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Jay and Ryanne, I’d be curious what would happen if you did end and sell similar on your oldest 500 items since you’re so busy with other projects. It’s interesting to see that you have had a few strong weeks of sales even without listing. Goes to show the value of building up a large inventory and keeping it there. Have you been running any markdown sales or sending offers at all?
I have been planning out what I’d like to accomplish with my spring cleaning and am starting to think about small listing and organizing projects I want to tackle each week of May and June. I’ve never had the time or money to think about my business like this. I love it.
3/31/2024 to 4/6/2024
Items in store: 159 (down from 202 last week)
Items sold: 36 — 7 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 11 via promoted listings
Gross sales: $1790.73 (down 45% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1151.55 (down 48% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $49.74 (up 8% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $380.40— LeBron James 2003 to 2005 Nike pitch book
Bought in September of 2022 for $55. Some things are worth pricing high and waiting, waiting, waiting. I have a hunch this book will be worth more in five or ten years, but I’m a take the profit now kind of person.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.78 — Will Shipley 2022 Onyx autograph
So this isn’t a scavenge of this week, but it’s a scavenge…from a week. Who cares really? There are no rules!
Sometimes my scavenge of the week isn’t technically from last week. No rules!
It’s the most West Virginian thing in the world to go to the flea market every weekend. I would bet there is a collector market for crappy knock off stuff, but not on ebay!
New Jersey thing to go the flea market every weekend, too. At least for my grandma. Fond memories of going to those trips. Can still taste the sausage sandwiches and remember the exact location of the booths I liked. I agree with you on there being a collectors market for weird knockoffs, in addition to the overseas demand for those types of items.
Anyone remember “Big Johnson” T shirts? They were super popular in the early 90’s. I remember kids wearing them to school…and no one batted an eye! It was a different time then!
There were so many weird 90s brands! I remember Coed Naked and Big Dog shirts.
Any videos you recommend to learn how to tell real from fake Nike, Ralph Lauren etc? Seems like a useful skill to have.
A little late on my numbers this week, but maybe posting now will get some of you slacking lurkers to remain accountable. Hope everyone is enjoying spring weather.
I had what I assume is my best week of all-time in terms of average sale price. It was mostly the product of my spring cleaning, which is a hell of a motivator. So when I haven’t been enjoying the sunshine (or, um, a New Jersey earthquake), I’ve been grinding away.
Sort out a few new curated team lots, get them listed. As long as the quality of cards is there, these lots will sell. I can’t keep some teams like the Boston Bruins and Cincinnati Reds in stock because they sell so fast. Some fandoms are intense. I don’t feel that strongly about anything except the process of reselling. I feel bad for people who sell things online and they hate it. I wish they could feel the joy I feel every step of the way from original purchase to taking a bin full of packages to my local post office.
Tear and cut and slice my way through a postal bin of mail addressed to me, last week’s purchases. It can be a trip seeing the weird ways people protect cards from getting damaged in the mail. The big consignment sellers have everything down to a science. I suppose I do, too, in my own way.
There will be a few bins of weird items to photograph this week. I have two in particular in mind, one full of autographed sports memorabilia (balls and pucks and clothing) and one full of action figures which will be a learning experience if nothing else. I want to organize them better before I pull out the phone camera and take pictures through a cracked screen. But I have to remember I can start with just one or two items and get those photographed and listed. Then do a few more tomorrow. I can get set in my ways, but I will learn to like any process that actually works. I’m not sure I’ve ever stuck with any sort of reselling routine for very long. I don’t recommend this. I’ve always wanted to do better. But change is hard. And have you tried living? It can be awful!
On that note, I feel great about my progress this week. I sold a couple bulky items which required me to become a box engineer, which I recommend. I had a couple other big sales which shipped in flat rate boxes. I have 142 7-day auctions ending tomorrow night and I would like to get $1000 in gross sales/$500 net from them. I think it can happen. I’ve been listing consistently all week. I have a plan for spring cleaning over the next few weeks that I think I can put into action without feeling overwhelmed.
3/24/2024 to 3/30/2024
Items in store: 205
Items sold: 18 — 9 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings
Gross sales: $1892.85 (up 26% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1311.26 (up 41% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $105.16 (up 124% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $340.57— Charles Conlon signed authenticated photograph of New York Giants outfielder George Burns
I had five $100+ sales this week, full details in sale of the week thread but what I realized writing this post was that none of them were from my original niche of individual sports cards. When I started full-time a few years ago, I had a 3000 item store and it was almost all individual cards and books/media purchased from library sales. Now I have a 200 item store, still with individual cards as a part of the mix, but individual cards accounted for just 20% of my overall sales this week.
All five big sales were a result of my spring cleaning. One flat rate box of graded cards which might be equally (or more?) profitable if I just sent them to consignment but lugging a large flat rate box to the post office is one of life’s best feelings. Two signed Charles Conlon photographs to the same collector. 13 pound signed baseball photography book. One enormous autographed gold shimmer photo of MMA fighter Bo Nickal. These are the items which led to an all-time great week.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.84 — Deommo Lenoir Panini Contenders autographed rookie 49ers
What a cool week of stories about your sales. I have always been curious what got you into reselling and now I know a lot more about it.
Your DIY photo booth is a real vibe. I’m glad you’ve upgraded, but I love the story of its construction!
Who is paying $55 for a vintage beeper these days? Was it a prop house? Or is there actually a collector’s market for this kind of stuff?
The COVID price bubbles were such an interesting phenomenon. The sports card market went wild for a brief time because of the stimulus checks and speculators becoming aware of the inefficiencies in the resale market. I will always look back fondly at that time period because it allowed me to build up my inventory to a point where I could resell full-time and make the money work.
Your overstuffed antiques centre sounds like each of the privately owned thrift stores in the New Jersey town next to mine. Did I say thrift stores? I mean tax writeoffs or money laundering spots. That must be what they are. I simply can’t think of another explanation for such illogically high prices on literal junk.
I’m a big fan of Dagstorp and Knutstorp, but I have to admit your names are much better! Is the IKEA cafeteria in Derbyshire area as delicious as the one in my beloved Newark, NJ IKEA?
Hey, Christine. You’ve had some great weeks the last couple months and did a lot of grinding to get your store up near 1000 listings. Don’t let the slow spring season get you silly.
But I hear ya on the pricing thing. It’s a double-edged sword, I overprice some inventory which sits forever and undersell other items. Got a whopper of a story about that for next week!!!
Tomorrow is the last day of March. Probably going to be a slow weekend because of Easter but maybe send out some 20% or 25% watchers to buyers. Or maybe 10% to 15% if it’s an item you have on sale like your oranges towel. Picked that one specifically because it has 21 watchers. Watcher doesn’t always mean buyer but with a little work, you can get a $20 item with a lot of watchers to sell soon. With the low dollar items, my move has become after 1-3 months, send it to auction at half my BIN and if it sells, at least it’s gone. You have free collectibles auction listings too. But a 15% offer on an item that’s already 25% off would probably get one of those watchers to bite. Sure, 40% off “feels” like too much, but who cares once those towels are a decoration in someone’s Florida condo.
You can also wait for the right buyer to come along and click your BIN, which feels great but when that’s not happening for me, I like to pull all these different selling levers to see what happens. Stuff will still sell if you do nothing. But auctions, end/sell similar and 25 to 40% discounts to watchers feels like you’re doing everything you can. Especially when there’s no time or motivation to create new listings.
Wow. You only have 200 items in your eBay store?! Assume you keep the store small because all your card inventory is at consignment + you don’t have storage for any other kind of inventory?
186 items to be exact. I’d be lying if I said I totally planned it this way. It’s been a combination of things. I ran anywhere between 250 and 500 auctions every month last year. After I finished shipping the auctions, I’d go through the unsold to remove any slow movers and add those cards to my next consignment shipment. So that’s a big part of how I’ve whittled my eBay store down from 500 listings to 200 over the last year and 2000 to 200 over the last two years.
But I’ve listed about 15 new items in the last three days. Started tackling some death piles. Hoping to keep it up!
I have one normal sized bedroom with all my eBay stuff which has always been a real mess. I don’t know about anyone else. But that’s been my scavenging life. You should have seen it after my Chicago trip last year when I bought all those bulky classical music box sets. Just boxes stacked and piled everywhere. Probably a fire hazard. It looked like Tetris in real life. But I got everything shipped home. I got it all listed. Most of it sold for the prices I expected. I made money on the trip. A great experience. 10/10, will do again soon.
But the trip made me keenly aware of my mess. I couldn’t deal with it right away. I needed to focus on buying and selling in Q4 like anyone else who sells things online, then I spent a lot of January working on my consignment pipeline and learned a ton. Most of all, I needed a plan.
There are a lot of small boxes stacked up underneath my desk and on shelves and in corners. I buy a 20 card lot for one valuable card and then stick the other 19 in a box. They’re not worth dealing with when there are so many other valuable cards. But my business is all about buying and selling. So the purchases keep coming. Eventually clutter piles up. One of the hazards of my line of work!
I’ve been pretty motivated to start to deal with this over the last few months. Best part — in all this clutter, occasionally I’ve come across cards which should have a home — either my curated card lots, or I send the card to consignment and sell it for a few bucks. Sometimes more than a few bucks. Get all this organized and I have an easy system in place as long as I keep up on it. It’s pretty motivating.
It’s not only card clutter. I have a few shelves with my other listed inventory and a few random boxes and bins and piles of unlisted stuff in various spots on the floor. I get the good items and the weird items listed, but it’s not organized well and I have a lot of unlisted unvaluable stuff. A lot of the floor stuff might best be described as “things I should donate.” That’s probably my project for mid-late April.
But this feels. It’s my first ever spring cleaning of my business. It’s nice to have the flexibility to tackle these things in a way that works for me, and doesn’t feel stressful or like it’s too much.
I don’t think I will consistently hit $1000/week, or sell 36 items/week, with a 200 item store. I’m just not sure it is possible. But my weekly consignment take-home has been the same or more than my eBay take-home for the last six months. So I have the space to think about this bigger picture stuff, and if I have a down week on eBay or nothing sells for a couple days — no big deal!
Very different problems from when I first started selling full-time with no other jobs two and a half years ago (time flies!) or when I was selling on the side while working dead-end job after dead-end job. But I like these problems now and it’s exciting to think about the future of my business after my very long overdue spring cleaning.
Had a crazy good week, with 36 sales from a 200 item store, even though I didn’t create a single new listing last week! There is always an element of luck with eBay. But I have started to master an important skill within my main niche — listing individual cards when the market is at its peak and pricing my listings so they sell. Last week, I sold 5 cards of one player to 3 different buyers and 9 cards of another player to 2 different buyers. It would have been a solid week without those sales but it was a great week with them, and I had multiple copies of some of the sold cards so I have already listed them again.
Barring some kind of crazy buying spree in the next few days, this was my slowest month of consignment sales since October. But you can either complain or think about your processes when things slow down. I chose to get more analytical about the different ways I can sell through consignment, so I tightened my belt in terms of buying for flipping purposes and I started their live auctions and taking notes. These live auctions run 8 hours a day, and each item starts at $0.99 with 15 seconds live bidding and 10 second extensions when someone bids. This wasn’t the main reason why I didn’t list on eBay last week, but it was part of it. I felt like this research was important. Previously, I had been sending old inventory to live auctions (the fee is $1.50 to $2.00 and there are a limited number of slots in each sport) and taking whatever I can get, even if it was the $0.99 opening bid. But after a week of taking notes on the live auctions, I’ve completely changed up my strategy. Certain cards sell for more than you’d expect, and others sell for less than they’re worth. Different hosts focus on different areas. This is a pretty typical lesson of arbitrage — things will sell for different prices on different platforms. Educate yourself and maximize profits with the same amount of work.
I assume this is what the rest of my year will look like in terms of reselling on consignment, and I’m excited for it. In terms of eBay, I expect that oddball items will become a larger part of my inventory as I continue to reorganize my inventory space and figure out what I like to sell and what I don’t. I have a few bins of autographed sports and historical memorabilia to get listed in April. But first, more spring cleaning with some card listings. It’s long overdue. I never had time for these big picture things as I was building my business. There were always too many day to day tasks and not enough money in my bank account. I’m happier where my business is at now.
3/17/2024 to 3/23/2024
Items in store: 181
Items sold: 36 — 23 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 25 via promoted listings
Gross sales: $1664.66 (up 1.6% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1113.93 (up 0.5% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $46.24 (down 40% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $135.04— TJ Watt Steelers 2018 Panini Rewards cracked ice autograph #10/10
Lowest price sold (net): $9.60 — Jimmy Carter 1977 presidential inauguration parade tickets
I don’t know much about presidential collectibles but picked up a small pile of tickets like this for about $10. Then tossed them on a shelf where they sat for a year. Got them listed a few months back and this one sale basically covers the lot. Get some of those death pile items listed folks!!
Sealed media, now that’s a nice sale christine! I feel like box sets like the one you sold are always sell as quickly as you can. With how much is available on demand and how quickly streaming platforms change, best not to get stuck with a shelf of bulky dvd sets. I have a few boxes of these to process over the next few weeks and I think I’m going to donate most of it.
Limited edition media is a different story, sometimes those are buy and hold for a year waiting for that right buyer
Sounds like a nice way to spend four hours, at least! I have always wondered in situations like this, why not get creative and all the sellers buy and sell from each other. Might not be any more profitable at the end of the day, but you’re all there anyway, why not go home with some different inventory. Of course, it takes two to tango and I’ve never met anyone else who’s thought remotely like this.
I have thought about posting threads when I relisten to old episodes. Like how communities that love a tv show rewatch old episodes and discuss then. Is this something that people think would lead to more discussion on the forum? If it is, let’s do it!
So much has changed selling on eBay in just the last couple years. but a lot of the basics are the same as ever. And one of the biggest lessons the podcast taught me was to embrace change. Don’t fear it, don’t complain about it, don’t pretend it’s not happening. Figure out how to change your business to meet whatever’s changing about eBay or scavenging.
It’s great life advice really.
Did eBay remove the negative or did you ask the buyer to reconsider and they changed it?
I had success with this one time last year…sold a dumb $20 book and the buyer insisted it was a photo copied book. Had another copy for a book club, my copy was poor font, missing pages, unreadable, stuff like that. My thought was, who knows maybe they had a point. Also it was $20, hardly worth spending more than about 5 minutes on. So I refunded them everything and sent a message apologizing and asking if they could revise the feedback. The positive feedback they left me was much longer than the original negative which wasn’t about me as a seller at all but about how unhappy they were with the book.
This was someone who had like 28 feedback and used eBay two or three times a year. I think those are the main group of users who still leave non-automated feedback. Those and very happy/unhappy customers. Kind of a bummer! But feedback doesn’t matter as much anymore with eBay’s money back guarantee protecting all of us most of the time.
I’ve got a neutral I’m thinking about calling in about.
Neutrals don’t affect your seller metrics or feedback score at all, so I wouldn’t even spend time with something like this.
I’m not sure I would call eBay about anything at this point. So much simpler to use the automated tools. Returns are a breeze. Feedback removal is quick and easy. Live chat is ok, a lot of waiting.
Kind of amazing to think about what customer service has become.
Thanks Christine. It is fun to get out there and look for stuff, probably more fun than anything else reselling related, so it felt good to stay disciplined and I built some decent momentum on my spring cleaning project. Have been winning a few more auctions than normal this week so I’m glad I didn’t get too spendy last weekend.
That pulley is really well made and seeing the listing made me realize, wow, I wouldn’t know where to begin with pricing something like that. I hope you get full price for it. Are those kinds of items really long-tail?
Issue was people were sending in garbage clothes. If clothes did sell, it was for $10 or less. It wasnt cost effective. Assume photographing and storing clothes is much more work than a baseball card.
This made me realize that one of the reasons COMC is so successful is because they’re largely avoiding junk cards. With fees of $0.50 and $1.00 per card, you can’t just send in everything because you’ll lose money. So the site ends up full of ultra-modern cards with a unique feature (autograph, serial number, piece of jersey) or vintage cards where the condition is in decent condition. I think the ideal sale on COMC, for both the company’s sustainability and for consistent profits as a seller, is around $5 to $20. It’s a good marketplace for the very niche cards that are sought out by old-school player or set collectors, as well as a marketplace for supply and demand to work in real time.
COMC fees have only increased over the years as the site has become more successful and popular. Back in the day, supposedly you could send stuff in for pennies. That’s why there are a few copies of your typical junk wax era cards on the site, but those types of cards are so plentiful that it’s always a race to the bottom to sell. Best to focus on cards with only 1 or 2 copies on the site so you can use Terapeak to determine your pricing strategy.
