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December 5-11
Active Listings: 11,800ish (sorry, can’t find the exact count from 12/12)
Number of Items sold: 106
Gross Sales (including shipping): $2691.53
COGS for Sold Items: $80
Highest Sale: Vintage Wallace Silver-plate Tray for $194.77
Average Gross Sale Price: $25.39
Returns: 2 (clothes, for fit)
Sourcing Cost: Zilch (though the previous week I spent about $600 on an estate auction via online bidding… it’s 600 miles away in my hometown. My car will be QUITE loaded down returning from Christmas!)Hellooo everyone! It’s been so good to get back on the forum and read this week’s responses. Sometimes when I’m in overdrive in my business or stressed I reach maximum information saturation and I don’t get on the forum too much. That’s where I’ve been the last few months due to a pretty much total plateau in sales from April-October…the shape of my revenue graph has been SO wonky this year! My response to that plateau was to dig in and keep listing, but the numbers were stressing me out, so I tried to focus on activity rather than obsessing about sales (or lack of). November finally picked up in a substantial way, and December has finally brought about the expected Christmas time volume of sales. Still not quite on par with what I’d expect for nearly 12k listings, but I am extremely grateful nonetheless! Now I’m in a positive kind of overdrive, shipping a ton and scrambling a bit to prepare for Christmas. I’ve got a new estate clean out project that has already yielded some really fun treasures, and this past week (and the numbers above) reflect my most profitable week to date. So maybe Q4 will end up where it seems like it’s supposed to be after all!
On another positive note, I want to encourage everyone in this community to apply for the Up and Running grant from eBay and Hello Alice. If you don’t know about it, they launched it in 2020. It’s basically a small business growth initiative. I applied in 2020 and didn’t get it; I think only 20 people are awarded each year so far. This year, applications opened for a few weeks in August, I believe. I reapplied, and YOU GUYS! I GOT IT! IT’S REAL! I am so excited to jump in, because not only do you get 10k with which to build your business, you also get access to what seems to be an awesome small business resource center/community/webinars in the first couple months of the program. So please, APPLY NEXT YEAR if they keep it going! It seems like they’ve had a lot of success with it so far, and I can’t wait to see how this opportunity will shape my business.
I would love to know from anybody who is willing to share their perspective, if you have a miscellaneous resale business like mine, big or small, what would you do with $10,000 to grow your business? I’ve got lots of ideas, but I highly value the perspectives of my fellow scavengers! I’m all ears!
I hope everyone gets to enjoy a fulfilling season, both on eBay and in our personal lives. I will try to be more consistent on the forum; you guys mean a lot to me!! My plan for 2022 so far is to soak up everything I can from the small business resource stuff associated with Up and Running, and to keep on listing — my sister in law is still contracting a ton for me, and we are both going to have our work cut out for us with this new estate we are cleaning out. I want to spend this grant wisely and focus on some big-picture stuff, but I’ll also be doing plenty of the dirty work myself, as always. I am ever striving to scoot closer and closer to the higher-end side of inventory, but I still have a hard time resisting the low hanging fruit, lol. Cheers to all my fellow scavengers!
I am getting choked up reading everyone’s posts! What can I say? Nothing that hasn’t already been articulated, for sure. I’m full of sadness and deep, deep gratitude. My life changed forever because of who Ryanne and Jay are and because of their sheer generosity. I love you guys. I have been planning to visit Broadporch Luray in person when I hit my first 10k month (gross or net? 😉 ) so hopefully there will be a way to connect then.
As with any loss, I feel like the absence of the podcast will sink in later as time goes on and episodes don’t drop anymore. I’m so grateful that the things you’ve shared and taught have always been smart and sustainable; I have listened to every single episode too, and I can’t think of anything else that could have motivated and educated me like the Scavenger Life. It was the perfect thing and the perfect time, and it’s been my favorite listening for hundreds of weeks at this point! The show will be missed, of course. However, as a fellow podcaster, I am jumping for joy on your behalf because even a simple production process can definitely be time consuming drudgery sometimes haha!
When I closed my private practice to go full time on eBay, I told my mentor that I knew it was time to move on when I heard someone say “if your spirit leaves, you should send your body with it” … it resonated with me, and I knew it was time to move on! It’s cool to think that even without the pod, you’ll still be running your store behind the scenes, sometimes with helpers, sometimes with extended handling time, etc… and so will all of us! Meanwhile, your focus and energy can be further directed to the current cutting edge of your life endeavors. That is a sweet, sweet reality!
Thank you for everything, more than you even know. Much love to you both!
Yes, I do! I have a super-part time photographer who has worked sporadically for me for about a year and a half, and he photographs anywhere from zero to 200 items per month. Depends on his availability and how much I’m trying to build that given month. My ride or die contractor is my sister-in-law/BFF, and she is now dipping her toes into helping me source and log items along with photographing/creating listing drafts, which she has been doing all along since she started working for me last August. She is the reason my store went from 5k listings to 11k listings in a year! Almost a year in with her, and it continues to be a really great, mutually beneficial arrangement for both of us.
Now if only my gross sales would start looking like it came from an 11k listing store! Haha! The interesting thing is that it’s simply the number of things selling that has slowed down; my average sale price has dipped a tiny bit, but its actually my sell through rate that seems to be in the toilet. I, too, downgraded one level from my anchor store, but for now I’m not putting too much stock in that as a reason why the sell through has kinda fizzled. Hopefully Q4 will shed some light on it if nothing changes by the end of summer! If I did my math correctly, I *think* moving back up to the anchor store becomes most cost efficient again somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,500 active listings… so if nothing changes and sell-through continues to stink, we may just make another big push of listing new inventory and upgrade back to anchor and see if that helps. I may reassess for that in like January if Q4 is also super slow.
Hello, everybody! Long time since I’ve posted. I’ve still been listening each week and reading the forum responses semi-regularly, but just not logging in to post for some reason. In my world, it’s still just a very strange transitional time right now being able to travel/move freely about the cabin a lot more, but also it’s been one of the most love-hate seasons with eBay. On one hand, my sales have been glacially slow (it is weirdly comforting to see that I’m not the only one!), and on the other hand, with my store chock-full of 11k listings/12k items, I’ve been personally transitioning more into a maintenance mode rather than all-out empire building. I think I’d feel a little better about that transition if things weren’t so incredibly slow, but alas, we are all in a transition economy/market-wise, and in the middle of summer to boot!
So I’m working on being patient and doing eBay on my own terms rather than letting my sales direct my feelings about it. I feel confident that my weekly sales will eventually get around to acting like a 12k item store ought to be producing (in my opinion, and based on the 3+ years of data pre-pandemic I have on my store performance). Meanwhile, I’m shipping stuff out and searching for the gems only! The good news is, I’m keeping myself to about 15 hours a week of eBay, freeing up LOADS of time for other creative projects, which is the dream. All my creative projects are fueled by Broadporch coffee at this point, by the way lol! I’m still loving every single delivery I get!
By the way, I am happy to report that I’ve sold almost 100 copies of my book about my eBay store… that may not sound like much to some, but it’s more than I ever imagined I’d sell, and it’s not even a year old. So that’s pretty cool!
How about some store numbers?
July 4-10th, 2021
Active Listings: 10,951
Number of Items Sold: 31
Gross Sales: $709.97
COGs: $13.82
Highest Sale Item: $55.09 (Unbranded Vintage Blonde Scandinavian Display Doll)
Average Sale Price: $22.90
Returns: 2 (for fit)
Sourcing Cost: $0It’s sobering. This is the slowest week I’ve had since June of 2020 (when I only had 4700 active listings), and today I’ve only sold one thing so far. I had three days last week where I sold one thing each day. I can’t even remember how long it’s been since that happened! Here’s to hoping for an acceleration for all of us. I’m very thankful to be part of this particular community; being able to see everyone’s numbers and hear your individual voices and experiences is a gift.
10k is active listings, so considering multiple quantities of a small number of them, my actual number of items is around 11k! I’m not totally sure how big I want it to grow; kind of playing that by ear! I planned to hit 10k and then sort of feel it out from there. I’ve got a two car garage and two 10x10ft storage units in terms of available space for now, so I’ll keep going until I need to address storage again. The value of things that can be held in a highly organized 10×10 storage unit far surpasses the monthly cost of the unit, but the next house we move to will hopefully have substantial storage options. I’d love an unfinished basement or something to work with instead of storage units, but for now, this lets me grow and scale up more!
Thank you so much! I’m so glad it’s been helpful!! PS you are officially podcast famous haha!
Hey everybody!
Loved the episode in general and all the calls this week! The crocs story was awesome; I’ve had a similar thing happen! In psychology, we usually chalk experiences like that up to the recency bias, but I can say from personal experience that sometimes (like in the case of the yellow crocs) it seems a bit TOO serendipitous to be only that! Feels a little magical! As frequent shoppers who always have our eyes out for certain things, we deal in recency bias all the time… but something like the yellow crocs is just uncanny compared to all the things we now notice because we’ve just heard about them or whatever. So cool. Also, so great to hear from Marty!
It’s been BUSY still around here. Hitting the home stretch listing stuff out of my storage unit, preparing to move HALF my garage inventory to a second storage unit and continue my inventory cataloguing! BOY that is boring, but worth it. I can’t wait to be done. Lol. Sales have been all over the map for the past 6 weeks. I also feel like I noticed an uptick from the stimulus checks, and may still be… but overall, compared to January, February and March have been slooooow. It’s interesting because I’m still listing a ton every month, thanks to my helpers… usually upwards of 500 items, all miscellaneous as usual, and it seems that the longer this alternate universe goes on, the less predictable my sales are. I just kind of notice that, and then keep working haha. Either way, the answer is to keep on listing. It’s nice not to be stressed about it, for the most part!
Numbers!
March 14-20
Active Listings: 10,130
Number of items sold: 57 (the most in one wee since the end of January, when I was selling 70+ per week!)
Gross Sales: $1844.38
Net Sales: $949.97
Highest Sale: Vintage Halogen Torchier Lamp, $274.39
Average Sale Price: $32.35
No returns, no sourcing!Have a great week, everybody!
YES! Julie, I have been to some like this in North GA as well. What the heck!?
That is AMAZING!! I haven’t been sourcing much as I’ve still been eating through a storage unit full of estate stuff for months… this is the kind of thing that I’m afraid I’m missing out out lol!!
Yes!! I have a booth also that I see as a storage unit… it’s at a consignment shop type of thing, not as extensive as most antique malls, but I got it to put some overflow of my own personal furniture and stuff as well as a couple bulky items that I did in fact have listed on eBay! It’s like a storage unit where there is a chance to make some money or at least subsidize the cost of storage. I don’t put in much work there, and since I’ve started selling some of my furniture stuff on Facebook Marketplace (which a sincerely love/hate), and I’m actually transitioning my main inventory to just a regular actual storage unit, I may not keep my booth much longer. I’m usually lucky if I break even there, but I also really like the shop and have until very recently had no other way to deal with my furniture problems lol! I like the way you think about yours, and that it’s a creative outlet for you!
@jay —
It is a TON… many of my items are actually small/easy to ship and store, weirdly kind of thanks to the pandemic. I started sourcing more online in large lots of things like vintage magnets, hankies, lapel pins, etc… probably if I kept going only in that direction, my average sale price would eventually be pulled down a little, because many of those thing only go for 10-$20, which is less that I’d usually like. BUT… they’re like 5 or 10 cents each to acquire efficiently in a big bundle, they are fun items that I’m interested in selling, and I’ve sort of honed a new listing strategy that very much takes advantage of bulk editing like 95% of the listing information. I can list 100 similar small things in a day easily!
I think chewing through a 10×10 storage unit full of estate sale stuff in combination with having these large batches every once in a while of super-smalls is how my numbers have grown so fast. I’ve got one helper committed to photographing about 400 items a month for me, and another who is more on a batch-by-batch basis, but usually can do up to 200 a month. So my days are then spend prepping their bins and listing their drafts, and now also cataloging all the inventory from before they came on board… oh and shipping, duh.
So if we keep going at this pace, I’d have to be selling like 600 items a month to hit inventory homeostasis. I don’t know how feasible or desirable it will be to keep going at this pace once the estate storage unit is done, so at that point I think I’ll teach my primary helper to do some other things within the workflow besides photographing, and maybe even get her to help me source, too. That’s one part of the vision. Another part is to possibly start another “branch” of my store in the midwest (where I’m originally from) but that’s a lot more complicated and I’m not really there yet… I just know it would involve someone else doing every step in the workflow, not just photography or sourcing or shipping alone. I’ll keep you posted on that lol.
As far as space, I’ve basically got two 10×10 storage units and my garage… currently in the process of moving everything from my garage to the second storage unit. The first one is exclusively for the estate lot I’ve been working through since November. So until this month, my whole inventory besides that has just been in my garage since I started almost four years ago. There are definitely over 10k items in there alone! Lots of steel shelves and sterility bins, lol. My plan is to move all of that to the second storage unit, bin by bin as I continue to inventory it all by bin number, and then once I have my garage freed up, I can further organize and improve my shipping station (which will remain out there) and use the garage as my “overflow” for growing my inventory even more. I assume that when I hit a critical mass, I’ll have to get another storage unit or move to a bigger house lol!
Currently, I run percent-off sales a lot, I typically have one or two day handling time, and I take a lot of offers. I think if I’m ever fortunate enough to be overrun with too many sales all the time, I can just slow it down a bit by adjusting those parameters. Longer handling time, no sales, being pickier about offers, etc… and maybe train someone to help me ship, too! Part of getting my inventory in a more specific shape is with that in mind. I want to be able to outsource most of what I do if I need to or want to. We may be having kids in the next few years and there are a lot of other creative projects I’m sure I’ll want to do in the meantime without having to just turn off my store.
@lauren —My fellow Illinois native! I’m from Highland 🙂 My storage, which has all been in the majority of a 2-car garage consists of about two aisles of steel shelves with lots of bins, boxes, totes, and a few other plastic drawer unit types of things. I’d say a solid couple thousand of my items are very small, like magnets and matchbooks and jewelry, and I do have those in drawer units for the most part. It is kind of a nightmare searching for those sometimes, especially the lapel pins! I’m trying to get a better system for that going soon… with the matchbooks it was actually pretty easy to store them in a more specific way. I divided them all into categories, like Restaurants, General Advertising, and Hotels/Resorts/Cruiselines and made a drawer for each. Then I created a 6-section divider out of cardboard to put in each of those drawers and sorted them by color within their categories. This has been SO MUCH FASTER than how they were grouped before, because now I only dig through like 50 instead of hundreds when I’m looking for one, haha. However, the way I’ll do it for most things going forward is just putting relatively like items in a bin on the front end like right after sourcing, then photograph a bin at a time, and then everything just lives in that bin and is assigned that bin number in my spreadsheet until it sells! I guess eventually I may have to consolidate bins, put new items into half-full old bins, etc, but I still think it will be way more efficient than what I was doing, which was just grouping like items together and then sorting by color if a secondary criteria was needed. Hope that all makes sense!!
