China in 2011 to allow for cheaper shipping rates with tracking. PDF of this agreement can be found here:
http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_037.pdf
I never understood why a similar agreement couldn’t be made for large sellers in our own country. At least make it an even playing field in terms of international shipping of US sellers to China. So baffling.
As for China holding a large portion of US debt, I would not be surprised if the markets went down for several days before hearing about it, only to go up the day they would announce a huge sell-off, or go up heavily within a week of it happening. Robot trading is also confusing.
Russia dropped a significant amount of treasury bonds this summer, but most people ignored the news. The stock market was fine.
I have 2 pairs of brass bookends I have yet to list on Ebay. A pair of plastic bookends from the 80s are listed on Etsy due to steep competition for them on Ebay. The ones on Etsy have yet to sell.
Has anyone gotten good results from listing bookends on Etsy vs. Ebay? Maybe I should cross-post for the holidays, just in case.
I don’t normally pick up bookends, but they were thrown in at an estate sale with other items I was interested in, making them essentially free.
Great podcast! Just some quick observations:
Do your local auction houses have a place where they post sales results? If so, I would study all of the expensive items that have sold in the previous few months and compare the ending results to how much they would go for online. From the podcast, it sounded like Ryanne was already worried about higher priced items: “hey, doesn’t that Tiffany piece already go for that price?” Just an idea.
Congrats on getting rid of your death piles (again)! I personally can’t imagine that ever happening for me. I’ve gotten in nearly 3,000 vintage paper items this week alone to sort through. I’m about to bid on an online auction (hah). Estate sales are plentiful this time of year, and I’m having to skip some of the ones I would normally go to in order to take a day off and get some free time. This part of the year is so exciting. 😀
I’ve only sold a few items on Etsy so far, but I just pack everything as I normally would for Ebay or Amazon. I have also used both Ebay and Amazon shipping supplies to send items in to people. What I do find interesting is how it seems (at least for me) you have to communicate with buyers. You can’t really do it in as a professional manner as you would for Ebay or Amazon (at least for me, maybe different for others). I have to use a lot of casual language and happy emoticons in order to carry conversations along. Also, when you do have a conversation with someone, it shows your picture as well as theirs. It makes it feel more casual and personal than a transaction on Ebay or Amazon, which is overall very cold and impersonal. I sell books and collectibles on there that are sort of skewed younger (20s-40s) than my usual ebay items that are more for everyone, so that might be part of it. I am also tying it together with instagram, which might also be skewing it young. I don’t know.
Weird, I thought everyone had to set up their own shipping rate tables. I would just take off the option of 2 day mail and stick to priority and media mail shipping.
Sometimes, you have to eat the cost of shipping in order to comply with your stated shipping method in order to keep the customer happy. It is not unusual to get a Prio order for a book that goes across the country and costs $5 more to ship than originally charged for. Oh well. Higher priced books can absorb this sort of extra charge.
10/11/2018 at 12:18 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50039This is pretty good advice. Continue sourcing like normal and finding the $300+ ones in the wild. I think also becoming an expert in a few different niches can help you find more hidden expensive items as well. They may not be necessarily $300+ items, but there may be more hidden $100-250 items already at the sales you already attend that you are passing up that could go for really cheap.
I just looked at my niche ebay store, and I have 10 out of 9,700 items listed for $300+. The most I paid for any of them was $5.
I have never attended an in-person auction. Just the online ones. I would like to attend an in-person one, but I currently don’t have any by me that I can get to without a car. The results of the online auctions sometimes leave my scratching my head.
10/11/2018 at 11:20 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50029Is the sell-through rate that high at the high end? I am seriously in the wrong business.
Sounds like a good goal. I’d be worried about competition driving prices very high to the point of spending $100 or more to make $300 per item. I would probably get a paypal loan out to invest in quickly building a high-income pipeline quickly (3-6 months), if that much inventory can be acquired that quickly. I’s estimate at least 12-20k investment for a few hundred items to start with in order to make 60k?
Yeah, I’m seriously in the wrong business!
10/11/2018 at 10:34 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50026After experimenting the past few months with only buying higher value books ($20+ up), and seeing slowing sales due to this, I am back to buying books that sell on the cheaper end. I am not buying as many cheaper books as I once did, but I have seen that they are necessary to keep a flow of steady sales and make your store appear “active.” The cheaper books also tend to be the ones that are more popular and common, so more people will buy them because they already have an interest in them right now.
Cheaper items tend to be more useful and desirable for a wider range of people than just focusing on the expensive items. I would think the same could be said for higher dollar items that are antiques or collectibles, or even just practical items that can range from $15-40 that people just need in their daily lives. You may get less sales for a higher value, but you’ll be losing a significant amount of business on the lower end that you need in order to maintain a steady cash flow in order to buy more items, or to at least pay your bills with. You’ll also see an overall decrease in sales because just focusing on the higher-end will not make up for the lack of lower-end sales, unless you are constantly sourcing the higher-end.
I realize that some sellers can get by on just selling expensive items, but they may just be doing this p/t, have a significant amount of money already saved up, or are already retired. In order to run a successful online business and support yourself and your family, you probably need to dip into both ends of the selling equation in order to maintain a steady paycheck for yourself.
10/10/2018 at 1:32 pm in reply to: Fixed-price listing fee above free allocation for anchor store subscribers #49952Yeah. We would be broke if we sold via FBA, lol. We store and ship them ourselves. Never had a chance to try out FBA before the fees went nuts. Between that, resellers referring to websites like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa and having to manage your IPI, I consider FBA sellers to be more statisticians than actual booksellers.
10/10/2018 at 1:10 pm in reply to: Fixed-price listing fee above free allocation for anchor store subscribers #49945Abebooks, Alibris. Barnes & Noble and a million smaller sites through Alibris. I miss the heck out of Half.com. I used to sell on several other sites, but it gets complicated after awhile.
Nope, no wholesale. Just lots of thrifting, library sales, etc,. throughout the years.
10/10/2018 at 12:12 pm in reply to: Fixed-price listing fee above free allocation for anchor store subscribers #49937I do all of the Ebay listing myself, and I have a friend that helps out on listing for the other sites. My husband and I source together most of the time for all sites, but he’s also focused on starting up businesses outside of reselling atm, so his efforts are mainly focused on those start-ups. Listing is the easy part, so it is okay to have some outside help.
It took A LONG TIME for my husband to jump on the Ebay train since we started off doing really well on just Amazon and other sites alone, but he gets it now. When we took off from serious sourcing this summer and did fun thrifting, he helped me by finding stuff to resell that I wasn’t expecting him to have any awareness of. He’s a good egg.
10/10/2018 at 11:00 am in reply to: Fixed-price listing fee above free allocation for anchor store subscribers #49930Well, technically the 10,000 listings a month aren’t free. They’re $0.03 a listing if you have exactly 10,000 items up and are paying the yearly cost of $299 a month. Otherwise, they’re slightly more than $0.03 a month for a lot of anchor sellers. More like $0.04 or slightly less per month if you have 6,000-8,000 items listed. This has been part of my motivation to get 10,000 items listed – to be taking full advantage of the cheaper listing fee per item. That, and I have thousands of items left to list, so I better get them all listed!
I guess if I go back to the frame of mind of only having 5,000-6,000 items listed per month, then the $0.05 doesn’t feel like too much of a departure from what I had been paying without thinking too deeply about it.
My husband suggested this morning that I temporarily migrate 20,000+ listings we have on other selling venues over to Ebay for the holiday season, so that would be an additional $1k per month. That makes my initial ugh feeling feel like nothing in comparison to the additional possible $250 per month for an additional 5,000 listings spread out over the next year, hah.
10/10/2018 at 8:02 am in reply to: Fixed-price listing fee above free allocation for anchor store subscribers #49914Yeah, 15,000 listings is only $550 a month. When I think about opening a b&m, $550 a month would barely pay for insurance, employees, heat, etc,. let alone even factoring in the cost of the actual rental for the b&m itself per month.
I don’t mind paying the extra $50 per 1,000 listings. I have too many items to list to wait to get the “free” listings per month once something sells down below 10,000. I just wish Ebay would post every single fee increase when it happens, not when someone is about to willingly pay more to use their service and realize that it has almost doubled.
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