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<p style=”text-align: center;”>I downsized to a Volvo xc40. I was sooo happy to be done backing up that huge van after 10 years. Love it but did not anticipate selling in person. 😬. My husband has an older Subaru Forester so we’ll have to make it work.</p>
I have over 250 in collectibles to play with. I may end some items too and move them to the district platform, which is pretty fast to do.
Last Friday I was randomly leaving my dad’s house at 8 am and my steering wheel turned to an estate sale. Then I found a moving sale three blocks from my house. The people offered me a gorgeous high end blonde leather couch for free. Sadly I don’t have my minivan anymore and no place to put that large piece. They also had an amazing cane softback table. It was going to rain and they weren’t prepared. I wished I could teleport them to you guys. They just wanted to get rid of stuff before the house sold and the dealers came and took all their smalls right before I arrived.
Someone is giving me a handmade wooden cabinet tomorrow from Nextdoor. Possibilities…
I made just two listings. Oof. My goal is to clear some recently acquired things. I have like 35 listings that just need pictures. I may try scheduling those to go daily this week. Unfortunately the death piles will have to wait for me. My daughter is back at school today and I have high hopes.
Good call. Honestly, since I am listing sell similar and they didn’t carry over item specifics until recently, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the category. Occasionally, I will look up and realize the category I’m copying from is no good.
Yeah, word salad is still an issue with descriptions. It’s in beta I think.
Thanks so much Sharon! Unfortunately I am just seeing this post on the first, but I’ll see if I can figure out another way to see what I have left. I totally forgot about that collectibles exclusion.
PS. I haven’t had good luck at all with auctions in the past. I haven’t ended and sold similar in a long time. However, I am closing in on the 1000 basic store listings so I don’t want to incur .25 fees to do so.
Our dads have both been hospitalized in the past couple of weeks. I’m a bit distracted by wanting to try some live selling and learning about that… I have sold a few items on the District platforms and went to a few estate and rummage sales in the past couple of months. I even went to the bins yesterday with my daughter because she’s on spring break and wanted to go prom dress shopping down there… So I’m all over the place. Lots going on outside Ebay. I’m opening my mind to being a multi-channel seller. I hope this week (and month) I am able to focus better and think about strategy more.
At least I got the taxes done! It was a good time to reflect on what’s done well on Ebay while working on my COGS.
Overall, I have a LOT of sourcing available to me, so I really should focus on the mantra “better to get some of the money all of the time than all of the money some of the time.”
Hi Craig, I send offers and set automatic offers on everything EBay lets me every day. However, in the past I’ve just been setting an offer from buyer, sale discount, and offers to watchers all at 20% max.
Those curtains I paid only pennies for. For efficiency, I’ve just been using the highest 2 year Terapeak price and doing the 20% off one way or another. All or nothing no matter what I paid for something. I don’t really have the storage to continue that though. Perhaps I will take more advantage of the itemized sake feature but I think I would do better paying more attention to the sell through rate and original pricing. I feel like EBay made tweaks along the way that make you need to price it right out of the gate.
Yes I read that Mercari is super successful in Japan but has struggled to replicate that here as well because Americans are less reasonable consumers. I guess they are trying to set themselves apart and allow US buyers to return at will, while paying a premium for that comfort and privilege. This is also in line with Mercari’s general efficiency focus – hassle free. They are hard core and dispatch crappy sellers from their site. Meanwhile, the other platforms are moving away from free returns. It’s a gamble for sure.
They are going after Gen Z sellers and buyers, the biggest growth demographic, which is very smart. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mercaris-2023-reuse-report-predicts-secondhand-market-will-double-to-325-billion-by-2031-301884361.htmlThey do a lot of advertising on YouTube, another area where EBay just fails.
I’ve thought about this some more and I also like it for another reason. If you are good at making titles with great key words you will be rewarded by their AI. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mercari-launches-merchat-ai-a-new-shopping-assistant-powered-by-chatgpt-301800139.html
Mercari rewards freshness like EBay does but they don’t hide listings. AI will dig up old listings that fit the request. Also there is none of that Poshmark sharing bs. They also have the advantage of being the fastest platform to list on. We’ll see.
Wow. I noticed they didn’t have the service fee in the fee explanation. I wonder if they are paying for the AI with it or?
@Vintage Lacy I’m super excited to try a vintage market. We continue to have rain here but the tourist season is coming. I’m so distracted by looking at display equipment and trying to pick it up discounted. I’m also trying to get a sense of the pricing I could do vs. Ebay so I don’t blow it. If I did it regularly, I would probably start trying out the bins and garage sales for sourcing so I could source some things more affordably. I have bought a few vintage display items and a couple of bigger than a breadbox things to sell. So I’m feeling like I may go for it in May or June. I could start with the 6×6 but that doesn’t seem like a lot of space. Ikea has a cool plant stand that would be awesome but they won’t ship it. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/daksjus-plant-stand-bamboo-20567011/
LOL above post is me being interrupted. @Craig you really seem to have things dialed in. You must be super good at pricing too. I really need to adopt that strategy. My high prices are not working well anymore, particularly when I’m not consistently listing.
@Steve nice flip from Goodwillfinds. I have purchased about 5 items to flip and have sold one of those for a nice profit so far. There is room for me to lower the prices on the others. The listing quality in the PNW sites is better but some of the other GW listing titles and photos are horrible and there are deals to be found. I haven’t had time to look lately. They also occasionally run % off sale prices and I get alerted in my Email.
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<li style=”list-style-type: none;”>
- Items Sold: 6
- Total Listings: 938
Net Sales: $165.38 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $45
Highest Price Sold: $44 (Royal Albert tea cup set)
Average Price Sold: $40.38
Returns: 1 ($25)<li style=”text-align: left;”>Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $125
Number of items listed this week: 5Well, it is high time to start listing in earnest. A lot is going on and I’ve been neglecting Ebay. Had a wonderful trip and the sourcing was fun but competitive. I had major cart envy. The garage is quite hoarderish and I have some other family and fundraising obligations this week but it’s raining this weekend and I plan to dig in on listing.
