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Eek only 3 items listed last week. I just need to do photos on a few more. Need to motivate and no shopping until I list my recent purchases.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334643120491 Brown glaze is not my thing but sold these cute Hull pottery gingerbread men. Thrifted them separately back in the day. There were quite a few listed so I’m grateful to have sold them.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/234871858732
I bought this on Goodwillfinds.com. for about $6 plus shipping. No dimensions were given and it was much larger than I expected when it arrived. Some of this potter’s larger bowls (more colorful) have gone for hundreds and they are mostly auctions starting at $9.99. I don’t really trust auctions having been burned before so I started at a pretty high price and haven’t got any bids. Still, should be a good profit when it eventually sells. For $1.49 I promoted the auction but that hasn’t resulted in many additional views.
Total Items in Store: 553
Items Sold: 8Gross Sales: $273.09 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $168.58 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $35 + a few items ours
Highest Price Sold: $35 (Vintage flower power vinyl fabric, paid $2)
Average Price Sold:$34.14
Returns: 1 threatened
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $120 RA, $40 thrift
Number of items listed this week: 3Congrats Ryanne! You are so impressive on many fronts. Happy for your strong sales too.
Not a great week of sales for me but I didn’t list much. Finished my tax stuff and due to the strong end of the year and selling more used items I made more profit than last year even with higher fees. I wasn’t doing much at all on Ebay in the first third of 2022, so this year should be better. Have some ongoing family stuff going on…
I did go out thrifting one day last week. At one of our larger thrift stores, a random guy mentioned the prices being way too high, which I completely agree with and this chain has swung that way before. I was happy that I had sold several undervalued items from that store for good prices last month. I didn’t share that part with him but just said “you really have to know what you are doing to find things worth selling at this place.” I’m grateful to Youtube and myself for being able to still find things to make a profit on. However, Youtube is a double edged sword and I am now seeing many more University students at the thrift branching into the hard goods and not just in the clothing. Luckily I have lots of piles and we have a lot of elderly and wealthy people in our community donating. Speaking of piles, I plan to hit listing hard today and finish the recently purchased pile sitting next to me right now.
I have purchased 6 items now on Goodwillfinds.com. All came packed really well and the shipping was very reasonable. At slow times in life I hunt in there to save favorites and will wait to see if I can get them later at better prices. The first two items I bought were right after site launch and were crazy low prices. Three items I bought during their extra % off sale post-Christmas sale, and they are all now listed on Ebay. They have some really interesting items so it’s also a little bit of an education – I can quickly compare on Ebay. The trick is to search a bunch of keywords and then filter by category. The search is primitive, descriptions are sparse, and the titles posted by some of the locations are unsophisticated and anemic. I’m hoping people forget to shop there and they start discounting things. I can’t imagine that they are going to get a lot of sustained traffic from regular people at Ebay prices.
Have a great week!
I’m taking my time looking for COGS and finding that I have some brand new items hanging around that I bought years ago. I should probably look at those listings. Last year I did sell similar on all items listed before 2022 and started getting to make offers on some of those.
I don’t know about others who are coastal but last year when I started listing in earnest again I noticed USPS parcel post is now significantly less than priority – usually a few dollars – and most of my buyers are choosing it but my old listings don’t have it. I need to remember that insurance doesn’t cover those items. I don’t have many broken items each year – knock wood – but should start paying attention…
2 items listed. I’ve got some stuff going on and my heart is not into it. No thrifting either so at least I’m not getting further into the hole. I was feeling pretty good after I got rid of a bunch of stuff last summer but now I’m thinking a lot about the piles I have left. It’s still a lot.
I should focus on large items when I get the cast off I think.Total Items in Store: 528
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales: $454.38 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $260.45 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $60
Highest Price Sold: $139 (Set of three new plates)
Average Price Sold: $56.80
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 2Can’t complain about sales as I didn’t list much. I’m working on tax stuff and hope to finish today. Haven’t been sourcing so that’s good. I have a bunch of better clothing of ours in my bedroom that I really want to list on Mercari and purge. Construction will probably start finally on our bathroom so another distraction. I always get overwhelmed trying to pick from all the cool tiles. I find I’m better and picking and isolating for sale on Ebay and trying to bring a whole room together… Luckily the rents here are sky high so no temptation to open a booth in one of the vintage or antique malls.
@Jay I’m curious where you got so much inventory. I always have the fantasy that you guys go into the urban area and grab up inventory to bring home and list. I’m not exactly a farmhouse gal but I enjoy vintage feed sack graphics. Cool sale.https://www.ebay.com/itm/234779954072 Yarn for the win. Paid $5. I list only the number of new skeins and throw in the rest “as a bonus” in case they don’t look closely at the listing. Yarn and needlepoint kits sell really well for me. I have no personal interest in them at all but can’t ignore the sell through. My mom was one of those people buying lots of supplies and never using them. This was before Ebay and we donated a giant closet full of fabric, including European fabric from when she was a stewardess on TWA.
I pretty much do what @Retro explained and have used foam board mainly with art. I never double box and sell a lot of breakables. I buy and use rolls of cushion foam (like for packing dishes) and the price at Uhaul is not too bad actually. I hardly ever use small bubble wrap and buy large bubble in quantity. Sometimes it makes me us a bigger box but it’s very protective. I haven’t sold a lot of art bigger than 14″ on one side – I intentionally look for smaller original art. Large art I plan to remove from the frame but sometimes the metal frames are kind of hard to get off imho. The very high end painting I sold I had professionally packed and put in plastic first.
@retro I paid a lot more for the RA items so COGS higher, taxable profit lower with more RA. Sometimes my used items sell for as much as lower end RA items but they only cost $3-5.
8 items for me.
Some external things have come up that will keep me from quickly accomplishing even my short term to do list, but maybe in the latter part of February that will improve. I’m also spending some extra time with my family lately.
@Antique Frog interesting art sales. I love finding art and it’s especially nice to be able to identify the artist, though many I pick up turn out here in California turn out not to be well known.
I rarely go to garage sales but after delivering my daughter somewhere saw a sign for one where it was family run but the woman had done her online research on everything and priced a bit higher than I like to pay. I did do a bundle with her on a few items and sold this pair of mini watercolor paintings for $88 (paid $8) https://www.ebay.com/itm/334649780579.
The cool part was a family member of the late artist bought them for his son and wrote to me.
Total Items in Store: 522
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales: $816.20 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $557.34 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $127
Highest Price Sold: $200 (used Williams Sonoma pasta set)
Average Price Sold: $62.78
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 8This week sales were surprisingly good since I didn’t mange to list much quantity. Shipping is slower and annoying with the cast. I’ve been working on my COGS bookkeeping and should finish that today. I had three big sales (for me) of $12-15 used items in 2022 and overall a lower COGS so even with fees up and kind of barely doing Ebay in the beginning of 2022 will make more money than 2021 due to those three art sales and a great 4th quarter.
I had an unusual INAD this week which was deserved but was really for a minor flaw IMHO. I’ll need to slow down a little bit maybe and inspect the used items carefully. So I’m sort of ruminating on the differences selling fewer RA items in my store. At tax time here I’m like wow that was a great sale! but also darn that will increase our tax liability.
I’m also enjoying people’s discussion of plans for business change. For me the most significant change is to be more careful about picking up only higher profit items. The exception to this is getting a $12-18 item with a bar code maybe. However, those easy to list items tend to get me into having a less
curatedfocused store, which maybe doesn’t matter on Ebay so much. I made some more headway into my piles in 2022 and finished listing all of the holiday items but there is a lot more to go. It would be wise to further limit shopping as a treat outing and get even more selective about pick ups.I’ve been working on cleaning up my Pinterest boards going into this slower time of year. I’m seeing between 10-15% of views coming from outside Ebay, though I suppose most of that might be Google mostly. I wish Ebay would give a bit more specifics.
@Retro he does already do extra but my income has varied quite a bit.
Forgot to mention that Goodwill Finds sent me a 40% off one item coupon for late shipping even though I never complained. Tempting to ship off the boxed items in the same packaging when sold but unfortunately they used GW branded tape. It looks like the same thickness as Ebay tape so should be able to peel it off.
