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226 items went out last week. 52 items are going out today. 30-40 items are going out tomorrow. Our normal mail person has been on leave for the past week and all the mail has been picked up, which was my main worry, so I tried Saturday pick-up with the substitute and it worked fine. I’ll continue doing Saturday pick-ups from now on.
Sourcing online has gotten trickier over the past week – not sure if I’m competing against other resellers or collectors at this point. Still, I have the backlog and a number of items still waiting to come in the mail to list when I get back around to listing mode. Mail has been so slow to arrive in my area that it sometimes takes 2-3 weeks for an order to come in. It’s no big deal. I think I listed 50 items last week and didn’t touch the backlog because I was too busy dealing with the daily ship outs. I’d rather do one task well – getting packages out to buyers in a well-packed, quick manner – than to try to list items AND get items out to buyers with all the packages not packed well and working late to squeeze the time in to get up another 10-20 items. If I had a smaller inventory I might worry about doing both, but I figure that I can coast by for several weeks without having to get new stock listed on an inventory of 13,000+ for my main store alone.
In meh news, I have to go in for an emergency wisdom tooth (teeth maybe?) extraction tomorrow or later this week. Yay for developing a problem in the midst of this pandemic. I’m not sure if they’re going to yank out 1-2 or all 4 of them at once, but this is definitely not something I was expecting to happen now. Ugh. I was just really happy to find dentists seeing patients for emergencies at all where I am, as I heard it was impossible to find any last month. Still, the place I’m going to seems to be doing everything possible to be safe in the midst of this with stringent rules to keep out sick people, so yay for that. I’m also worried about having to take an uber during this (I was hoping to avoid taking one for the rest of the year), but I really have no option in this case. I’ve already put all my stores on vacation and will pack up whatever stragglers there are tonight to be picked up tomorrow while I’m dealing with this mess. I do still have all of the items in my Ebay stores available for sale with the normal vacation banner on top of them. Once I get to the point of not being able to actually ship them for a few days or potentially longer, I’ll contact each customer to remind them about the delay and see if they would like to cancel or not.
Shipped out 187 orders last week. With multi-quantity orders, I think it was roughly 195 items to go out? 53 orders going out today. I estimate we’re at 20-30 so far for tomorrow. Mainly selling the usual items, but I did sell a Christmas ornament on my 2nd Ebay store. Christmas ephemera has also been selling on my main Ebay store – I think people are finding the idea of a future Christmas to be comforting, so they’re stocking up on related items to be as cheerful and optimistic as possible. Disney related item sales have also picked up. I would recommend listing both types of items if they’re the sort of items in your backlog and you’re wondering what to list next?
I ventured out of the house today for the first time in nearly a month. Very bleak. 90% of people outside had face masks and looked miserable. I walked in the street multiple times to avoid people. With the gray skies and drizzle, it just felt wrong outside. When things start to “get back to normal” here, I honestly don’t know how it’s going to work. It barely worked today with only essential businesses open and few people walking or driving. I don’t know how an increase in people will work with the small footprint the stores in NYC have – as it is now, you can sometimes be the only person in a store for up to 5 minutes. When more people are encouraged to walk around and go shopping, our stores won’t be able to handle it. With more cars on the streets, it will be difficult to walk in the road when it’s full of cars again. The sidewalks won’t magically get larger to accommodate the 6 ft social distancing mandates. This goes for all the major cities in the US with tiny stores. It’s not going to work. At least in rural or suburban areas with large stores, most people can keep to themselves in their cars or in their Super Walmart sized stores or even thrift stores. We don’t have that option here. Our corner stores are tiny. Our thrift stores are tiny.
This was going to be the first year I completely cut out online sourcing for the majority of the year and just focused on buying locally. Oh well. I’ve gone back to buying a lot online and continue to work through the backlog. I feel that to an extent things may go “back to normal,” i.e. the “new normal” for the majority of the country, but not for where I am. Just gotta get used to it. During Cuomo’s press briefing today, he said the shutdown will be extended for downstate NY and just had a bunch of ? question marks ? about when we would even begin to reopen.
My M-F carrier has been my Saturday carrier as well for the past month. He said he needed the overtime. I was going to do it last weekend for the first time, but I was afraid that that would be the weekend he took off. I’ll once again skip scheduling a pickup for tomorrow just in case it’s a substitute carrier. The substitute carriers can come anywhere from 8 am – 7 pm on a Saturday and I just don’t have the time to train them, especially if it’s a different carrier each Saturday when it’s not my main guy.
Anyone do Saturday pickups? I’m completely overwhelmed with the amount of orders this week and think there will be too many for my mailman to pick up on Monday. Is Saturday pickup reliable, or should I just stick to Monday-Fridays?
Yep. I’m currently nearing 14,000 active listings in my main Ebay store. I’m saving nearly $200 in listing fees each month thanks to this! 😁
I wish I could like this post a million times! Yes! Best news of the day!
Maybe they’ll see how many new items get listed (and sold) and move in the direction of making large free listing allotments permanent. 😀
Mainly books & ephemera. A few RA/OA type items. Records are selling again – sold 2 on my 2nd ebay store this weekend that are going out today. The 4 sales on Etsy in the past 24 hours were all books.
After complaining about Amazon before, they’re actually pulling through today with a lot of orders. Ebay has only had 1 sale so far. Now I need to complain about Ebay haha.
45 orders going out today. I think we’re currently at nearly 20 orders going out tomorrow, will add 10-20 more to tomorrow’s ship-out by the time that goes out. Scheduled pickups are the best! That being said, I miss walking to the post office. They say that we’re past the peak, but there are still way too many new cases added each day for me to feel comfortable about walking outside again unless I absolutely need to for essential errands.
The last time I walked anywhere was early April. I’ve just been holed up in the house other than bringing in mail and putting out packages for the mailman. It’s been too rainy or windy to exercise outside. The days it is nice out are full of other people with the same idea to walk around, so I’ve just been staying in other than having the windows open and exercising in the house by moving around heavy boxes of stock. It’s not worth going out to risk getting sick.
It’s fine. When I do start routinely going outside again, I’m planning on walking more than ever. Before the pandemic happened, I was an Uber Platinum rider. I was using Uber 3 or 4 times a week at least, sometimes multiple times a day. I haven’t used Uber in over a month and a half, and don’t really have plans to use it again for as long as possible. I think it’s a way the virus is spreading around here – public transportation is definitely one of the main spreaders, so I wouldn’t be surprised about Uber being another transmission source as well.
I know a lot of people are eager to get back out there and go to thrift stores. I’m planning on just continuing to primarily source online for the next few months or longer. If I do go to thrift stores, I will most likely just buy enough (quantity and weight) to allow me to easily walk the items back home outside of additional non-Uber transportation methods. That is, if I feel safe enough to either venture on public transportation or go to thrift stores with other shoppers. If I lived anywhere other than where I do now, it would be fine and I wouldn’t have these concerns. It just feels like such a calculated risk to be thinking of an immediate future that involves my sourcing being 100% completely normal in the way it was before the pandemic. It has now been a little over 2 months since I’ve even been to a thrift store, so it’s not something I am urgently missing anyway.
Etsy is doing really well right now. 4 sales over the past 24 hours! I think they’re getting a lot of traffic due to being one of the only places online where you can buy masks, hand sanitizer, yeast, sourdough starters, seeds, etc,. I’ve been trying to focus on my main Ebay store, but I’m going to go back to listing more items on there as well. Amazon is a dud because I haven’t been able to buy a significant amount of stock for it in 6 months. Still, enough orders are coming in to make it worth continuing with until I can steadily source for it again.
I would do what Jay suggests first about talking to your mailman about it. If after that you’re scheduling the package pickup and he’s still not picking up your packages, submit a request through the USPS website about problems with your postal carrier. The local manager of your post office (or postmaster? IDK) should call you back within a few hours and help you out.
I’ve been buying collections, inventories, bulk lots, large quantities of items for years now. Here’s my advice on dealing with them:
You have knowledge of items that sell, how they sell, what to buy developed after a number of years of doing this. If you don’t, you know how to quickly research what you are looking at to buy. Sometimes, knowledge combined with your gut will tell you what to buy and what not to buy. If this had been a home-run, or really good buy off the bat, you would’ve just bought it. Since you thought about the price asked, the selling prices of the items, the sold history, etc,. and DIDN’T buy the items, you were initially hesitant to buy them. If all of them had worked together and the math worked in your head, you would’ve bought them right off the bat. Instead, you came on the forum to ask what we would do. Most of us said “eh, I wouldn’t deal with this,” because your initial reaction to not buy the lot outright at the price asked was correct.
Sometimes buys are amazing and you are so happy you stumbled into them. Sometimes buys look like a bad deal and turn out to be not worth it, and you’re glad you didn’t buy them. I totally get turning numbers over and over again in your head to see if they would work, I do that all the time with potential buys, including very minor $20-$100 buys. It’s natural. Sometimes it’s just best to go with your gut.
A lot of the solds are $5-10 apiece with free shipping. If you’re spending $4 on an item, there is hardly any room to make any money off of this.
I actually LIKE selling cheap items, but I only spend a nickle or a dime on items this cheap. To buy at $4 to sell at $8-10 with free shipping, fees, shipping supplies, store fees, etc,. is a bit much. I understand the appeal of selling items that are already listed, have stock photos, multi-quantity, no hard work, etc,. but the initial investment to do so seems really high.
I’m curious about how many different skus there are? 220 sales over 3 months equals roughly 73 sales per month. That’s a gross of a little over 1k per month, before all the expenses are accounted for.
It looks easy, but what comes to mind is if it’s so easy and takes up so little space, why would this person be jumping out of the business now? Depending on how many skus there are, what would happen if the price crashed with a few thousand units left?
I might also be hesitant to buy it because you can pretty much list anything online at this point of time and sell it. If the pandemic hasn’t increased the sales of this item over the past month, that’s really not a good sign.
