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Good to know– thanks for your reply! I may need to call eBay about this one.
What a great score! I’m definitely a bit of a box gatherer myself. I’d have snatched those right up!!
Great episode today, as usual. I loved the resource management video game model. My ultimate goal with my eBay business is to create a stream of income that will still let me have enough free time to monetize other creative projects/endeavors time and time again! I keep moving the finish line out further in terms of reaching my “baseline” level of inventory. At first, it was going to be 4k items… now I’m shooting for 10k. At some point, I’ll have to actually prioritize the other projects, but as long as eBay is fun and full of momentum, who knows? I may push the finish line again.
I was driving listening to this episode today, and I was screaming YES! When you guys talked about wanting a 12x12x12in box! WHYYYY don’t they have one?! I’ve always wondered. I also got that dang Fed Ex adjustment message from eBay – I think mine was from shipping labels created in August. One interesting thing I’ve encountered this week was running a promotion (sale/markdown type, which I run frequently) and noticed it was not populating any of my items. I called eBay (couldn’t find the chat option, suddenly?) and they had to forward my promotion problem to IT. We’ll see if it gets fixed! Not a super great week in terms of sales, but it is 2020 and stuff is consistently selling… so no major complaints from me!
NUMBERS!
Total Items in Store: 7823
Number of Items Sold: 47
Gross Sales: $1040.19
Cost of Items Sold: $31.98
Highest Priced Item Sold: $64.95 (Denim Sherpa Lined Levi’s Jacket)
Average Sold Price: $22.13 (bleh, low… like $5 below my all-time average)
No Returns and No Sourcing Costs!Quick question… I may be super late to this party, but is parcel/USPS ground still a shipping option for those of you who print labels through eBay? I used to ship all my matchbooks that way (because legally they are supposed to be shipped ground only since they’re flammable) and now I can only send them via parcel through my stamps.com account. So weird! Is this a me thing or an Ebay thing? Anybody know?
Loving the sale of old bottles! I’ve sold a couple of old midwestern dairy/milk bottles from specific dairies. Pretty fun sales, but nothing as high as yours! That’s awesome. I’m glad you’re loving the book and it’s making you reflect… to be honest, I was thinking mostly of the perspectives of people who are curious but pretty unfamiliar with selling on eBay when I wrote it; we always learn so much from each other as scavengers whenever we hear from one another, so I’m very glad it’s causing you to pause/reflect/engage! LOVE that!
Wow, I am super late to the game this week! Speaking of remembering when life was boring — I’m just now catching my breath for the week!
It’s been VERY busy – I took a trip to Southern California at the end of last week/beginning of this week, and I’m happy to report that Time Away was mostly awesome! I had about three things oddly becoming overdue for shipping in spite of Time Away, but I’m going to call eBay about it tomorrow, as they weren’t things that had outstanding offers etc… I think it’s genuinely just a glitch. In any case, I have been busting it to “catch up” after being gone for almost a week (self imposed goals/deadlines and all that!) starting with over 50 things to ship out when I returned from my actual trip and from Time Away (yesterday). I didn’t have the heart to schedule a pickup for all 50+ packages, so I took some to the post office and scheduled a pickup for the others.
Mostly I’ve been working on getting organized in my new storage unit and thankfully, my main helper has been working away on photographing and drafting items in them meantime! I’ve put up 4 steel shelving units and continued to cull the storage unit contents for the last two days. I’m aiming to go into that whole section of inventory with my own personal best processes/inventory management (probably adopting a bin-number based filing system for listed stuff)… we shall see how it shakes out! It’s been a really fun, if not really tiring experiment so far.
I’m not going to add my numbers here because I’m still kind of behind on my documentation since my travels, but I’ll have them again next week for sure! Have a wonderful weekend, everybody!
My pleasure! I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Also, LOL about “offertunities…” my husband will be so thrilled to hear that term is being adopted haha! I learned most of what I do from this very community, and something I love so much about it is hearing people’s own personal experiences and applications of different methods/logistics/philosophy related to what we do. Thanks for the glowing review! It means a lot to me!!
Another great episode, and just in time! I agree that it was chock-full of information. It is totally all about the work in my store this week, to be sure! Thanks to everyone who ordered a copy of my book this past week, too! I was (and still am) so excited to send them out to you!
It’s been wild, guys. On the eBay front, a couple of major things happened this past week. The first is that I helped a friend clean out a 10×20 storage unit she had rented to basically just store an entire household of stuff leftover from an estate sale she happened upon by pure serendipity. Her plan was to get around to selling it, because she could tell it was valuable and the people running the sale were all too happy to let her have it all for free in exchange for her cleaning it out. However, that was a couple of months ago. Right after that happened, she kind of realized that while she had great instincts, she didn’t really have a plan to actually move the items, and she got kind of overwhelmed.
So we have partnered to get all of this stuff sold! It’s basically a major consignment operation, but I wish you guys could see this stuff! It turns out, this was no ordinary estate sale! It was that of an antiques collector and artist who had SO MUCH COOL STUFF packed to the gills in her house. Some of it had not seen the light of day outside of her attic since the early 80s. And the clean out itself was quite unorganized, so everything is just thrown together in boxes. Every single box is like a fun treasure chest, and I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me organizing and culling the inventory. I had no idea when I agreed to help her move everything what percentage of the stuff would make good inventory, but I lucked out. In the first two boxes I found 60 things to list and there must be at least 6 months of inventory to list still to be sorted. We got everything out of her unit on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’ve been continuing to wrangle/sort the inventory on my own every day since. I’ve made a tiny dent. It’s bananas.
In summary, I get 6+ months of free inventory (of course, I’ll pay out her chunk of the profit each month as it sells, but I don’t have to cashflow anything additional if I don’t want to), it’s mostly awesome vintage stuff (so many goo gaws, holy cow), and she gets to not deal with monthly storage unit expense or reinvent the wheel to create a system to sell the items. I just plug them into my process and off we go!
Fortunately, with a broad stroke of sorting while cleaning out her 10×20 unit, we were able to get a bunch of stuff that was ultimately trash, donatable, or larger furniture that she wanted to sell via Facebook Marketplace separated from the rest of the stuff. This lead me to go ahead and take the plunge of renting my own storage unit, which I had been teetering on the edge of doing already. So now, I’m the proud renter of a shiny new 10×10 unit 5 minutes from my house for a great price, and all those treasure boxes are piled up halfway to the ceiling. I actually love the sorting/culling/logging/researching part of things, and fortunately, I have an awesome helper still doing photos for me every week, so my weeks are going to look a lot like sorting/organizing the unit and then listing her drafts for the next few months. I am really grateful I can keep getting stuff listed at a decent pace with her help! I think this whole project will probably interfere with my goal of getting to a “full” 10k item store by the end of the year, but so far it seems a worthy detour. I guess we’ll see!
Whew! Thanks if you made it through that whole story with me. It’s been a very high energy week around here haha! I am also very glad that the national stress level/sales correlation seems to have moved back in a more favorable direction for sellers; I definitely noticed that, even in all this storage unit chaos! Okay, numbers time:
November 1-7, 2020
Number of Active Listings: 7720
Items Sold: 54
Gross Sales (including shipping): $1117.58
Cost of Items Sold: $40.88
Highest Price: $70.31 (A vintage orange punch bowl with 12 cups and clips… this thing was a beast! I had gotten it for free over 3 years ago and can’t believe it finally sold!)
Average Price: $20.69 (my all-time average is more like $27, so this was kind of a bummer haha!)
Returns: 0Time for a second cup of Sumatran – here’s to a week of holiday-level sales for all of us! Cheers!
Oh man, I hadn’t thought about the open offers/time away/vacation scenario… in the past it seems like having offers open was one of the reasons extra copies of business policies would be created, before Time Away, when you just had to change the handling time in business policies. I wonder how that will work in this case, because I assume the handling time from the time the offer was sent still applies. Really good question. I’m going to be in a Time Away situation for about a week starting tomorrow (in fact, I’ve already turned it on), so maybe I’ll have some insight about this question next week!
That’s an interesting business model for a clean out company… I wonder if that’s a common way of doing it, especially to give a discount if the items are valuable. Curious!
I love that gut feeling thrift store phenomenon! Ya gotta go for it!
Thank you so much, everybody! I feel very supported and always accepted by this community. You guys are the best! I agree that we have the responsibility and honor of supporting each other in all our endeavors, especially in the scrappy, self-motivated, self-defined lives we lead! Oh, and I’m sure this book will pair very well with some Broadporch coffee 😉 I’m definitely living by the rule that “coffee is for listers” haha! The coffee is seriously delicious!
As requested, my book is up on eBay! 🙂 https://www.ebay.com/itm/264928821063
I listed it in the same fashion as nearly all of my other listings, including a best offer option. It’s kind of my way of doing pay-what-you-want for my fellow scavengers! Cheers!
Good news! I finally got in my copies and my book is now listed on eBay! It’s so meta. I listed it in the same fashion as nearly all of my other listings, including a best offer option. It’s kind of my way of doing pay-what-you-want for my fellow scavengers! Cheers!
