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What is even worse, is most of the time in your example the item is ALREADY in the category they are asking for the department. Why is there even a Department specific in Women’s Jeans or Men’s Jeans? Why would you EVER choose Men’s in the Women’s Jeans category???
Anyway, I am more upset about the new bug I mentioned. I do not ever want to send international direct.
If it were me, I’d just sell it myself. I think it’s illogical to expect the seller to accept the return (when they don’t offer returns) and eat the original cost of shipping. I’d be a bit salty if a buyer tried to pull that on me. It would be a different situation altogether if returns were accepted on the item.
No, it’s not a Mandarin Duck. Head, beak, wings and tail do not match.
For the past 3+ years I have had very short descriptions. If the item has condition issues, I place those in the condition field and copy and paste that into the description. If there are no condition issues, my description field is literally a copy and paste of the title. I don’t use any kind of template, I don’t add a wall of text to my listings, I don’t put any instructions. The only time I use the condition field for something other than condition is for clothing where I place: “See photos for my measurements”.
I started on eBay in my teens. My account has been open since 1999 and started selling Hallmark Ornaments that I had bought through my dad who was a Hallmark store manager.
In the mid 2000’s (pre smartphone) I started selling books. I used to go to Goodwill’s after work looking for books for myself and realized there was likely money to be made. I sold my first book for $50 and took off from there. I ran that model for a couple of years until I moved and had to liquidate my inventory.
I dabbled off and on from 2008 – 2016 never taking anything serious. In March of 2016 I was tired of being bored and wanted a constructive and profitable hobby. I did some research and dived back in with $200 selling clothing from thrift stores. I then found out about yard sales and that catapulted me into more profitable inventory. I continually ramped up and due to my position being eliminated, I went full time in June of 2018. I am on pace for my best year ever in 2019. My girlfriend and I are building a 1500 sq ft warehouse and should be working out of there come spring. We will also be running a screen printing business from there.
I call my store a bazaar, because I sell almost anything. I look for nearly anything of value that I can ship (and some that I can’t). I don’t know that I have a favorite or specialized category. If I were to choose a couple, it would probably be sporting goods and kitchenware.
I love being a full time seller. It gives me the freedom to work how I want. I currently average about 30 hours a week (I do not have, nor will I have death piles). My low weekly hour average gives me plenty of time to do what I want as well as expand without feeling overwhelmed.
I keep mine very simple. I have it automated to generate feedback once I receive feedback. If they don’t leave any, then I don’t either. The feedback system is mostly a waste of time and I agree with others that the least amount of time spent is preferable. I haven’t manually entered any feedback in over 3 years.
I was at a yard sale last fall and came across a grandma selling some cards and other sports related items. She wouldn’t make a deal because they were here grandsons, I took his number from her, but decided not to bother with contacting him because what was there wasn’t anything very exciting. Fast forward a couple of months and I am at a small little junk store in a town with one gas station and a community hall that I pass through from time to time. I am looking around and another guy comes in. We speak a bit when he asks the owner if she has any baseball cards. We both look around and end up at the front counter together with her. He mentions something that jogged my memory and I asked him if he had sold some cards at his grandmothers yard sale. He confirmed and since lightning rarely strikes twice, I took his business card and gave him a call about what he had for sale. I went to his house and he had 150k+ for sale from an old card shop he had bought out. After doing some cursory looking, I decided to buy the lot for a winter project. Paid $1300 for the entire collection. Took me two trips in my Kia Soul to get them all home. Spent the next 6 weeks sorting, looking, piling, researching, photographing, listing, etc. I pulled out everything I felt like messing with (there were a lot of autograph/memorabilia cards that were pre-sorted and easy money). There was some really good and rare stuff in the collection. I made my money back in the first month and have been steadily selling since. I expect, over time, to make around $8-$10k in profit. I still have all the bulk and will be listing those soon on Craigslist. I am gonna shoot for $1300 as there are a lot of good older bulk cards that could be sold by the card (92 Bowman, 81-84 Fleer, etc). If I can get close to that price, it would pretty much pay for the entire endeavor and everything on ebay would be profit 🙂
I still do very well in my local Goodwill stores. I have one in particular that I do very well at. I actually take my time in that store as it is crammed full of stuff with very good turnover. I have a couple of independents that I visit too, sadly one is very nice but 2-3x the price of Goodwill. The other is very reasonably priced, but small and mostly clothing. I do find good stuff there and I am in and out in 10 minutes.
Thanks for the tips, guys. I already have a SKU system in place and will only need to adjust a few of my 1st year listings (what is left of them) to get them all in a uniformed state. I tried to keep all of that in mind when I first started as I’ve always wanted to get my business into a database.
I added a screenshot below of my yearly totals from my running spreadsheet. I went full time in July, was sick all of October (sourced very little, but listed when I felt like it). I purchased a large collection of sports cards at the end of November which propelled me to my best single month of sales in December (previously set by August). I still have a lot from that collection to list and have already made my money back. It’s a bit overwhelming at times, but I took it on for a winter project and constantly have to remind myself that it doesn’t have to be all done within a week.
I purchased approximately 2535 items to list for a cost of $9956.72 for the year. I currently have 1519 listings with an asking price of $69,381. My listing total is up about 60% since going full time, though a lot of that is being buoyed by the sportscards.
Thanks for the info, Tsatt. I’ll be keeping an eye on Mercari and see how they evolve over the next few months to a year. I am in no hurry and would prefer to see more data before committing time and resources to other platforms and let them iron out some of their bugs and issues. Looking at their Alexa stats, it’s interesting to see Mercari’s rise over the past year and that the demographics are overwhelmingly from Japan.
eBay vs Mercari country origination:
Agreed. I felt it was the right thing to do when I found them as I would appreciate the same courtesy if ever in that position. Maybe there is more to the story, I don’t know. Regardless, I gave them the opportunity and they passed.
You can with FLipper Tools. You can also see what a best offer on eBay went for.
https://www.flippertools.com/tools/etsySoldPrice/etsy-sold-price.htm
