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I am looking forward to the expansion of the Jay and Ryanne coffee shop empire. Then in ten years maybe I will sell my Broad Porch summer vibes tee on eBay for $100 plus shipping to some vintage coffee nerd. They can pry my small victories long sleeve from my cold dead fingers though. Bury me in that sweater, y’all.
It is a rainy day here in New Jersey, but eBay is the best when the weather is bad. I have been listing all day and reflecting on my scavenging life. I just hit my two year anniversary of doing this full-time, no other jobs to help pay the bills, and it’s going better than I could have imagined. The most important thing that I’ve learned that I enjoy thinking about how I do things day to day, changing my processes and modifying my goals. Posting on these forums helps a lot with that. I’m looking forward to putting in some good Q4 work, and writing some good posts, over the next few months.
10/1/2023 to 10/7/2023
Items sold: 26 (5 via auction, 15 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 16 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1541.68 (down 26% from one year ago)
Net sales: $848.59 (down 45% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $59.30 (down 3% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $113.73 — Charles Barkley 2019-20 Panini Illusions autograph
One of the true NBA greats from my childhood with an all-time great nickname: the Round Mound of Rebound. It’s not mean, he’s a beloved Hall of Famer and a respected commentator.
I picked up three of these autographs from the Panini Rewards site when they did a limited drop a few weeks ago. They cost me 1500 points each which is about $40. I’ve sold two of the three autographs, both to Australia. Aussies are nuts for basketball.
Lowest price sold (net): $15.01 — lot of 2 Frank Frazetta 1980s wall calendars
Won these in June 2022 for $0.99 and $0.99 as part of a large order with one of the biggest trading card consignment sellers. Let’s call it $5 with the combined shipping. Really it was just a few dollars gamble based on: A) browsing every single auction listing from this seller B) seeing the picture of the calendars and that initial reaction of “that’s cool” and C) $0.99 start bid with no bids when I found the auction, which led me to Terapeak and seeing they had value.
I wouldn’t have bought these if they didn’t look cool and I never would have listed them, they would have sat in a bin until I got the urge to clean. I can’t just sell anything. I need to care about the thing I’m listing beyond hypothetical profit.
It took a few months and more than a few rounds of auction, sell similar, lower the price for these to sell, but the calendars are in their forever (?) home now, and I know a little more about another type of item that I would have skipped over not too long ago.
Those prices are ridiculous, but this stuff is so rare that I believe you’ll get something like those prices. I’ve said this a bunch of times in the last few months, but we are all lucky to follow along with this in real time. This is like a scavenger’s dream haul. It’s inspiring to see your progress and all the little tidbits and anecdotes you’re sharing with us. It gives me so much to think about as far as what to do when considering a large purchase and what steps to take from start to finish. And of course there’s so much to learn from seeing your listings and which items sell and for how much. Great stuff. Thanks for all the time you take to write about it.
Absolutely, even through the frustration, I felt grateful (lucky really) that they managed to get the sale done and ship another box of stuff to me. Nothing seriously damaged. Nothing missing. I’m sure it would have been a cluster if anything like that happened. Made me appreciate how easy it is to buy on eBay!
I’d love to know what happened to the two box sets that were “accidentally put out to the sales floor” though. I figured that the bookshop manager (or someone else) snuck the stuff out the back door or purchased it with an employee discount and sold it themselves. Maybe that is just my own paranoia. Nothing on eBay or their website (which is terrible) though.
Shipping preferences is the most direct way to accomplish your goal. This is huge in my main niche of trading cards, all the big sellers (and even small-ish ones like myself) have some kind of shipping discount in place.
I use a flat rate shipping rule of $3.99 on individual trading cards, $4.99 on small lots and it works in almost all cases without needing to send invoices manually. By far the most common order is two items but once or twice a month I’ll get someone who buys a bunch.
I also created a promotional shipping rate of free shipping for 10+ items or orders over $100. As mentioned, promotional shipping rates don’t always work to the exact intentions you may have specified. But I rarely get orders of this size anyway. Maybe they would become more common with a $20 order threshold.
I have not had a lot of luck with markdowns or volume pricing, so I rarely mess with them anymore. But I’m sure in some categories or with certain types of items, they can be really useful.
I love the glimpse that you’ve given us into this wonderful soul’s home and life. This person certainly had a particular style and taste! Your photos are everything I could have dreamed and also beyond my wildest imagination. What a trip!
I don’t know if those soldier figurines are valuable or not (I assume they are, since they were in a glass case) but I hope someone, at some point, plays with them again.
That china set is so distinctive.
Oh, and that clock! I love the dog portrait next to it too. What a good boy!
This feels like the contents of a mansion, like something from a movie.
And you have 40 (!!!) more bins coming. This is going to be the haul that keeps on giving into 2024 I think…
It’s very different now compared to a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic all of the consignment and grading companies had wait lists that were months long (seriously…3 to 6 months to grade a card or get it shipped from your consignment port to your home) and manufacturers sold out of everything. Of course that was never going to last for a million reasons — speculators found other ways to gamble, stimulus money ran out, people went back to “regular” forms of entertainment, too many sets. Topps even came out with a Bob Ross styled set recently! That one did sell out, but at this point it’s a few large companies (wholesalers and box breakers) buying up most products.
But all the cards that were bought and sold the last few years didn’t just disappear. Eventually the grading companies got their backlog graded 100% accurately (lol not at all) and consignment companies worked through their death piles of cards and listings and all the important people at these companies made lots of money.
Meanwhile lots of speculators who received their graded cards were disappointed because they speculated in some second-rate rookie backup player because that’s what sports card influencers told them to do, and the prices crashed after the weirdness of spring/summer 2020. Or people bought cards at peak 2020 prices and cut their losses in early 2021…or bought in early 2021 and cut their losses in 2022. Some cards went up too, it’s not all down. In fact, the National show set attendance records for the third year in a row and new sets continue to be produced at a feverish pace, hundreds of sets each year. There are more quality niche sets than there were before the pandemic — European soccer, wrestling, women’s sports. There are always bargains to be found when people sell cards at auction, no matter how they do it.
The consignment site I use runs a big Black Friday promotion every year. I have slowed down my buying a little bit since my Chicago trip and considering running a large sale — 50% or maybe higher. Not a panic sale or anything like that, just trying to use common sense about my scavenging life. My inventory there has grown pretty sizable, and once you get big enough, you can experiment. Worst case, everything sells and I have enough money to do some cool stuff. Isn’t that what life is really about?
And there will always be more stuff to buy.
What a cool piece! You have the best flea market near you. Any idea where the seller got all this stuff or was he too in the clouds to have much of a conversation?
I have been thinking about trying Promoted Listings Advanced too, because of the promotion on fees. That’s how I got started on regular promoted listings and I got hooked pretty quickly. Believe it or not, two years ago I wasn’t doing promoted listings at all. What percentage do you use on promoted listings and do you promote all your listings or only some of them?
You should be at 1000 listings before Halloween at the rate you’re going. Keep it up!
Sorry about the negative feedback monster. I think we are too small of a forum to have someone troll us. Remember that anyone in the world (relatively speaking) can sign up for eBay and that includes every weird person you have ever met.
I have had some weird negative feedback this year too. Fortunately it is pretty easy to get these things removed or revised. Sometimes the people who leave the weirdest feedback don’t realize what a negative truly means to a good eBay seller, maybe don’t even realize that eBay is a collection of sellers big and small and not just one giant warehouse. Then once I explain how disappointed I am (and fix their problem, this is the actual important part, you can’t just troll the person back), they become a normal person again and everyone is happy, even me who is now slightly poorer from giving the buyer a refund.
Great sale on the Porcelain! I mean…not in terms of profit (don’t worry, we’ve all been there)…but you handled everything else as perfectly as you could.
I get 2 or 3 sales out of every 100 where the buyer sends a counteroffer to my counteroffer…and then buys at full price (even above my counter) before I can accept their offer. I think FOMO can be very real for serious eBay buyers. I had an instance of this last night when the great Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus died, and within an hour, the three cards I had of him all sold. If these buyers could just wait a month, Butkus will be out of the news and his prices will drop back down. (With rare exceptions — Kobe Bryant cards, for example, are way more expensive since he died so young) But, hey, I’ll take the few extra bucks where I can.
I didn’t know there were still junk drawer lots around! Those used to be huge back in the day…sports cards had an equivalent called mystery packs. They’re not a good deal generally speaking, but every so often you find something cool in between all the other stuff. I guess buying poorly described lot listings (how I get about 25% of my inventory) is a version of a junk drawer lot. As long as eBay resembles its current form, these types of deals will be out there because of all the people who want to sell their stuff in one shit and just be done with it.
Still in awe of your numbers…scavenging, listing, premium hoarder haul, you name it. Really giving me something to aspire towards in terms of what my scavenging life could look like in two or three years once I’m settled somewhere that’s not the expensive Northeast…
Really seems like you hit the jackpot in almost every way possible with this hoarder haul. Couldn’t have worked out better the way they’re selling everything to you, and it works out for them because they know they have a buyer for most of the stuff. Have they connected with anyone else to pick the stuff that you’re not interested in or don’t want to deal with, or are you buying basically all of it just in stages over the next few months?
This week was a nice reminder how experimenting with your eBay store can pay off. I had a rare week where my sales were higher than they were last year. This should not happen since my eBay store is 1/3 the size of what it was last year. But I started running auctions this year and I’ve started to get the hang of how to sell more than 1 out of every 10. I’ve been running them twice a month lately — basically have them start and end the first and last week of the month.
I sold 38 listings at auction last week (out of 250 auctions total) and then 5 of the unsold listings sold in the first few days after I relisted them as BIN/BO in my store. I like the routine. The last two auction batches I’ve run, every auction was paid for by Wednesday. It was a couple days where shipping was annoying, but I had a nice extra pile of cash and a little more structure to my scavenging life. If I’m selling 40 items on an auction, then I’d better make sure I’ve got 40 quality listings in the pipeline ready to go. I actually have more than that right now, so it will be time to hunker down over the next few days and get photographing and listings.
9/24/2023 to 9/30/2023
Items sold: 60 (38 via auction, 13 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 13 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2368.28 (up 52% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1533.90 (up 42% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $39.47 (down 29% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $176.64 — Quartetto Italiano 37 CD box set
One of many great finds from my Chicago haul. Finishing up a post to close the story of that trip this weekend, including all kinds of numbers. Then it’s time to find a new scavenging travel adventure!
Lowest price sold (net): $-4.20— Let the Doors be Made of Iron (prison documentary) DVD
A $1 thrift store find about the history of the local Eastern State Penitentiary, which is now better known as a haunted house around this time of year. Would have been a $30 sale but the buyer said the DVD didn’t play, so I refunded and moved on with my life.
Every time I see your posts, I am amazed at the profits you make from these discontinued or seasonal items from Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn etc. Really interesting.
That lucky guardian is absolutely terrifying. But I’m sure to someone it’s beautiful. I will keep my fingers crossed for you no returns, no returns, no returns.
The Harley jacket and Bills coat are such nice items, like the perfect example of what it means to be a scavenger. What a great return on your $5!
That Max Headroom badge is one of my favorite items you’ve ever sold. I agree with you completely, once you get to a point where you have a sizable inventory, everyone’s store should have a few items that are in there for love and not money. Maybe you make $5 if they sell, but more importantly, you list them because you know that some buyer is gonna be really, really happy when they get your package in their mailbox. Love those buyers!
Wow, that Warhol sale is just incredible. Congratulations! It’s another example of why we’re all still posting in these forums. Always new things to learn about and new stories to tell. Did the bidding war happen towards the very end of the auction? What a thrill!
