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I used to work with the guy who was doing the sale. The stuff is from a relative that passed. And older man who had obscene amounts of money and was addicted to buying clothes/shoes and jewelry. They are looking to offload everything if possible. The crazy part – what I saw is only about 10% of what is available!!! Everything else is at another house that is packed full.
they took the jewelry collection to a jeweler and offloaded everything for $70k. I bet that jeweler took them to the cleaners.
This is one of the things about the scavenging world that makes me a little sad — especially with the amount of money we’re talking about! — but then think about it from the perspective of the living, the family members of the deceased relative. Obviously you will be doing them a huge service by buying up all this stuff in one shot, even the jeweler was, and while that family probably doesn’t lack for me, an extra $70K is meaningful to most people. And of course reading about your finds is one of the best parts of this forum, I just hope that there is a Ralph Lauren bear sweater in there for you somewhere. I don’t know clothes at all (though I’ve learned quite a bit from your posts), but I still know that’s a nice find.
I haven’t made it live yet, but one of the items was a sealed Queer as Folk complete DVD set.
Assuming it’s this 28 disc set, I think you’re right on the mark pricing somewhere in the range of $250 and $399. I tend to go on the low end of comps with most media listings because you never know if something will get a physical reissue or plastered all over every streaming platform, but the old out of print stuff I always price high. Especially sealed. I will be interested to see if your set sells internationally, a lot of my high end media listings end up overseas.
This is an all-time great scavenging story. Can’t wait to see what Round 2 brings you. just amazing what people are willing to practically give away…
Congrats on the slow and steady progress with your listings. That’s the best kind of progress because it’s what is most sustainable.
I feel you on listing a lot of lower dollar items, I spent a good year or two in that slog and would probably still be there if it weren’t for being able to sell a lot of my trading cards on consignment. It is definitely not exciting. But you create so many more options to move inventory when you have more items in your store — you can lot things up, send them to auction, lower prices. All these methods work the same way as “tricks” like consistently listing new items and sell similar on old items.
I ran a quick 5 day auction batch to end last Monday the 19th, so my numbers this week are split almost equally down the middle between auction and fixed price. I usually run 10 day auctions at the end of the month, so it was interesting to run a 5 day auction and compare. Maybe 10% lower sales than a 10 day auction batch, but no huge discrepancies. Fits nicely with the theory I developed this year that some eBay users use the site a few times a month to casually browse auctions.
6/18/2023 to 6/24/2023
Items sold: 58 (34 via auction, 11 via best offer, 9 via seller initiated offer, 21 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2376.96 (up 28% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1594.24 (up 21% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $40.98 (down 31% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $107.11— Amazing Spiderman 2011 Marvel Comic Cuts panel card /80
This was all Terapeak and doing the research on a poorly listed auction, then patience flipping using BIN/BO. I received a number of offers below $100 before this buyer finally accepted my offer of $119.99 (20% off the BIN of $149.99). I was never into comic books and don’t have much more knowledge about them than the average scavenger. I have three or four of these cards from the same set (all purchased around $20 each) and this is the first that sold. Similar comic cut panel cards from other official Marvel trading card sets are not worth nearly as much, so this set must have focused on a very popular issue or character.
Lowest price sold (net): $5.50 — Herbert Hoover Washington Nationals bobblehead
I won maybe 6 or 7 of these bobbleheads from the same seller last year for the $0.99 start bid, and with combined shipping they probably cost $3 each, so…hurray for profit? I did sell one or two of the other bobbleheads in the $20 range, and one bobblehead cost me about $20 because it was autographed but will eventually sell in the $50 to $75 range. So I guess I’d buy all this stuff again even though it was bulky and not worth a lot. Fun to branch out a bit from the usual stuff at least.
Gerulaitis’s death was what convinced me to bid as high as I did, he preceded the sports memorabilia craze so this felt like a unique item for a tennis collector.
I did a Terapeak search on engineer’s hammers since I’d never seen one before, and it’s interesting to see all the different types from vintage to modern. There’s a little antique shop in my small town and another the next town over, and looking at all these hammers made me want to stop by both of them on the next rainy day and browse for a bit.
Did you find out why they were selling 250 new with tags scrubs at a yard sale? Such an inefficient way to move clothing in that quantity…but I always have to remind myself, not everyone is a scavenger or interested in selling things online. Great find!
Those prints are very cool, no idea whether they will sell for $91 or $19 but it will be fun to find out. There are enough watchers on other Don Freeman lithographs and drawings that I think you’ll do well. If you had a local auction house like @antique-frog the sale would happen so much quicker and you would have had an outlet to sell the nude ones as well
I did the old sell similar trick on pre-2023 listings and got to make over 20 offers in the next day or two.
Quoting for emphasis sake, for those of you where sales are slow. Don’t let those old listings die in eBay purgatory, folks, especially when it’s so easy to bring them back to life!
Congrats on 700 listings @ChristineR and keep making progress on those piles. I have been doing the same thing over the last month or two and it’s been really exciting to reclaim space for new inventory.
It’s great to se your numbers, I hope you continue posting. Those are really impressive numbers across the board and I’m looking forward to seeing how your sales figures change and grow especially as we enter the busy season in a few months
Too quiet in the forums this week. I hope everyone is doing well. I had a busy week of sales in terms of size and weight — lots of flat rate boxes and heavy packages — mostly thanks to a few repeat customers.
6/11/2023 to 6/17/2023
Items sold: 27 (22 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 18 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1503.52 (down 28% from one year ago)
Net sales: $977.35 (down 34% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $55.69 (up 6% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $372.29— Mixed lot of graded and encased cards plus mixed lot of encapsulated and uncirculated cards
Both to the same buyer, who was very friendly and sent me pictures after he received the 15+ pound package from me plus a little package with some extras. I hope to get him buying from me again. If you’re not familiar with modern trading cards, these listings should give you a good idea what to look for if you ever find cards out in the wild. Keep in mind: these are cards that (in my expert opinion) are not worth selling individually!
I also sold a couple flat rate boxes of poetry books to the same buyer, about $40 profit on each, and a different buyer asked me if I could make another box. So that’s my project for this weekend.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.98 — Jalen Wilson PSA certified autograph 8×10 photo
Jalen Wilson was a star basketball player at Kansas who graduated this year and was picked in the second round of the NBA draft by the Brooklyn Nets last night. I must have bought around 100 autographed photos of him that cost me about $2-$3 each, and I’m probably in the profit already. It will be fun to see how long my pipeline of autographed photos continues. If he is a surprise rookie star (there are a few in every sport every year), I will see some good sales of these photos in the fall.
The later sales for the most part stunk, with a few decent things here and there. So…would the later sales been amazing if I went early? Would all the things I bought at the early sales have been gone if I went later?
This is always a question that I think about. Impossible to be in two places at once as a scavenger but a lot of times sales overlap. But making your choice (even if it is to stay in!) and accepting it is part of having a low-stress scavenger’s life. It is hard to remember that when you really want or need to find new inventory, though.
Amazing that you found video game stuff for those prices. If you had a YouTube channel documenting these finds, you’d have a crazy clickbait title just from those two buys. Ironically, you’ll most likely make more profit from the Harley stuff and maybe the Taekwondo equipment. Congrats to the 2 broke homeschoolers for their softball bat find, too.
A good question. It starts with looking through every single one of this seller listings. I could tell these listings weren’t normal cards from the lack of identifying card features (no set name, nothing on the back) and the size of the sketches. Plus I had an inkling about the Sportkings art sketches so did a little research and confirmed that these listings matched sold listings of the art sketches.
A lot of sellers who make mistakes like this would cancel the listing after the end of the auction. But I know this seller doesn’t because of the volume they operate at. Sometimes that means I come out on the losing end (occasionally they mix something up in shipping or something is in worse condition than I expect) but that’s all part of the game, and my experience has been that the small victories (or big ones, in this case) add up to a lot more profit than the few losses.
These are on my desk to be scanned so I hope to get them listed this weekend.
Ikea stuff can be nice flips. I love the way you doubled your money on the Freemason fez hat. Kind of surprising the original buyer didn’t just buy both at the lower price…but that’s the thinking of a collector, not a scavenger.
That’s an amazing looking sewing machine for its age! Great eye. It’s interesting that it sold on Etsy. I have a few friends who use that platform a lot (mostly for vintage clothes and handmade/custom items) and I would never guess that there’s a market for weird old vintage stuff on there, too. But considering the customer base, it makes sense. Great sale!
