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Other than internalizing the higher ASP I want to move forward with, and just working hard on listing my backlog of inventory, none of those numbers are actually concerning at this point.
Taxes – I manually set aside the expected taxes each month I expect to pay at the end of the year (with fees for not paying quarterly), not a big deal at all.
ROI – Only in terms of my current goals for higher ASP, which I have already internalized and will do when I am out sourcing
STR – Don’t care.
ASP – Already internalized, but will still have a lower asp as I list through all the unlisted stock that I already own that may be lower than I would like to get and hold onto in the future.
Free Returns – I don’t offer free returns, so it doesn’t bother me at all.There are quite a bit of unspoken concerns that can be said for doing this in the long-haul. I have thought about creating a podcast to do so, but I have realized my target audience would probably be less than 10 people, if even, so there’s no point. I have also thought about writing out articles, but less people would care to read them than to listen in a podcast format that’s not “how do I get started?” sort of tawk.
I feel like 99% of the energy going into the discourse on reselling is about how to get started, bolos, troubleshooting, fake tax avoidance conferences for resellers to hang out with their friends or youtube mentors & gurus, not anything about the actual substance or consistancy of reselling for the long-term, or how it fundamentally alters your life as a person, and even attempts at conversation about it lead straight back to the expected 99% of discussion.
Just doing this forever burnout. Like the midlife crisis of reselling.
Haha, yeah. After dealing with it for so long, I have come to a complete understanding of the importance of the very long-tail vs. methods to bring about faster sales. What to stock, what not to stock.
It is pretty much now the autopilot experiment store, not the actively trying new things store. I have been doing this way too long even on Ebay for any of it to be a surprise anymore.
I have an entirely separate Amazon business that is my real “ft” job. That’s where all the “popular” stuff goes. I don’t like discussing Amazon ‘cos that’s how I really make a living, and at this point in history it is TOUGH with an insane amount of competition, and almost impossible if you don’t do FBA, like me (yay).
Ebay was meant to duplicate the Amazon business, which it does on some weeks. Otherwise, it is pretty much my other ft experiment business, even at the stage of having 9,000+ items currently listed. It is the weird store with 35% or more unique one-offs that can sell within an hour of listing, or 10 years.
Yeah, books and ephemera are really all I can deal with on a daily basis. They are their own beast. Clothes, the same. I have several bags of clothes to list on my tiny “everything else” store, and I just can’t. There’s only so much time in a day.
Yeah, a lot of the paper inventory I have already purchased (which is quite a bit, in the thousands) has quite a good ROI – purchase for $.10, if even that high, sell for $10-30+. I will continue to list those items that I already have, but since I have so many now to sort through (and I am tossing or re-lotting about 1/3rd-1/2 as it is now), I am not actively purchasing ephemera at the moment. I will once again when I have my unlisted inventory under control.
I’m thinking more in terms of books for Ebay to change my criteria permanently on – it is incredibly easy to purchase a book for $1, sell for $10-15. However, I have the unlisted inventory problem to contend with, as well as major burn out. If I churn through what I have at that price range (as well as continue to toss anything that does not meet my criteria), I will eventually erode my unlisted inventory completely and have nothing bugging me to get done other than what I go out that day to find to sell.
By then (1 or 2 years in the future), I will have already started to build up a steady supply of $25+ items that I will have also been listing during the entire time I was also listing through the unlisted items. If I train myself now to stick to these purchasing patterns in the future, I will not go back to picking the as good ROI, but realistically just low-hanging fruit. Luckily, the $10-15 is the sweet spot for the casual book buyer, so I will sell a lot of it down and won’t have to worry about it taking up too much space for too long.
Yeah, I have a ton of ephemera priced at $9-10 that I’m going to leave at those prices and sell off, but I was thinking of lotting others at 10 per lot to get to $20-30+ in the future. I’ve also been compiling very large lots of it to get $50-200, but I might start selling them off in smaller lots to get $20-30 per lot out of those, and in the end make more money from the combination of smaller lots. No one other than dealers and the rare genealogy collector likes buying paper lots for $50-200, unless it’s otherwise very special.
Alright, the main forum thread is too long for me to add to, so I’ll post here. I’m going to do an experiment in which I only list either a) more valuable & desirable items I find out while sourcing in the wild for Ebay ($25+ books) OR b) items from my own unlisted inventory that are $10+ (books & ephemera) that I already own and are technically “free” outright stock anyway. I’ve already been doing (b for the past few years anyway, so I will only have to outlay $$ for newly acquired items that are supposedly worth more for more interested people.
I have severe burnout from doing this for so long anyway that it works out. I need to get through all of my unlisted stock, and I also need to continue sourcing without exhausting myself out by adding too much to my unlisted piles. I seriously want to get through it all in the next year or two, and then have the $25+ be my new permanent floor while the cheap stuff sells out.
Does higher value equate to an item being more valuable? Will it all still turn to long-tail anyway? I don’t know. It will be a good experiment to see if anyone’s math works in any possible way. My asp for books & ephemera has been $16+ for the past yea on Ebayr, which is actually pretty good considering the fba people seem to hover at $12. They have all their metrics backing up their buying choices. Hmmm.
07/11/2018 at 10:53 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45128I feel like with long-tail stores, obsolescence isn’t a “problem” with the store, but a perk, and the ultimate driver of sales to the store for that seller. It is required of the long-tail store to have items that people don’t necessarily need, but want.
Or, will eventually want. Or, that tv shows and movie studios will want as props for period pieces. Or, a collector will need to finish his collection. Or, a specific article that someone needs to read in a magazine. Or, an item someone does actually need, but can’t find anywhere except for the one long-tail seller on Ebay or Etsy that bothered to stock it in the first place for them.
07/11/2018 at 10:20 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45118very infrequent bad buys – i don’t want to freak out the editing bot by editing my post too quickly.
07/11/2018 at 10:19 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45117Long-term sellers think of their business like x.
Fast-paced, commodity based sellers think of their business like x.
They are just two different strategies for selling. To me, I find it more odd how people base their sales on the expectation that a person will like x due to factors such as x in a time period of x, vs. me buying an item because I find interesting, knowing that within a day, or 10 years of listing, someone else will find it interesting as well. It doesn’t matter when, but they will at some point. Enough “at some points” add up to a full-time income based on all of my previous efforts listing.
For fast-paced sellers, there are a lot of bad buys to cull. For long-term sellers, there are very frequent “bad buys” in comparison. For fast-paced seller, time is finite. For long-term sellers, time is infinite.
What the…?
For my large inventory, I do sometimes remove items from inventory that have been damaged while in inventory due to any number of reasons. However, I don’t assume that my entire long-tail inventory will somehow destroy itself in its entirety over the course of 5-10 years and I will have to start from scratch at some point due to the forces of nature.
At the very least, having a large long-tail inventory allows for certain items to be junked for any number of reasons, all the while still being able to hold onto a substantial inventory without any fear to loss of income if a few items have to go for whatever reason you feel like it has to go.
As for fads, I would argue that the lack of a current broad underlying culture (i.e. post-internet culture) allows for either a very fast cycle of fads, or even the absence of fads. Someone looking for a weird item on the internet is doing it for themselves, not because culture dictated for them to be interested in it. This has also applies to people of a certain age (maybe 30-35+?) who are not buying items to look “cool,” but maybe for historical/genealogical reasons, or aesthetic reasons that do not fit in with the current perceived norms of “coolness.” Let alone what people are interested in in Europe, or Mexico, or Asia… I find this to be a very interesting topic, but too much for a paragraph or two tacked onto the end of “but what ifs?”
I switched to a 2 day handling time because I was getting dinged by Ebay for shipping on items I was sending out even the same day of sale. Making that change alone pushed me back to a TRS status on Ebay.
This might be controversial, but just like how I never look back at my listings once I’ve created them, I never check my defects or anthing else on the dashboard. I would probably look if I was scheduled to be below standard or whatever the lowest rating is on the next cycle, but I feel if I have the green Top Rated Seller or even Above Average on the dashboard, that’s good enough. Nothing to worry about.
I was thinking of selling on FBA right around the time they started increasing fees heavily a year ago. Even still, I had 4 bags set aside of low-rank (under 1 million), $10+ up (on FBA) textbooks that would have sold well. Since all the new fee increases went into effect, I would have made only $1 or $2 per book. I just donated them instead of dealing with them.
Are you seeing better sales on Ebay for Amazon type books? You do have an advantage with much less 3rd party sellers competing on Ebay, plus no FBA to also compete with. I currently have 22,000 books listed on Amazon, in addition to the nearly 10k books and ephemera I have up on Ebay. It sucks that you can no longer list the books on Half.com and have them come through to Ebay that way. Now it seems you have to directly list each item individually on Ebay yourself? They have made it really difficult to list ISBN on here.
Years ago, I had another website FTP upload the higher value books from my Amazon inventory directly on Ebay, but that would be impossible now with the picture requirements. That, and coming up with an entirely new account that would be able to instantly upload with the restrictions they place on new accounts. I have also thought about uploading these listings to my large Ebay account that can absorb the addition listings and listing “values,” but it would be a hassle to have both accounts merged in such a way.
I don’t have a car, so I have to really focus on getting items back by public transportation or uber. If it doesn’t fit in my backpack, it’s not coming unless it’s worth $$$$, but even then I’ll still leave a LOT behind because I don’t want to sell it and figure out how to get it to the post office by uber. It always involves coordinating multiple people to help me bring my large box or boxes to the post office along with the normal mail that has to go out anyway. It is seriously a hassle.
The largest items I’ve brought back by uber were 2 Ikea rugs that were sold new on their website for $150 apiece, but I won them in an online auction for $10 combined. I only bought them because I really wanted them for myself, and I got a bunch of other lots of smaller items to resell at the same time. I could not imagine having to resell them and ship, or even sell locally without a car. Ugh.
Luckily, I got an incredibly nice uber driver to help tetris everything in his van, but it was still stressful. Even with the large suv van, they still barely fit. -
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