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I’ve found two Patagonia puffer jackets thrifting for myself essentially NWOT. One was one size too big, but black so I wear it anyway. It seems like our thrifts are more expensive out here in Cali for lower end items but there is a point where I think the indy thrifts are afraid to price too high. Some really quality, great condition items in the $20-30 range. However, they will go high on art – I guess they are more worried about it being secretly expensive?
I love to buy orchids and other plants at garage sales and Vietnamese glazed ceramic pots on Facebook or Craigslist. I’ve bought loads of children’s books and I’ve donated many to the school library when my kids are done with them. Not giving up on real books and I’ve sold a few complete series on Ebay lately.
Finally, my son is now a men’s large so I’m actually willing to look through the clothes and I’m building him a wardrobe. It’s really easy to find the same stuff I’d buy at Macys or a surf & skate so I can’t imagine paying full price.
Thanks Ryanne, that’s nice of you. I watched a bunch of tv last weekend and vegged, something I never do. Flea Market Flip, Project Runway, Game of Thrones. Today I got an hour to list so yeah!
* Total Items in Store: 350
* Items Sold: 7
* Cost of Items Sold: $125 new + $25 used
* Total Sales: $338
* Highest Price Sold: $128 (set of 5 new dog art plates, purchased a few weeks ago $74)
* Average Price Sold: $42
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 0How fun to see your day in the life video. It’s like picking up the matching read along picture book to the record for the first time. You work SO hard and it will be a nice end of the year enjoying the spoils of the new rental. Everything looks super and we would totally rent it if we weren’t across the country. I recognize the Ikea duvet my daughter has and I love the art you chose, especially Steve’s amazing buffalo piece. I’ll keep an eye out for those 70s Marushka pieces – totally something I would pick up but I’m sure I’ve never seen any.
I’m hanging in with Ebay just shipping out. The kids are back in school but we are a household of sensitive people, half of us going through puberty, big schedule changes, and unfortunate pet deaths. The emotions are running high. Although I’m the adult I have to talk to myself out of feeling everything along with them. It’s an interesting but challenging heavy parenting time that has me resting instead of working Ebay in my time off. I hope to soon get handed a couple of weekdays off my contract job. Ah, to sit alone and list for a day and get some exercise. That would be amazing! Keep your fingers crossed for me trash elves. Have a great week!
Amazing find! When I’ve listed Italian Raymor I have had immediate interest, particularly from the U.K. I would price high on EBay with best offer for what that’s worth.
I also have this with 0 needing identifiers. I’ve been keeping my listing recommendations clean each day. Not happy to get this email since my bar codes are mainly retailer specific with fewer digits and have been rejected by EBay before. Also just helps eBay show my buyers lower prices from other sellers on my item. Hopefully they will cancel this again. Not much notice – 9/18.
Total Items in Store: 349
Items Sold: 8
Cost of Items Sold: $9 used + 79 new
Total Sales: $228
Highest Price Sold: $43 (Set of two new decorative hooks – paid $16 early summer)
Average Price Sold: $29
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 3 RA listings – added multiplesEclipse was partial and foggy here on the West coastline, so I have to admit I wasn’t really feelin’ it. Your photos and some on Facebook make it look much more interesting.
I’m scraping along here with some ok sales considering I’m still finishing out the crazy busy summer and back to school business. I did list a few multiples for new items. I’ve also been trying to at least clean out my listing recommendations daily since I discovered the option to put them off for 30 days. I have to say that so far I do think adding free shipping to some first class items has made a difference. I think I might be a convert. I watched a video on youtube and it made me realize that I had written off “sell one like this” in favor of using my own listings to start with because I had some boilerplate I liked at the bottom. Now I’m using almost no boilerplate (just encourage buyers to use the shopping cart and visit my store) and there are many more item specifics Ebay has added since then. So I plan to revisit sell one like this. Looking forward to seeing the new rental photos. Have a great week.
Total Items in Store: 335
Items Sold: 10
Cost of Items Sold: $4 used + $135
Total Sales: $316
Highest Price Sold: $50 new pajama bottoms (paid $24, listed 9 months but sold immediately after I added free shipping)
Average Price Sold: $35
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0A fairly good week, though I did make less than double on some older new RA items. I’ve started a free shipping experiment and did sell a couple of NWT items that have been sitting in my store for quite a while so that’s pretty interesting. One also had a promotion on it. The other I had dropped the price much lower before to try to move, but the free shipping (due to the timing) with a higher price I think really did it. The item only weighed three ounces. I’m definitely going to continue free shipping when I list new first class items and see how it goes. No sense in being stubborn about it now that I feel comfortable with estimating shipping costs. I consistently weigh at listing times but will have to think about my ongoing sales % and pricing. Overall, I need to see more movement out of the store since sourcing is so easy for me. Hopefully free shipping will help.
Another thing I’ve been doing is cleaning out my listing improvements page daily. This week I found a toggle on the analyze listing page where you could ask Ebay not to bug you again for 30 days. So getting some relief from the same ones popping up again and again with unhelpful suggestions. One day I only had one. Hit the toggle and cleared it. Then my store door changed from red to blue. Tin foil hat time.
I made another post in the forums about this summer just being chaos for our family. I look forwarding to school starting in the next couple of weeks and I’m hoping to get Fall and Winter pile items listed if life smooths out. Plan to keep shopping to a minimum and it will be hard because it’s rummage sale season around here. Have a great week!
I’m pretty sure that I’m slower than that even with my new bare bones descriptions. I thought the topic was interesting. It really depends on the type of item too. I love art and pottery but the research really slows me down. Bed linen photography slows me down.
Congrats to those above making progress. Fun to see the empty box photo.
Well, I never completely feel off the wagon and I did learn to become very choosy about my purchases. This weekend my absolute favorite indy thrift had a grand reopening with all new inventory. It was painful but I decided not to go. I’m sure I would have picked up better merchandise than 70-80% of my vintage death piles. BUT, this summer has been absolutely chaotic with the kids’ schedule, deaths of friends and pets, surprise houseguests, vacation, kids’ online bullying, back to school prep, and all manner of other chaos. Very, very Ebay unfriendly.
Even though virtually all of my piles live in the garage, I have lots of cleaning out to do inside with our stuff and the clutter is getting to me. I’ve got a few boxes of holiday stuff to get up this Fall. SO, making a pledge again to resist the sourcing urges. There is just so much quantity available and so little time to process it!
Susanne Wells made a video I found interesting about a reality check on listing time relevant to my struggle and part-time or parent sellers without listing software or employees. Here’s a link in case anyone is interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijwIt6yi3UM&list=UU0jQVSDUTGLj83382j2DPMA&index=1
Thanks to the elves who answered my questions above. Only some of my items pop up as possible promotions and I usually pick just a hair above the trending rate, or if that fee is too high, a hair above 5% (a round # I think other sellers might be choosing). Haven’t had great results yet and I wish more items were available to promote.
Regarding the improvement requests, others may not be noticing so much if they sell mainly used items. It’s all new items in my improvements feed. I think the recent increase is due to Ebay adding new categories and now NOS vintage items are showing up – mostly craft kits for me at this point. They are flagging items with no comparisons (no UPC) so I’m not sure how they know it’s 100% less likely to sell than competitors? The entire category maybe. So I’ve decided to try a free shipping experiment for the kits they pick on. The other new items are mostly things I have sold a number of times before (hence my own listings are used as comparisons) and the recommendation has more to do with my not offering free shipping rather than the price it seems. I’m just going to tinker with the price up and down on those if I have time.
I saw in the news that 67% of Ebay transactions are free shipping already, so I’m really considering doing more of it going forward as an experiment. A lot of my items cannot go first class or in a PFR, so I’ll have to up the prices if I really want to embrace it.
Hi Cindi, can they still use the shopping cart and get guaranteed delivery with a muiti-item purchase from one store or do they need to immediate pay each item? Thanks.
Brian, what strategy do you have in choosing the % for your promoted listings? Thanks.
Total Items in Store: 336
Items Sold: 5
Cost of Items Sold: $102
Total Sales: $214
Highest Price Sold: $90 (Set of three new art plates that seemed to be blogged about or pinned somewhere, cost $48, purchased in Spring)
Average Price Sold: $43
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 5Tough week for listing. We attended the out of town funeral of a good friend our own age. Hope to never do that again. Overall, it’s been quite a hectic summer with a lot of kid transport and unusual stuff going on. I can’t wait until school starts and then the back to school business subsides by second week of September or so. It makes me chuckle when you talk about your nephews being exhausting and demanding and not conducive to working. Some kids are harder than others and in different ways, plus their needs and activity levels change over time. Your sister is a good mom taking them to the country and limiting their screen time.
On the upside, I can list a lot faster now than when I started Ebay a couple of years ago. On the downside, Ebay is starting to hammer daily with their listing improvement requests on 10-15% of my actives. I don’t personally find it very helpful for a few reasons. Mainly, they show me my own items, compare with items that are not really the same, flag items that are only 50% less likely to sell than competitors, show my brand new listings, recommend free shipping on everything including lower overall cost items vs. comparison sales, etc. Wondering if anyone else is noticing this or cares?
I really didn’t want to do free shipping because I prefer the shipping to be kind of a wash, but I’m now trying it on a few underperforming first class new items where the solds were higher than my overall price with shipping. No immediate sales resulted so far. You want to think buyers will just search by the overall lowest price, but Ebay is telling us they will treat free shipping items better in search for those who don’t plus maybe people aren’t used to filtering on the phones. I suppose I should listen to this now that I’ve become familiar with estimating shipping costs. As a buyer I do love free shipping and I’m getting used to getting it from major retailers. I guess the allure is that I evaluate the price independently before seeing the related shipping, and if I then see that’s it’s free shipping I’m like “hey – that’s a nice bonus”.
I just made my second free shipping order from Amazon since canceling Prime. Three weeks and it hadn’t shipped FBA products from the warehouse. Tried to cancel, they emailed “sorry, it’s too late”, then shipped later that day. This could be a nice opportunity for Ebay coming on the with Guaranteed Shipping program for the holidays. Have a great week.
Thank you everyone for your thoughts. There is a lot that goes into pricing, but original art or rarer items can be harder to price for me as a adolescent part-time seller. This is especially true since we only have access to 3 months of sales data on Ebay. It’s tricky when you don’t have enough data available (there were a number of Worthpoint hits on Google but I don’t have a subscription.) So, that’s when the gut comes in and a though to other seller’s current prices. I’m always using my gut to make purchases but often I stop to research the solds too, so it’s a mix. The market will tell me if I’m too high and I can adjust within the year. In most common cases I’m on the high side of the solds or maybe a 50% or less above, then I do the perennial 10-20% off sales. I had a tapestry sale not long ago that was pretty rare but I matched a price on Etsy and the quick buyer essentially told me she was thrilled to find it so cheap – oops. It’s all a fun learning experience. Interestingly, someone just put up a new listing today on these for $199 so I’ll be watching that pair.
Thank you both. Mike I kind of factor in what you describe but there is way more gut involved in my process and I’m too small time to buy subscriptions. Normally I do not pay more than $15-20 for used items, but it was half price day and these really feel and look like quality and just spoke to me. Since I have limited time for Ebay sometimes I splurge a bit on items that have been priced by people who know what it is. The most fun is finding the overlooked items though. So, my COGS is overall higher than many trash elves, but I seldom lose $ and my duds I’m thinning cost only $1-3 (mostly handmade items and relatively uninspiring pottery). I’ve found these bookends priced at $295 and $395 online without best offer, but Ryanne your pricing is inspiring!
