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I’ve never been to ebay open, but I think you can learn more on the forums here in terms of tips and tricks over the course of several months for free than you could at ebay open for $$$. I also never understood the whole networking aspect of it; the only people I would want to network with would be ebay themselves. If you’re guaranteed time with them to genuinely voice your suggestions & complaints, it would be totally worth it.
That’s a pretty good number of items sold compared to what’s listed. You should be able to achieve that goal by listing 10 a day, which would compensate for items sold during the course of the next several months.
The insane crush of humanity is getting me down. I live in what is considered one of the most suburban parts of my city, and just the effort to get back into the main part of the city by public transportation is soul-crushing. Tourists spill out into my neighborhood during busy touristy times because the city is just so full of them that they feel like they have no other choice. I see them taking selfies in front of the most inane places. I guess they feel like they are off-the-beaten trail explorers (I get it, I travelled in a similar fashion when I was younger).
Still, I’m over it. The places I’m interested in moving to have a few restaurants, a coffee shop, and a lot of local farmers stands. Small farms with a few acres for under a half million, or a few acres with a house and a few outbuildings for a quarter mil. I don’t need 500,000 restaurants to choose from on a daily basis, or constant theatre & museums that I don’t go to enough because I’m sick of all the tourists at them no matter what time of day or weekdays I try to go to them on as it is.
This is such an extreme decision that it will probably take 10 or so years to actually achieve, I won’t be as young anymore, and there are a million factors to fully consider, but I think it’s a good direction to be heading in. Learning how to drive in my 40s will be fun, too.
I searched for him on Google and read the little blurbs about him underneath the Google Books and Los Angeles Times Newspaper links. I found the following info:
I learned it from Al Tomsik, a friend of mine who used to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war during World War II. He told me that when he used this technique it was certain he would eventually persuade the prisoner to give him the information he wanted. He said it was so powerful that even prisoners who came into the …
and
Jan 17, 1976 – Al Tomsik founder and president of the Tomsik Sales Institute is a salesman, author, consultant and popular speaker. Tomsik became interested in “Behavorial Psychology” during World War II while serving as Japanese interpreter and psychological interrogator with the U.S. Marines in China and the South …
and
May 7, 1972 – IrlM Kvlqr, Tromrtr: lauli E. Wtbb, 011 You are invited to come, see and hear Al Tomsik. America’s leading creative-selling expert.
I glanced at a few of the other links about him, and saw him referenced in other current business books of the past 10 or so years. Since I can’t find instances of his books for sale, or ones having been sold prior to this, I can infer that his books are actually desirable, though hard to come by.
I don’t think that you could get a whole lot of money for them if you found them again, but I would feel comfortable pricing them for at least $35+ in the future.
Darn, I’m too late to this thread. Looks like good keywords would have been “Creative Selling” “Business Psychology 1960s Psychology.” From what I’m reading about him, it sounds almost like his techniques utilized proto-NLP, so I probably would’ve used “NLP” as a keyword.
If you have anymore booklets by him, price them higher. They seem like genuinely rare & desirable 1960s kook business psychology booklets, hence why they sold so quickly.
I’m starting to become jealous of the people on here with acres of land, outbuildings and farms! It sounds nice to have so much space.
Just curious…out of the inventory of 4k industrial items, plus the additional 3 houses of stuff: how many items are actually listed for sale?
Thank you, MDC!
I tried adding the Youtube link to the Stonecutters Song from the Simpsons to my original post and it vanished. They do keep the martians under wraps. 😀
My post disappeared? 🙁
If it’s in my niche, I’ve sold something similar before, AND I’m in a rush & it’s under $5, I’ll just throw it in my cart. If it’s in my niche and I’m not in a rush and it’s only $1 or more, I’ll look it up on my phone. I actually think I’m better off going with my gut while in a rush a lot of the time, but I’m also more prone to leaving good, interesting things behind as well if I’m in a rush and can’t thoroughly look through it all.
If it’s not in my niche at all and I don’t know what it is, I’ll look it up if I’m at a thrift store. I’ll look up comps on Amazon/Ebay currently listed/Ebay solds. If I’m not in a rush, I’ll take up to a few minutes looking up weird items and looking at results. I don’t care if thrift store people see me looking stuff up on my phone.
If I’m at an estate sale and it looks weird and interesting to me, I’ll just bundle it up into a pile with other weird stuff and ask for a bulk price. That way, at least I’ve brought down the cost of the item in relation to everything else, if it ends up not being worth anything. I know I’ve picked up something good if other estate sale people try taking it away from me to look at themselves (!) while bringing it up to the check-out area.
Thank you! Perfect. Just sent her the info.
04/02/2018 at 11:56 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 354: The Long Game – 10 Years On eBay #36894I’ve had my current Ebay store since 2007, and it has gone through many iterations before finally becoming something I am comfortable with. I’ve had to completely eliminate large product lines from it almost completely due to cost and value of the items (*cough cough* postcards). I started working on it when I got burnt out from just doing Amazon (which I still do, and which is still the lion’s share of my business).
Now that the ebay store is running on auto-pilot (I still feed it daily, or several times a week), my focus has been on working with a secondary ebay store I’ve created, as well as etsy. If it wasn’t for the creativity of being able to run an ebay business, with your own method of curation, I probably would’ve burnt out hardcore a decade ago. Ebay makes me feel like I have an actual store. Amazon is just soulless in terms of representing yourself.
The main ebay store is at nearly 9,200 items. I have 80-100 boxes of unlisted stock for this store that I can pick & choose from to list in the store, as well as going out to source new items 1-3 times a week. While the main ebay store is niched out, I still have dozens of sub-niches in it that keep me interested. I am not listing the exact same item day in and day out.
As for the secondary store & etsy, I am hoping to branch out more into items I am not fully comfortable with. At an auction this past weekend, I picked up a large lot of vintage blueprints, wallpaper, really terrible extremely bad art, misc. items, an olivetti typewriter, and tons of books like usual. I am really looking forward to listing the weirder, non-book items on the secondary store & etsy. This is stuff I would normally be interested in for myself, not necessarily to list online. Now, I am interested in them as a way to keep going in this business, as a way to continue listing and learning.
The auction also had a fill a bag & box sale going on. My husband picked up a box of 1960s/70s french pop records & misc. books for $10! while I filled up an overflowing garbage bag full of vintage clothes and fabric for $20. I haven’t listed vintage clothing online in over 10 years, but I thought this would be a good motivation to get back into it.
Totally jealous of the d&d haul. I was able to get 2 collections of the 3rd edition within a week of each other a few years ago, but it’s been dry since those hauls. I will occasionally find a few volumes here and there out in the wild, but that’s it.
Around 10 years ago I found a collection of the older ones (not as old as the ones in your haul) in a Goodwill, but yeah, I can seriously count the number of times I find actual collections of them while out sourcing. My husband had some of the original booklets from the 1974 set growing up, but someone tossed them at some point. Ah, well.
I did find some rare modules a few years ago out in the wild that went for a lot, but even those don’t pop up that frequently. You’re more likely to just find the manuals rather than the modules most places.
There used to be all these flea markets in empty lots (mainly parking lots, some just outright abandoned lots) in lower manhattan in the 90s. I thought the prices for items seemed expensive at the time, but at this point they’re comparable to any Midwestern goodwill. I can only imagine what i missed buying at the time (pre and beginning of ebay days, too young to know what to look for).
Yeah, $5 is a good offer apiece to just quickly get rid of them. An auction of 45 issues in similar date ranges ended at $245, roughly $5.33 an issue. Good call on the bundling.
which leads back to the definition of “hustle” that jay got from the dictionary:
But then you have what most people define it from the dictionary:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle?s=t
–to earn one’s living by illicit or unethical means.
–to pressure or coerce (a person) to buy or do something
–to sell in or work (an area), especially by high-pressure tactics:
–to cheat; swindle:snake eating its tale!
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