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I do this too, but out of a fear of bedbugs lol. It must get thoroughly scrubbed before coming in my house. If it looks crittery at all on the curb, it does not even pass the stage of getting lugged back with me.
Agreed. Problems in Amazon chat get resolved in 10 minutes. For ebay? Normally an hour on hold before you get to even speak about the problem. Meh.
When I buy an item, research it and see that similar items sold for very high in the past, I’ll price the item just as high as well and add a best offer option to it. I don’t know if someone will pay the exact same high amount for a similar item 5 years down the road, especially when there are no similar comparables.
This has resulted in offers within 24 hours at half or 75% of the price. These are items that I would have normally listed and sold for 15-30 before researching so thoroughly. With the higher prices, I am asking 100-300 and getting 50-150 usually within a day.
I usually just take the offer because it is much more than I was expecting to get for the item no matter what. They get a “deal,” a very quick buy “before anyone else can come in and get it,” and I get more money than I was ever expecting to get. Win-win.
07/22/2018 at 2:11 pm in reply to: Worthpoint/Terrapeak Request! Vintage Xerox 400 telecopier #45915Just checked on Worthpoint. No results for that model, or any model of xerox telecopier.
I found this one that sold on best offer on Ebay:
According to Watchcount:
Sold For (USD):
$ 450.00Looks like a good find!
07/18/2018 at 3:49 pm in reply to: Running a large sale on Ebay long-tail items test; does it result in more sales? #45771The way I used to determine that was to go to:
then find each sub-category within that I focus on.
Now, when I try to look up items that way, all the stores come up as 0 results.
I tried the new way to look up how items are selling via Growth – Sourcing Guidance, but it doesn’t break down items low enough to see specific results. I also tried to search for these specific categories, but it won’t come up outside of the ones they suggest.
The old way I used to search resulted in showing the top stores in the category for each subsection. I was always in the top 5 for the ones that I did well in. Now, I can’t determine where I am. 🙁
07/18/2018 at 2:01 pm in reply to: Running a large sale on Ebay long-tail items test; does it result in more sales? #45745Yeah, I am actually seeing a small boost in sales today. I’ve already sold 4 items. Most of my orders for Ebay come in during the evening or overnight, so this is very encouraging. Sales have been way down in my store over the past 6 weeks due to glitches or who knows, so anything that can kick start sales back to normal is great.
When I say sales are way down compared to normal, they are way down compared to normal comparing my store on a year-by-year basis. Sales are down by 1/3rd this year from the past several years. I could see being down a 1/4 this year, but they are way lower than they should be. This is one of the high-points of the year for a few lines of stock I carry that I have been actively restocking with good material over the past few weeks, and it is still just crickets this year. Foreign sales? Economy? Glitches? Disinterest? idk.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m doing now. Taking off a few days each week. The days I don’t work, I just fulfill orders early in the morning. The days I do work, I try to compact them down into a 9-5 at this point, or more of a 10-3 or 9-4 at the most – when I am done, I leave work outside of work. I guess now that I have been able to shrink the work day down, or get rid of it, I’m wondering how much more can I do?
I think you should go with the urge and go with your interests! Especially if they keep coming back.
I don’t really want to get into it on here, but I guess I could say I miss the “freedom” I had when I was younger and made less money with less overall responsibilities (I don’t even have kids or anything, so it’s not like I am even that encumbered with outside responsibilities). I sometimes make fun of the people I know who have really crappy minimum wage jobs (mid-30s as well) and degrees who just do whatever they want artistically outside of work, but I also completely get just working 8 hours a day and not caring about it .at.all. outside of work.
I guess I’m trying to get back more to the “not caring” part on my own at this point. Trying to deconstruct the business so it is more like a self-contained job, and not so much my life 24/7. I really feel like reselling changes the way your brain works to an extent when you get really good at reselling – you stop seeing physical objects for what they are, but more for what they can get on ebay. It’s weird. I want to see objects as objects again, like what life was like before reselling. The crux is that I need ebay to do that, because I realize how much more I can earn than a minimum wage job. Hah. =/
I finally started listening to the podcast – just have to take a break from listening to say that I totally agree that long-term goals are everything. When you first start running a business, you are so involved in the day-to-day that you can’t see the the bigger picture of what you are doing at all. You are just trying to get from point a to b without failing too hard. Once you’ve gotten past that initial bump into a successful or successful enough long-term business, it’s like ? What do I do now? More of this, or other projects that more align with who I am as a person?
That’s the point when I’ve said that most people crash & burn in this business. It is so easy that processes learned can just run on auto-pilot. It is at that point that people are like “am I going to be doing this forever (until retirement or ?), just like you would at a normal job. What am I going to do now that I am doing fine enough?
You can run your business, and then do x or x or z or whatever. But there comes a point when you’re like what do I do now? I have already learned everything there is to know about all aspects of my business. What is next?
My own personal long-term goals have gotten me to start thinking in terms of an endpoint for all of this. I have been reading about what the FIRE people do when they finally have enough to retire – some say to continue working if you want to build more money, but others say that sometimes enough is enough. Just live off of what you have set-up and get out of the race to make money otherwise.
I’m at the point now where my projects outside of selling could fully absorb all of my time – but I do not have the money to do so. I first turned to online selling to give me time and energy to work on projects outside of a f/t job – now that I have a grip on those projects, I could devote all of the time that I have working on a business to working on them. But, I do not have the funds to go f/t on these projects.
So, I wish that I could find a current stopping point and just leave it alone at that, be completely free of online selling – but Ebay as it is for now will have to be my “stopping point” because I do not know how to break free of work and business completely in order to support myself doing what I really want to do. Online selling has given me a taste of what I am capable of doing outside of the normal conventions of “work.”
Ugh, sales were TERRIBLE on Amazon yesterday. Normally there’s a huge boost for 3rd party merchants that aren’t prime on prime day, but not this year. Too many site problems.
I went in to buy 2 books for myself at 9 pm yesterday and had to search multiple times for the titles (BY ISBN), then had problems adding to cart. What would normally take 30 seconds per book took 2-3 minutes from search to books bought. I can only imagine that most people gave up after the first time they attempted to search for something.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but just wanted to say congratulations on the new building! It feels like I’m watching real-life Monopoly with you two. So cool.
My stock levels are really high right now, so I am taking it easy from both listing and sourcing. I am running an experimental sale on my store right now to see if large sales boost overall sales of long-tail stock. I will post results when the sale is done.
From those stats, it doesn’t seem worth cross listing on both platforms – unless you have an enormous turnover on Ebay, even with those high Amazon sales. I’ve also found that even with posting on other sites, Amazon still draws in the majority of book buyers.
Fillz is one of the most common sites for online booksellers to post on multiple sites.
Hahahaha. I was so tempted to call him out as a troll IN THIS THREAD when it was first started, but I held my tongue and kept completely out of it. Wow.
Theory ain’t nothing if you’re not listing.
Yeah, you definitely have to love what you do, and come about it from a perspective of abundance vs. one of scarcity. That is definitely the key. You also have to work very hard for an indeterminate amount of time to get yourself settled – go out, buy stuff, list it, sell it, package it well, ship it quickly. Over and over and over ago. On your own.
I think the ones more likely to fail at this business are the type that are overly anxious, not capable of working for themselves, and unable to be repetitive in the right way to do this (at least at first). Of course, what you do first with online selling will not be necessarily what you end up doing a year later. Still, you need something to work from at the beginning to get you over your initial ?
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