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I’ve been hovering around 400 listings for about a month now, and last week was basically a wash with 21 sold and 19 listed. Hoping to list more than I sell this week, and off to a good start so far with 16 new listings in the last three days. I do have a tendency to slow down on listings towards the end of the week, which is not necessarily good or bad, simply how I choose to spend my time. It crossed my mind last week that if I can bank 10-15 “easy” items to save for quick listings on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, maybe I can finally get over the hump of 500 listings in my eBay inventory by February! But I’m fine if I never get there, too. I hope everything sells. Sell it all.
1/5/2024 to 1/11/2024
Total listings: 402
New listings this week: 19
Items sold: 21 — 12 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 8 via advertising
Gross sales: $962.70 (down 28% from one year ago)
Net sales: $588.21 (down 27% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $45.84 (up 17% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $67.46 net, about $40 after COGS Lauri Markkanen locker room nameplate from the 2018 NBA All-Star Skills challenge
Going all the way to Lauri’s home country of Finland! Love eBay for connecting items like this with a buyer who wants them.
Christine, I think it’s not as much that it’s a slow time of year for me. January and February are pretty decent in the sports memorabilia and cards world, football playoffs plus basketball, hockey, soccer all in the middle of their seasons. I also think that January and February are pretty decent months for eBay in general. But I have gotten way more selective in what I’m buying to list on eBay. I know what items I will get excited about listing, and I haven’t been finding those at the prices I want. Also, I am committed to working through my death piles. Even with the cards I buy for my consignment inventory — my average COGS so far this month is $2.57. Last year, it was $4.15. And I’ve been buying about half as much. We’ll see if this holds up — one $$$ purchase can skew those numbers — but I have quite a few cards in the processing queue of my consignment port, so I’ve decided I don’t need to buy inventory unless I’m really, really, really (3 reallys) confident that it’s a good pickup.
I’ve been to the bins a few times. I can see the appeal, but they’re not for me. Same with the local flea markets. But I’m going to some new flea markets in the spring and see how that goes. If they aren’t an outlet for me to buy inventory, maybe one weekend I will get a table and sell some stuff.
Nice haul. That backpack is very colorful. I think the scavenging spidey sense is very real. When I went to that big library sale in Chicago, that was a spontaneous trip…but I just had a feeling I needed to go check it out. Even when there was a line the first day, and big crowds (two things I usually avoid), I pushed through.
I get that excited feeling when I find something in the $200 and up range for cheap. $100 isn’t exactly bread and butter, it’s a good score. But once you’ve been doing this a while, you have the knowledge that maybe that $100 listing will only sell after a year for or might only net you $50 after COGS and shipping and fees. However, a potential $100+ profit is always exciting to me, and I hope that never changes.
I love collectibles. $50 for that beer can? You love to see it!
The model kit makes me want to buy out a toy store/card shop owner. Put it on my scavenger’s bucket list, I guess.
Your mention of the mandela effect made me curious just how many eBay sellers think that’s they read the Berenstein Bears books as kids, and the answer is…there are hundreds of us.
Sharyn, The bread looks great. Nice crumb! I don’t have a lot of kitchen space (someday…) so my go-to bread recipe is always Serious Eats cast iron garlic focaccia. I need to make that soon…making bread is so meditative.
The Too Good to Go app is great for bread and pastry as well.
I did some digging last night with plans to do some photography and scanning later tonight and tomorrow. So once I have those items photographs and the listings created, I’ll come back to this thread and show off.
Well, I actually followed through on my plan this week, so it’s time to show off a few of the listings I made. I had a pile of old sports programs and other paper items that I bought way too long ago and just…let sit in a bin on a shelf. Don’t do this! Bad habit. Poor use of space, especially for someone like myself who’s still in an apartment. Not a good use of scavenging funds. I don’t feel good it. But I can’t do anything about the stuff I bought four months ago or a year ago or, um, September of 2023 except list it, or lot it up, or donate it, or trash it. And this week, I did that!
The bread and butter type of stuff was 1960s era stuff in the $20 to $30 range, like this Kansas City Chiefs vs. Boston Patriots 1965 AFL program. There is a little history of these selling in Terapeak and the football playoffs are just about to start, so…maybe this will sell soon? I’m going to be more confident. It’s a good thing I listed this because I know it’s going to sell in the next 60 days.
I had as many college items as I did professional, with this 1948 Kentucky football program being one of my favorites since it features two early legends of the game, the great coach Bear Bryant and the Hall of Famer George Blanda, who was both the quarterback and kicker because that’s what football was like in 1944. It was a different game back then! I saw a sale in the $50 range for this program in Terapeak, but there is an active listing at $30 with best offer on and the listing is not promoted. So I priced mine at $30 with best offer and promoted listings on and now the two listings will battle each other for supremacy.
The big scavenge of the week was this 1944 NCAA regional basketball finals program which cost me $10 (!?) back in September 2023 and then sat in a bin ever since. I am not sure why I paid this much for this item, but in researching it, I realized I may have stumbled on gold. This program happens to feature Wat Misaka, the first Asian NBA player, and it’s a year in which his team the Utah Redskins (yikes — today their nickname is the Utes) won the NCAA championship. I put a wild price on it since a few of his old authenticated photos have sold in the $300+ range. I assume this will sell at some random point for $100 or so, which will definitely get me fired up to buy more old sports ephemera.
Actually, this whole process of finally photographing, researching and listing this stuff made me really appreciate these types of items. I loved seeing the old advertisements and everything looks like it’s from another time because, well, it is. I don’t have the space or knowledge to acquire huge numbers of old programs and paper items, but now it’s definitely a goal for down the line. Assuming any of this stuff sells, of course.
Thanks for keeping this thread going, Sharyn. Your Future City competition reminds me of the TV show The Good Place. Maybe they don’t know it yet, but those kids are training to become future architects of their very own Good, medium, or bad places!
Personally I would give the plate buyer their refund. Some people just struggle with certain aspects of technology. My general philosophy with refunds is that I’d rather lose $20 (or whatever the amount is) than worry about an unhappy buyer, the stress of an eBay case or (worst of all) trying to play at doing IT for some random person. I prefer my reselling life to be very, very, very low stress. I know other people have different tolerances for these types of customer issues. I hate dealing with them and just want to handle them as fast as possible. For whatever it’s worth, I’ve found that I typically receive the nicest feedback from customers when I handle their INAD/INR case from this perspective.
Hit 12,000 feedback on my eBay account this week. What an unbelievable number. I would like eBay to send a certificate to sellers who hit different feedback milestones, or some kind of swag, please. Give me a Power seller mug or some shooting star merch, even if I have to buy it using my quarterly coupon.
I can think of one nice perk, at least. On the very infrequent occasions when I’ve had to call eBay, like a few months back when I had an international buyer try and commit the rocks and stones return scam, the eBay rep became a lot more helpful when they looked at my account and saw my feedback number and no negatives or neutrals. I would like to think they would have been just as helpful to any seller, but I’ve been selling on eBay long enough to know better. Luv ya, eBay.
12/29/2024 to 1/4/2024
Total listings: 404
New listings this week: 36
Items sold: 30 — 17 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 14 via advertising
Gross sales: $1243.18 (down 42% from one year ago)
Net sales: $692.81 (down 51% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $41.44 (down 15% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $64.96 net Thurman Munson 2012 Panini Prime Cuts Nicknames jersey card
A jersey card of the great Yankees catcher from the 1970s who died in a plane crash at age 32. My COGS was $25 and this was a very quick flip, bought on December 12 and sold on December 29.
I love the AI descriptions, they read like they are written by an insane alien who is studying these tricky humans:
The card is made of high-quality plastic with a thickness of 20 Pt. It is a standard size card and printed in English language by Leaf, a renowned manufacturer. The card features a serial number and is signed by the player himself, adding to its value and authenticity. This card is a great addition to any collection and is sure to impress any baseball fan.
Christine, Thanks. There are so many different sites and platforms to sell cards and how I use them has changed over the last couple years. There is nothing but junk 90s cards listings on commons as I write this post, but that could be a great place to buy in a month. I have realized in the last couple months that it makes sense to spend just a little extra mental energy towards analyzing the different platforms I use to buy and sell. What worked well for me last year is very different from what is working for me now! But learning to adapt with what you buy and sell, or how you buy and sell, is the name of the game with reselling.
Sharyn, I check MaxSold auctions occasionally since I signed up for the emails at one point or another, and every so often I’ll see those “entire bookcase” listings that go for $1 or look like they’re going to go for $1. It’s cool that you found something valuable from one of those listings. True scavenging right there.
I don’t think I am smart enough to understand how 3d printing works, but that’s a really neat way for your buyer to solve the problem of a missing tailpiece.
How do you ship these planes? It seems like they would be challenging to ship, but probably nothing that a little bubble wrap can’t solve!
Death wardrobe is a great description for that suit! Heck, call the next one haunted and double the price…
Those Louis Vuitton sales are…wild. Great sale on the sunglasses even if you paid $200 for them.
What do you do with your low STR records? My username is actually a reference to my favorite record store. I am a huge music lover (basically all genres, all eras) and I have a lot of fond memories digging through bins of CDs and records in that store to find some gems to list on eBay and a few to keep for myself. I still make the trip there every few months with a box of stuff to trade in. They used to take anything and everything, but have gotten more selective over the last 3-5 years. Always great music on and the employees are surprisingly helpful and kind, this isn’t a High Fidelity kind of place.
Generally I have room for a discount of at least 20% and want to move more of my items. I started doing this 4th quarter and will continue. I used to start with the highest price but now I’m pricing a little closer to the average and running a sale.
Yes! I think consistent sold listings (along with consistent new listings) are two of the big key factors within the eBay selling algorithm. Of course, there are certain items where it makes sense to price high and wait. But I don’t think that philosophy can work with every item, and with items that are older than a few months and under $50, I’ve started looking at my inventory like…let’s just find a buyer that wants this and move on to something else.
It would be helpful to know how most buyers are filtering.
I think most experienced buyers sort by price, but eBay’s search will default to best match if you’re not logged in. Who knows how the best match algorithm really works, though.
If I go sourcing too many days a week somehow the hours of the day just pass and often I’m not really in the mood to list at night. We are cancelling our direct tv. Also walking taking the dog in the morning so I hope to get into a good rhythm in the mornings after the kids go back to college later this month.
I have always struggled with buying too much, not listing enough. Especially in the last two years since I shifted to reselling full-time. Sometimes spending more time on my reselling business has simply meant buying more! Tracking my habits every day has helped keep me a lot more accountable. I don’t like when I look at my daily listing log and see zero items, so I’ve started creating a little backlog of photographed items for those days when I’m completely unmotivated or super busy. Simplifying my listings has helped with this. I’ve always had a listing template and I would change the description for each item because I like to be thorough. But no one really reads descriptions anymore. So last month, I started changing my new listing descriptions to say something like
You are bidding on the item in the title and in the pictures. Please contact me if you have any questions about the item’s condition.
Now I can knock out a couple new listings in five or ten minutes. So I try to do that every day, even if I’m not feeling motivated or I’m super busy that day, usually I can find that time so I get 2 or 3 items listed. I think having a few big listing days where you put up 15 or 25 new items are also important, but if that’s not manageable sometimes, 2 or 3 a day is better than 0.
Like @christiner, I don’t really do resolutions. But one of the great things about reselling (on eBay especially), which I think we all learned from this podcast, is that you can pivot and change your business around at any time. I did that a lot in 2024. What were the biggest positive changes I made?
I started getting serious about organizing my inventory and spent a lot more mental energy thinking about how to spend my most valuable resource, my time. I expanded into a few niches that were new to me which was a learning process. I loved doing that and it will definitely be an annual experiment. If you’re not learning when you’re reselling, you’re at risk of complaining about how slow things are in a few weeks or months, with no real way to change your situation. Maybe my best change of all was that I started tracking different numbers, like how many new listings I created each week and how many photos I was taking. The results were pretty eye-opening. I can see there are times when I slow down on listing, usually because real life has gotten in the way. My sales will suffer when this happens unless I use some of the other tools in my eBay toolbox.
What are the tools in my eBay toolbox besides creating good, quality listings that are priced reasonably? End and sell similar, reprice, accept lower offers than normal, send out more aggressive offers, run a real sale. If my goal is to sell x this week because I have a bill to pay or need some more money in the bank, then I have to stop piddling around with 10% off. I am competing with other eBay sellers, Amazon, livestream auctions (don’t sleep on these y’all) and constant discount emails and coupon codes from corporations and stores. I feel like I really learned this year that interested buyers will just tune out my offers unless they’re 20% or more. And not all watchers will become buyers. So maybe I will go 30% on my next batch of offers to watchers. Or even 40%. How bad do I want to sell things this week?
Every seller should be using these tools on at least a monthly basis. It’s not going to lead to you selling your overpriced items, but it will move some listings that would otherwise sit forever and more importantly, get you thinking about your listings differently.
@retro-treasures-wv posts are basically the bible on how to how to approach your reselling business more analytically in 2025. We are so lucky to have his posts as a resource. I’m sure there are podcasts out there which cover similar ideas, but I wouldn’t know about that. The best lesson I’ve learned this year from his posts? You can look at your reselling business on a micro level, how do I save time or change up this individual process? Or go from a macro level like in terms of your monthly or year-end numbers or goals, and work towards that. Breaking my business down in these ways makes me feel like I have a lot more possibilities and a lot more options with my business. Reselling can be overwhelming! It’s important to recognize what we can and can’t control, and harness our energies towards maximizing success (however you define success, for someone just starting out that might be 5 listings a week) rather than avoiding failure.I’ve been doing the reselling game full-time for a couple years now and when I started, eBay used to be 100 % of my income. That seems crazy to think about but I had thousands of listings and was just constantly buying, selling, shipping. Over the last couple years, it’s become half eBay and half my card consignment business, which requires more buying and selling on my part (and of course paying higher fees) but the process is enjoyable and a lot less stressful. Mostly I think about prices and 90% of the time (or more), making some profit is fine, it doesn’t need to be top dollar on every card every time. I’m fine playing the middleman because with my knowledge, having a little extra money to buy and sell can lead to huge profits (usually a few months from now) if I find some amazing deals. And those deals are out there, maybe now more than ever.
It has only dawned in me in the last year how much time and energy (and clutter!) a reselling business can take up. I got used to the mess and always having more sh*t to do. Lately I have been thinking a lot about other questions, like what kind of setup I want for inventory storage or taking photos. My process had always been, and still is, pretty disorganized. A lot of putting things anywhere, sorting through inventory (especially for the card business) on the floor, taking photos wherever. My thermal printer is on the floor! It doesn’t feel great to admit any of this, not that anyone except us scavengers really appreciates what it means, but take it from me: you can build a business this way! A good business, even. I will hit 12,000 (!) feedback on eBay this week. Let it be known: by the time I get to 13,000, I will have professionalized my setup a little bit more. Maybe it won’t be perfect, but it will be progress, and that’s the name of the game with setting goals and making resolutions.
Happy New Year’$$$!
You’re an inspiration. Incredible numbers, but what I really look forward to every week is learning from the ways you think about your business and how you come up with process improvements. You have an incredible sense of what you want to accomplish with your business and I love to see how you involve your family and use the extra money from your reselling business to improve your family’s life and make memories with them.
My vote is ditch the hoarder update unless you hit a significant sales number or until it’s all gone. Track some other number that’s meaningful to you. Maybe something related to those death piles?
