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That’s incredible. I’m so glad you’ve been able to pick through this haul at your leisure. It would have been a very different if you had to buy everything at once and figure out storage and (the important part) get it all listed on top of dealing with your already existing inventory. That would have been very stressful.
I bet if you went 25% or higher with your offers, you’d start to see more watchers turn into buyers. But there is no rush with a lot of this stuff unless you think values will go down for some reason.
That $100k gross sales goal is definitely a stretch. Still, having $75k in sales be the new normal is a TREMENDOUS change in my business!
Congrats on such a huge number as the new normal. So many full-time flippers don’t even touch your numbers, and you have a full-time career and family on top of it. Amazing. Inspiring. Can’t wait to see what your numbers are like in a year or two.
I’m still not where I need to be, but the fact I’m getting alot of the organization knocked out now means I’ll be spending my time listing in March/April instead of doing all the inventory management then.
I have realized that I fall into this pattern during Q1 as well, since Q4 is often hectic with both buying and selling, I end up accumulating more death piles during this time. Plus I have a habit of putting off taxes until the last minute. This year I want to get the taxes done (if not fully paid) by March 15th (a full month early!) so I can spend April really focused on listing, hopefully setting myself up for big sales in the second half of this year.
Sold 9 items for $896. It seems like I’m gonna live & die this year based on my hoarder sales each week.
How much more is left to list from your hoarder haul? And how much more do they have left to sell? This will be the gift that keeps on giving to you into 2025 and beyond. You have a lot of options for how you can sell your current inventory and the rest of your pickups. If you want to sell faster, you can always cut prices, send out aggressive offers to watchers (I bet this would be successful with these types of items) or even run auctions.
I think the coupon in your imgur post is just a regular markdown coupon. Why it says 25% when she has a number of different coupons (some at higher rates), I’m not sure. Maybe the 25% coupon covers the largest number of items in her very large store.
I’ve never had much success with markdown sales, or volume pricing, but I’m sure those numbers are very different with a 100,000 (!!!) item inventory. In my experience, the best options for moving stale inventory or selling inventory faster are:
1. Price more aggressively — set the BIN at something like 75 to 90 percent of solds instead of 100% or higher
2. Lower best offer settings — for example, to 50% of BIN price if your minimum offer settings are set at 60 to 75 percent like mine are
3. Send stronger offers to watchers — I start at 20% off and I’ve found that 25% is where my interested buyers get more likely to accept the offer. Also allow counteroffers on sent offers.
4. End and sell similar — especially listings that are 6+ months old, but even on newer listings with no watchers/offers, try end/sell similar and fiddle with price, category or title.
5. Auctions!*** with these caveats: don’t run auctions for weird gewgaws and items where there are like 3 potential buyers in the world, don’t expect bidding wars, don’t start opening bids below your floor price for the item (I usually go 50% of my buy it now price) — but keep auctions in your mind as a possibility for items in collectibles categories (where you get free auctions every month with a store subscription) or items with a decent amount of competition where an auction stands out from many similar/same buy it now/best offer listings. Also for stale inventory where you’d be happy just to get $10 or $20 or whatever your absolute floor is. Auctions should be in every eBay seller’s repertoire for the right types of items. They are a unique feature of the platform and I think part of why eBay has held off so many competitors over the years.
6. Markdown sales — these used to be more useful back when the eBay bucks program was still around, but I have run them less and less over the last two years. Now I only do markdowns around holiday weekends and I always make sure to end and sell similar most of my store a few days before I start the markdown. Maximize chances of connecting with potential buyer this way.
7. Volume discounts — I see these often with sellers who have multi quantity of the same type of item (for example, something new in the package which they sell wholesale) and I think for those types of listings, absolutely set up volume pricing. It’s never really fit my store but I know @retro-treasures-wv has had some success with it. Generally I think these types of discounts (as well as markdown sales) are easiest to pass by.
Like clothes, my trading cards niche is easy to pack, store and ship, and I have lots of sources for getting inventory at bargain prices. It can be time-consuming and it’s a lot of work to process all this inventory, but it rarely ever feels like work and I have all the flexibility in the world. I’d love to expand to other niches faster, but I’m happy with my schedule how it is right now. For now, I’ll keep riding these waves and building my inventory, buying a lot or selling a lot when opportunities present themselves.
Speaking of that, I created 300 auctions tonight to end the evening after the Super Bowl, and I’m really excited to see how they end up. I tried promoting my auctions for the first time — eBay calls this Promoted Listings Express — and you pay one flat fee ($0.99 to $1.49) to promote the auction listing for the duration. What’s a buck worth to you? I tried Promoted Listings Express on some expensive items, like a Taylor Swift box set and some fancy Chiefs and 49ers cards, and some cheap listings with lots of competition, like a few of my curated team lots. You can’t get much for a buck these days. I want to give my auctions every advantage I can to get into a bidding war.
I got bids on 3 items within the first hour tonight, and one $14.99 listing sold for a $25 best offer. So we’re off to a good start. Full results next week.
1/28/2024 to 2/3/2024
Listings: 377 — up from 324 last week thanks to a few big bursts of listing today and this past weekend
Items sold: 27 — 19 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 19 via promoted listings
Gross sales: $1059.31 (down 61.1% from one year ago)
Net sales: $621.00 (down 66.3% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $39.23 (down 15% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $66.03 — Fran Tarkenton 2017 Panini Preferred autograph /25
Lowest price sold (net): $10.24 — Udonis Haslem 2013-14 Panini Intrigue autograph jersey card /99
A little late on the numbers this week, but it’s good to keep up the habit. I have a nice pile of sold listings to pick and pack tomorrow, and I’m starting another batch of auctions tomorrow night to end next Monday, the night after the Super Bowl, so shipping will be annoying early next week, too. It’s a good routine, a nice day to day life.
1/7/2023 to 1/13/2023
Listings: 334 — down from 379 last week thanks to auctions (37 sold out of 250 listings, I start the bidding around half my BIN or target price) and culling unsold listings a bit (pulled 15-20 listings to send to consignment)
Items sold: 27 — 19 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 19 via promoted listings
In last week’s numbers thread, I had been kind of dumbfounded because 31 out of my 36 sold listings had been promoted. That seemed high to me. 19 promoted listings out of 27 sold listings isn’t quite as high (70% versus 86%) but the point is still valid — promote those listings!
Gross sales: $1059.31 (down 61.1% from one year ago)
Net sales: $621.00 (down 66.3% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $39.23 (down 15% from one year ago)
It will be interesting to see where these gross, net and ASP numbers are for me in a year. I have shifted so much of my online reselling over the last year from eBay to the trading card consignment world, and predictably my numbers there from Jan 2023 to Jan 2024 have basically doubled. They have run a lot of selling promotions over the last few months so I have been selling, selling, selling. My favorite was send any item to eBay auction (7 days, $0.99 opening bid) for $0.75. That promotion ended on January 31st, so it will be interesting to see what my consignment sales look like in a month from now without things selling daily at auction. Unless they bring the promo back for a third time, which would make for a very happy craig rex.
Highest price sold (net): $66.03 — Fran Tarkenton 2017 Panini Preferred autograph /25
One thing that is interesting about the ultra modern card market is all the different sets that are made. Dozens each year for every sport and all the big non sports pop culture properties (Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Marvel etc) and almost all of them cost $100 and up for one box now. This has been going on for the last 25 years, so some sets have become iconic and heavily collected, and the less popular ones get manufactured for a few years and then replaced with a new set that will maybe become popular and maybe not.
But even dud sets have some valuable autographs and rookies. I’ve been trying to focus my eBay store on these types of cards more because they often sell within 30 days as long as I price them around their established value. That is basically the story of this card, autographed by Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton. I bought it in November during the consignment site’s Black Friday sale from a seller just like me who ran a sale which brought the price of this card down to $25.25.
Lowest price sold (net): $10.24 — Udonis Haslem 2013-14 Panini Intrigue autograph jersey card /99
Sometimes the popular players aren’t the best players. Udonis Haslem was never the best player on the Miami Heat, often wasn’t even one of the team’s 5 starters, but he played with the Hear for 20 (!!!) seasons and it’s very rare for a player to stick with one team that long. His last eight years he was basically a coach who never played, but you wouldn’t guess that from his final game highlights. The Heat retired Haslem’s jersey a few weeks ago, so this is probably the end of a good run selling his cards, which always sold for slightly higher prices on eBay versus my consignment site because I pack more keywords in the title than their algorithm created listings do. Flipping is the name of the game with most modern cards, but there are still collectors who are huge fans of the team but casual collectors or only spend $ on their hobbies instead of $$$$, and I think these are the types of cards they buy.
Never in my entire ebay history have I had a mouse mess with a single item in my garage or my shed. It is TOTAL WAR! I WILL DESTORY THIS MOUSE AND HIS ENTIRE LINEAGE!
Please include weekly mouse updates in your numbers as long as possible. This is the content that keeps me coming back to this forum.
Sorry about your eBay scammer! I had one of those recently too (which I posted about very late in last week’s numbers thread) and then had another weird thing this week. A buyer who asked me to cancel a purchases a few minutes after paying last week randomly left me a negative feedback which said this:
Very rude.
The odd thing was that I never even responded to the buyer’s message — just refunded them immediately. I was working on my eBay store when their message came in, so the refund was practically instantaneous. Then the negative almost a full week later.
Of course eBay removed it, and I’ve been doing this long enough that it didn’t even faze me, but it was still strange. Like, I would love to talk to that buyer and learn about all of their mental issues one by one. That’s the thing about selling on eBay — it’s a good life but truly anyone can buy and sell on eBay. It’s almost too easy. Fortunately, 99% of eBayers are normal people who want to buy our stuff or sell their stuff to us.
I will be interested to see how you do on Niknax, which sounds like an app the kids are using these days. I am always skeptical of other platforms, but of course my main niche of cards has a hugely successful alternative platform to eBay called COMC which is a huge part of my business. So who knows, maybe you are getting in on the ground floor of a site that you’ll be using heavily in a few years. How are the fees compared to eBay?
Did you really hit $1000.00 on the dot? If so, that’s amazing and it might be years before that happens again, if at all.
We are total opposites as far as weather and eBay. I will easily spend 12+ hours on eBay when the weather sucks, but I want to go outside and play when it’s nice out. I don’t have kids and I still like enjoying my city-adjacent life, expensive as it is.
We had our first snow in Philly in over two years last week and it reminded me how much I missed it. I would love one more snow before the end of winter and I will be ready for spring after that.
I think you’re being smart with holding off on the premium hoarder shoes where you have the provenance and for sure the weather will slow down those sales. If things don’t move by mid-spring, you can always play around with markdown sale, end/sell similar or even an auction and probably still end up in that $500ish range. Plus I’m sure one or two oddballs will sell for full-price (or close) between new and then.
Have you run any auctions on the best of the best premium hoarder haul? I forget, but in very select cases those might be a good way to move some of the inventory.
Business really is simple. I’ve been on a nice run lately of listing more and I have seen more sales as a result, despite really only focusing on new listings Friday, Saturday and Sunday the past few weeks. I am listing better quality items than I was a year ago, and they are selling faster. It is an interesting life as a good chunk of my inventory storage space is taken up by items in various stages of not yet listed. I need to photograph them or lot them up or research them. A good chunk of my time is spent looking through auction listings for new things to sell through my consignment port. That business happens in volume and I have really streamlined how I spend that time, but it’s still quite a few hours each week. What I am saying is: my business is horribly inefficient and selling on eBay reminds me of this every day.
However, I am happy with my sales this week because of how many items sold, when they sold, their sold prices and my COGS. It was exactly the kind of eBay week I would like. Maybe at some point in the next few months, I will go all hands on-deck and double the size of my store by listing anything and everything I have. But right now, I am happy with my routines for buying, selling, and shipping and how they fit my life.
1/7/2023 to 1/13/2023
Listings: 379 — up from 345 last week, let’s keep this up @craig-rex
Items sold: 36 — 16 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 31 via promoted listings
My percentages are 7.5% on older listings and 5% on newer if anyone was curious after seeing such a high number of promoted listings sell. This was probably an outlier week, but I’ll be eyeing this number the next few weeks.
Gross sales: $1585.98 (down 4.7% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1039.21 (down 9.4% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $44.06 (down 26% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $70.52 — Zhang Weili auto autograph card /15 2022 Panini Donruss UFC purple laser NM 张伟丽
I’ve never willingly watched a UFC fight, but they’ve made increasingly nice cards for the sport for about 15 years now as it’s grown in popularity and I can use Terapeak as well as anyone else. This is the second copy of this card that I sold, COGS about $25 and both sales were at the higher end of the sold range. I like to think it’s because I copy/pasted Weili’s Mandarin name into the title, but both sales were to US buyers so I might be giving myself too much credit. Still: copy/paste things into eBay titles is fun!
Lowest price sold (net): $8.49 — Stephen Curry Leaf golf card
As a rule, I don’t suggest selling things for $12 when you can spend the same time listing something that will sell for higher. Unless you’re sure it will sell fast, but even then: list your more expensive stuff ASAP.
If you are interested in some education on ultra modern sports cards, normally I avoid unlicensed cards like this because they’re less valuable. Companies like Leaf don’t have licensing agreements with the major pro sports leagues, so they get creative in order to tap into the card market and mostly make 2 types of cards.
1. Minor league and other amateur players, most of whom don’t make it to the pros so the cards are worth $1 or $2 within as soon as a few months after release, no matter how low a serial number on the card or if it’s autographed or they put a big piece of jersey in the card. Making it pro in sports to the point where your cards hold value for 5+ years is kind of like making it full-time on eBay for 5+ years: it’s easy to say how you could do it, but actually getting there takes a lot of work, and even if everything goes mostly right, it might not happen.
2. Retired and pro players cards without logos. Sometimes these are clever but silly cards like Steph golfing, more often it’s cards where the picture is photoshopped to remove the team logo and occasionally they make terrifying nightmare fuel abominations like this.
Unlicensed cards like these go back decades to cards that were inserted in food products. Most of those have never been very desirable to collectors, though there has always been a market for rare oddball cards of the best players and there are some sets from the 1980s and back which have become very hard to find after all these years. But generally collectors desire the big sets and manufacturers, Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck and Panini. Better quality control and nicer cards. Leaf is probably the highest quality maker of unlicensed cards but they’re still not cards that I sell often. The demand is just not there. But sometimes they are good for a quick $5 or, in the right circumstances, $10 or $20 flip.
I acquired 14 copies of this card from this listing, as well as 13 more from two other listings for about $12, so regardless of my feelings about the card’s aesthetics, I will be selling Steph Curry golf cards for a little while and I have to be honest — I recommend it. It’s a nice life.
Your choice to sell through that consignment company seems to be the real payoff. You don’t share those numbers here (because we all talk about eBay), but I assume that’s the real exciting number for you? or is eBay still a significant part of your income?
Jay, it is so amazing to think that I started selling full-time and was mostly selling cards without the consignment company. I only started with them a few months into going full-time and it took about six months to build my port to where sales were consistent. But that has become the exciting number, more than eBay at this point. Their cash-out fees are 10% so my “take home” is a combination of a weekly cash out and cards that I get shipped to me. Usually cards which I think will sell better on eBay because of timing or the automated consignment listing isn’t optimized.
So eBay is still half of the equation for me. And of course it’s a home for all the other random stuff I sell as well as my little curated card lots which I enjoy making so much. The consignment company doesn’t offer a lot option, it is individual cards only. If I think of my inventory like a set up in an antique mall, eBay is the stuff in the glass case and the consignment inventory is everything else on the shelves and out for open display.
I couldn’t imagine a better set up. I have a lot of flexibility this way and it opens up the possibility of taking a few weeks or a month off eBay to travel or focus on other things and still bring in a decent income.
The last two months, the consignment company has run this promo: for $0.75, send any item in your port to an eBay auction. 7 days, $0.99 start bid, no minimum fee beyond their normal fee which is less than eBay’s like it is for most big consignors. I’ve been taking full advantage because if I could sell a lot of items in a short time frame and how things would sell. Plus it is almost too easy: no shipping, no fiddling with anything, just click send to auction button and a few weeks later, I have a few bucks in my account. Of course auctions are almost always disappointing. My average sold price this month is just $4.75, but this is my fourth straight month with over 1,000 items sold. A lot of the cards that I sent to auction were ones I sent to consignment a year or even two years ago which haven’t sold after lowering the price multiple times and running sales as high as 50% or 60% off. So $2.32 or $1.67 might be a good sold price. There are plenty of cards where I lost a few cents or even a few bucks, but it’s a different perspective selling in volume — sometimes it’s best to get whatever you can for the thing and use the money for something else.
I am constantly figuring out ways to lower my COGS and fees bit by bit and end up with a little more cash in my pocket. I still have a ways to go with some old debt but getting there. Life is busy and enjoyable. I hope the same for you and Ryanne too!
I had a numbers post get eaten a few weeks back, copy/pasted and couldn’t get the post to go through either. I’m glad your post didn’t get eaten this week because I added a few more BOLOs from it. That dollhouse wiring kit sale is really impressive. I think you got a good price because your listing redirects to a different listing (I really wish eBay didn’t do this) which looks like the same item (granted I don’t know what I’m looking at) and it is only priced at about $15.
I thought this is a great pearl of wisdom too. About the Star Wars lot.
Sorting/prioritizing a bulk buy is an art that all resellers should develop. It would be easy to get paralyzed by analysis when picking up something like this. Having a system allowed me to go through everything quickly and efficiently.
This was one of the biggest keys as I transitioned from part-time to full-time. Everything has its price, and some things are worth holding onto for the right price, but a lot of stuff is maybe not worth thinking too long about. Especially when you start buying in bulk. Get the valuable stuff separated and listed, figure out what else is worth holding onto to sell individually or in small curated lots, and then do something with everything else. “Something” can be whatever you want it to be on any given day. List a bulk lot, sell to a consignor or wholesaler who gives pennies on the dollar, donate to somewhere in your community that provides things to focus who need it, or throw things out. Don’t let maybes paralyze you into living with clutter, even though some clutter is inherently part of having an eBay business. I am still a work in progress with all this, mostly because I’m still in an apartment that’s too small for my business, but I’m getting there and it feels good to visibly see some progress each week.
@Christine
I wonder often if I’d hold myself to the same level of accountability without this forum. Even on weeks when I don’t post much, I still read everyone’s posts and it keeps me centered and reminds me to think beyond the day’s work and consider my bigger picture goals.
You posted about that boat for scavenge of the week a couple months ago (maybe longer). I’m glad it sold and good to know I am not the only one who scrambles to buy a box when I sell something big and weird.
Those placemats are very striking but I would not have been confident in the purchase either. Nice to see there is someone out there who’s willing to spend $100 on placemats!! I like to think your buyer is opening a tiny hole in the wall restaurant and those placemats will get new life on the tables of a successful business.
There was a crowd, but nobody else was bothering with the paper, so did I miss something or was there only one near-mint 2,000-dollar comic in amongst the timetables?
If it’s this issue, then you’ve won scavenge of the year, barring another luxury hoarder find from @retro-treasures-wv. Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about comic books, merely got swept up playing around in Terapeak after reading your post. Also learned there is a market for 1960s era bus timetables in both the US (NYC in particular) and Europe. Incredible!
should I bother to leave fb?
It’s against eBay policy to leave a positive comment for a buyer with negative comments, so even if it might feel good in the moment, don’t do it. And there’s no way to leave negative feedback for a buyer, we can only leave positive. I would suggest that you respond (on your feedback page) to any negative or neutral feedback left for you, but 1 negative or neutral isn’t going to affect anything beyond your pride.
I wouldn’t call this buyer (or any buyer) because it’s very unlikely to accomplish anything besides frustrating you even more. Take those feelings and use them as motivation to list more, scavenge more or organize your inventory.
I ran a 25% off sale all last week on some older pics and listings I’m not excited about in my store, about 200ish items and did not have good success with that unfortunately. Contemplating trying again a little deeper.
Try again a little deeper. Say 35%? I’ve found that 20% to 25% offers work pretty well to move items with watchers or fairly new listings. But old, slow listings need a little more tinkering.
It felt so good to get organized with my shipping supplies and storage. I posted on another thread that I have many boxes of unlisted inventory left. I hope to get a lot of that listed in 2024. I will continue to enjoy the flea market and try to limit myself to one other sourcing trip per week as a treat. I will continue to avoid larger items, estate sales, and garage sales because I don’t want that kind of volume right now.
Amazing work getting disciplined. How many unlisted items do you think you have? I would be curious to hear other people’s answers too. I have a lot. I admire the discipline you have to limit your sourcing like you plan to. I’m working on getting there! I don’t have much unsorted stuff on the floor anymore. Hopefully in a month or two, I will have sold, sorted, consolidated and donated/trashed enough stuff that everything will be on shelves. That’s the dream, anyway.
I still need to contact Ebay to see if I can get that one bad feedback removed. Buyer never returned the “fake” item.
I had an end of year return goofball, too — tried to pull a bait and switch on me, returning a much less expensive card instead of the $100 one he sent. Didn’t get a negative from them because the buyer was removed from eBay, and no money on hold, but the return remains open. I called eBay about it and they said the case would be found in my favor. Surprisingly, the call only took less than ten minutes and it went pretty smoothly. Probably the first time I’ve called eBay in a year.
Have some competing goals but I really should address my old boring stale listings and look up current comps since the % off sale didn’t work.
This has been a big key for increasing my sales lately on eBay and the trading card platform I use. I’ve gotten better about looking up current comps and that’s really helped me hone in on what I want to list in my eBay story, what I’ll sell on consignment as far as the cards go, and then everything else gets sorted into small lots, large lots, deal with it another time or donate. That’s my current project. Also a work in progress! But it feels good to make progress.
