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I have been kind of slacking on posting my numbers over the last month, but no better time to get back in the habit than right now. It’s been a bit of a grind so far this year selling on eBay, but my card consignment business numbers have been extremely consistent. A lot of that comes down to optimizing certain processes, for example, the company I use introduced live auctions this year and I submit a consistent number of items to the lives every week. It’s become part of my life. Assuming that doesn’t change, I can throw some extra energy towards figuring out the same thing with eBay.
Organization has been a huge key for me. I have so many less unlisted items and random shipping/storage/collectibles supplies than I did a year ago. It’s been nothing fancy to get to this point, just doing the work week after week.
3/23/2024 to 3/29/2024
Total listings: 322
New listings this week: 27
Items sold: 23 — 11 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 7 via advertising
Gross sales: $998.52 (down 49% from one year ago)
Net sales: $656.55 (down 50% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $43.41 (down 56% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $56.64 net, about $30 after COGS Sadaharu Oh 2000 Baseball Magazine Japanese baseball jersey card
Those name your price sales really grind my gears. But that attitude of “name your price — but only if it’s a high price” is a lot more common than you might think. I’ve seen it a bunch of times at random thrift stores, card shows, even media sales with “special” items. It’s the downside of having a computer in our pocket at all times. You don’t even need to care in order to sell stuff anymore. Fortunately the weirdos who don’t want to price anything are more than offset by those lovely folks who underprice their things.
Those jeans look real nice. I’m a broken record here, but it’s such a learning experience seeing your posts and the types of unique items which sell for you. I’m filing away this knowledge for future scavenging trips. It’s nice to see that these quality clothing items are still selling for strong prices.
Christine, I love that espresso cup set. I don’t know anything much about china beyond what I’ve learned from yours and Sharyn’s posts, but even I can tell that’s a nice pattern! $65 too, nice sale.
Those stuffed Hansa dolls are wild. Best part about finding them: if those sales get you motivated to do some spring cleaning, that’s priceless! Definitely want to get yourself at least enough space where you could pounce on a scavenging opportunity like that. I know you can do it…and probably a lot faster than you think!
Christine, I’m glad that I seem like I have my business under control! I’ve certainly learned a lot about managing my inventory and inventory space over the last year. One of the things I enjoy most about reselling is how it’s a constant learning process. If you want to learn a niche badly enough and you’re willing to put in the time, you can become an expert on almost anything. And you never know what you’re going to find and where you’ll find it!
But understanding (and accepting) my own tendencies has led to the biggest growth for my business, by far. Pricing is the biggest factor, and figuring out how to use different platforms to their fullest potential is huge as well. But there are some other factors which have helped make me a little bit more profit, or keep a little more money in my pocket. For me personally, I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter how valuable something is if I’m not going to list it for months and months and I don’t have the space for large long-tail items. Figuring out these small marginal advantages is a constant learning process, and it helps make the inevitable slow weeks a little more tolerable.
Love those jeans and boots sales. Those prices are amazing! But obviously that Raisins costume is sale of the week. The hair is in incredible condition for its age!
@Christine Baseball just around the corner too. Baseball has always been the sport I know best, so I’m hoping I can really move some cards over the next few months. I’d love to clear out even more inventory this spring than I did last spring and summer.
I wouldn’t have ever guessed that home decor is popular in March or April, but I guess it makes sense if most people’s “normal” is spring cleaning.
That painting and the Lisa Frank clipboard are visually so striking. And both sold for like 2-3 times what I would have guessed. Great sales!
@Sharyn I have always had great experiences with Shop Airlines and other freight forwarders for many years now. Freight forwarders and US mailboxes are big in the trading card world since there are a lot of deep pocket card buyers in Asia (mostly China and Japan) and to a lesser extent, Australia and Europe. Similar to Global Shipping, seller protection covers you as soon as the item gets to the US address. I don’t know how big a customer base Shop Airlines America has anymore, but good to see them still hanging around.
@jaepete I don’t really know anything about cars, let alone car parts, but new old stock is like music to my ears. Pretty great score if you’re up $200 after fees already! How do you handle storage on these parts? In my mind, car parts would be easy to mix up but if you have the original packaging, that makes the whole thing a lot easier.
@ChristineR That sounds like the dream estate sale company honestly! If you start getting deals from them regularly, that might make it easy to get in a groove with creating new listings…
Sharyn, I do think going the extra mile for buyers pays off, whether that’s ridiculously good packaging, little freebies, quality description, whatever your little extra is. Don’t expect it will get us a repeat customer for life or even get a feedback comment from most buyers. But I think a small subset of eBay users are like us and intentionally seek out sellers who provide good customer service. That’s become rare now that so much digital interaction is automated or scripted, and especially now that reselling has become more ubiquitous and some flippers are cynical about buyers or downright hostile. And that’s why I still hang out here and not somewhere like the flipping subreddit!
I’m not a huge horse racing person because I’m an animal lover, but I can appreciate that oil painting. The artist’s style of brushstroke really works for translating horse race scenes to the canvas. Did you know the artist at all before you bought this painting? Or was it a gut feeling, or you just did your research? And how much elbow grease did you have to put into cleaning? Even if that took some time, $6 for two paintings is really a steal!
Yeah Christine, as you know I’ve been doing sell similar every month or so for the last few months, and I see a bump in sales just from that. But I don’t think it’s just the sell similar effect. I also bump the promoted listings to 5%. I only promote about 25% of newly created listings (basically anything bulky or that I want to sell right now) and everything else gets promoted when I do sell similar. I don’t know if it’s the perfect formula, but it works for me and it’s pretty easy to do it like once a month.
Oh, here’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask you about your repricing. How do you have your offers set up? Do you set your minimum offers at a standard amount (like minimum 50% of buy it now price) or is it random depending on the item, price, etc?
One thing that I do which really speeds up repricing for me is that I have pricing/offer tiers which I stick with. So for example, lowest priced listings in my store are $19.99 BIN and my minimum offer that I’ll consider is $12. Next level up is $29.99 with an $18 minimum offer. Then $39.99 with 25, and so on from there. If I price an item at $29.99, the minimum is always $18 no matter what. If I reprice it down to $19.99, the minimum will be $12.
I’ve found that this really speeds up pricing decisions for me, and it also makes repricing and sell similar so much easier. I have never done auto accept because I like to negotiate, but I’m sure that would work well for some people with a large store or if they just don’t like negotiating. What’s funny is whenever I do the sell similar process, inevitably I will get offers on listings that had been sitting in my store for a month, or longer, with no offers or no offers I was happy with. But something about doing sell similar and seeing an offer come in the next day…at that point, I don’t even think about negotiating, I’m just like…yes I will take your money, thank you very much.
Sometimes our perfect buyers are just not on eBay all the time and are going to send one offer and that’s it…and their money is as good as anyone’s.
Sharyn, Those are some nice profit margins and cool story on the old phone. How much time and energy does it take you to ship these plates and mugs to one buyer? I love weird and old kitchen stuff. But shipping it seems daunting. I suppose it’s really no different from any other breakable, though.
That facebook marketplace deal sounds exhausting. It is why I don’t meet up in parking lots to sell cards (or other stuff) anymore, lol.
But $200 profit is not a bad trip. How much time and effort are you putting into refurbishing the nintendos? That ability to fix stuff (or “fix”, sometimes it takes like thirty seconds because the original seller wasn’t handy) is what separates scavengers from jokers.
As someone who used to sell a good amount of media items and still dabbles when it makes sense (RIP Newberry Library sale)…unless you’re going to miss the $200 terribly, or you have severe space limitations like I do, I say go for it. It only takes a few $50+ discs with moderate scratches to cover the initial investment of a resurfacer, and as far as I know, every good resurfacer works on video games, cd’s, dvd’s. So you should get some use out of it.
I think about it like this…is there any equipment that any of you have purchased for your reselling business that you regret buying? I took way too long to get a Dymo label printer, but I can’t imagine life without one. Same thing with every time I stock up on a particular shipping supply that I use. Worst case, you sell off the used machine for something close to what you paid for it.
Heck, there are sellers who have mail-in resurfacing listings, send them your scratched discs, and they will send you back clean ones. That doesn’t sound like a ton of fun to me for about $8 net after fees and return shipping…but do that 210 times (as this seller did) and you’ve got a few grand in the bank for very little actual work.
We must be passing germs around the forums because I have also been feeling a bit under the weather the last few days. And I don’t get sick very often. Fortunately, I think I am on the mend. This couldn’t come at a better time because I ran 275 of my eBay listings as auctions which ended last night. So I have quite a few packages to get mailed out over the next few days.
The auctions went well, maybe slightly above my expectations, and I’m planning on trying another batch the week after the Super Bowl if I’m feeling better by then, or the end of the month if I’m a little slower to heal. I’ll have those auction numbers plus some thoughts on the state of auctions in next week’s thread.
1/26/2024 to 2/3/2024
Total listings: 234
Before writing this post, I returned the majority of unsold auctions to my store inventory at their original BINs or close to it. I do it by price range. I still have 84 unsold auctions to return to inventory. Probably tomorrow. It’s all my cheap stuff, so I want to go through and remove the listings that I don’t think are going to sell. I’m happier when I’m evaluating my inventory regularly instead of letting it sit, sit, sit and things get too cluttered.
New listings this week: 24
Items sold: 19 — 11 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 12 via advertising
Gross sales: $954.75 (down 33% from one year ago)
Net sales: $518.16 (down 40% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $50.25 (up 16% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $133.54 net, about $95 after COGS Jayden Daniels 1/1 2024 Pro Set fire SGC 9 mint
