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The town I live in has a little coffee shop which was converted from an old train station. You would never know it from the set up if it weren’t for the plaque on the outside.
I don’t remember if we have ever discussed this but how do you store your inventory? You get some cool stuff and a lot of is decent sized. Do you have a shed like J&R?
You aren’t kidding about poor picture quality, this is like amateur hour. That is kind of charming in its own way though, and I can see what you mean about the potential for hidden gems. Especially compared to a lot of the other auctions in my area on the site, which are downsizing or seller managed. Even a few reseller auctions. I guess it’s good that they come right out and say reseller auction, though.
I may need to make checking Maxsold a part of my weekly scavenging routine, it kind of scratches that yard sale itch without as much time investment.
I have never been on a scavenging trip where everything is for sale, everything must go, but now that’s on my bucket list if you will. Sounds like a lot of fun as long as the place has some character.
The pictures of your old bowling alley did give me the heebie jeebies a bit. Particularly the back area with the pins. I did find it kind of funny that they did their “investigation” with the managers hanging out in their offices. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
I think I may continue this trend of hitting some sales in my short loop before the family wakes up, come home to cook breakfast, then go hit the longer loop of my yard sale path with the fam once baseball is over.
I have a little routine when I go into my favorite thrift store in Philly where I spend an hour or two in the store, I get at least one book to read on top of whatever else I buy, I go sit in the park and read for a while, I get a smoothie and I grab a too good to go bag from Le Pain Quotidien or Reading Terminal before I get back on the train. Its a nice life. Scavenging routines are the best.
You are really doing great with listing these unique high dollar items lately. I am excited to see them sell for you over the rest of the year and beyond.
It’s funny how this goes but my week went in like a lamb and out like a lion. I actually had no sales at all last Monday, not even an offer. I tried restarting the computer, turning it off and on, I threw it out the window, offered a sacrifice to the eBay gods, still nothing. Tuesday and Wednesday were more normal but Thursday and Friday were also very slow.
But shipping this weekend’s packages was annoying. In fact, I have a few more to do later this morning. What could have been the cause of this sudden uptick in sales? Well, I’d like to blame eBay. But here are my newest listings by age:
12 days old: 3
11 days old: 0
10 days old: 3
9 days old: 7
8 days old: 8
7 days old: 1
6 days old: 2
5 days old: 1
4 days old: 3
3 days old: 5
2 days old: 21
1 day old: 9
It is very boring advice, but list more, sell more still works.
I don’t know if I will ever get bored with the cards, mostly because certain cards I can really understand why they’re valuable to different collectors and I love finding them for a low price so I can make a profit and the buyer is not spending hundreds from some unscrupulous dealer. But I expect at some point — 5 years? 10 years? — that something else will become my main focus. Maybe it’s because Fanatics buys up too many companies and becomes a monopoly, maybe sports collectors move on to VR experiences or some product that doesn’t exist yet. But cards have been around for 100+ years and desirable as collectibles for most of the last 40 (!), so maybe not.
As soon as I saw that Krog Street Underpass DVD, I knew it would sell well. It sold in less than a day so maybe I could have priced it higher. But I have a hard time asking more than $50 for a single DVD. I’m sure I’ll get over that someday. The teenage punk side of me was thrilled with that sale. The child side of me understands why someone would pay $30 for the original Reading Rainbow DVDs, even if LeVar was much better at hosting that show than Jeopardy.
One of the best things about your scavenger manifesto was the realization that I could just begin selling. People psych themselves out of so many things in life. But selling on eBay can start very simply. Scavenge your own life. Just sell the stuff in the back of your closet. It gets more complicated building a business, but step one of the process is often the one that stops people. Both with eBay and in life…
As an eBay buyer, I find its pretty rare in general to find sellers who seem to really know what they have and how to sell it to me. Lots of low effort.
It can get easy to focus on how much competition there is on eBay, race to the bottom and all that, but thinking about it from the optimistic POV that you and Ryanne had with the podcast, knowledge is really one of our biggest advantages as scavengers. Or it can be. Years ago, maybe you would show that knowledge with a long description full of backstory about the item. eBay was different back then. Now I think you can demonstrate your knowledge with a good title, good price and most importantly — quality items.
Nighttime numbers thread? Well look who’s gonna post their numbers first this week for once…
Congratulations on the mini laundromat in progress. It is always inspiring to see how you and Ryanne adapt to make better use of your space and time. Kind of surprised to learn that you had been doing all that laundry and linens in such a small area. Reminds me of the early podcast days before you two had help and were still taking pictures and doing everything from listing to shipping completely on your own. I remember Jay even said a few times, I can’t imagine not taking the pictures or having someone else help us, how it would even work. Something like that. Amazing how things can change!
My eBay business is going through its own changes. I’ve developed new systems this year for buying, photographing, and listing, and expanded into different areas while maintaining my core business. I think my business is a lot more sustainable long-term than it was a year or two ago. I have a better eye for items which sell quickly and figuring out the right price range for items. Also developed a sense for listings which I can sell similar again and again. It’s still buy low, sell high but with a little more intention behind what I’m listing and each step of my selling process.
5/14/2023 to 5/20/2023
Items sold: 30 (22 via best offer, 13 via seller initiated offer, 11 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1195.86 (down 59% from one year ago)
Net sales: $711.70 (down 60% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $39.86 (down 14% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $62.46 — John Lynch and Mike Alstott Panini Absolute autographed card red #/75
I had no high dollar sales this week, but this was the second of two copies that I sold of this card in about ten days and I have one more left in a different color. These two players were long time teammates on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, so I can understand why a certain collector would pay $50 for a card with both their autographs. I’ve focused a lot more on these types of cards this year since their values are a little more fixed.
My favorite weird item that sold this week was this $40 graffiti DVD
Lowest price sold (net): -$9.59— Noir DVD box set
Buyer claimed this DVD set was damaged and sent pictures of the damage. It was a $20 sale and I’d profited on the buy a long time ago, so I sent them a nice message, a full refund and called it a day. Even with this refund, movies & DVDs were 13% of my sales this week. In fact, 44% of my sales came from categories other than trading card singles which is probably a new record for me. Hopefully a record that will get broken this week or next as I continue to reshape my store.
I had been envying that gelato maker since you first posted about it. Glad you got to test it out before sending it on its way. I love to cook and have been getting into desserts a little, but I wouldn’t be able to pass up that profit either.
Haunted bowling alley sounds like a fun low stakes trip or a terrible premise for a youtube hustle video, take your pick. It’s a strange world either way when you can buy a nice item like that for all of $2.
Smartwool socks are one of my earliest memories from this podcast where I thought, these seem like my kind of people. They really are great socks.
I went back to the thrift shop the next day to see if they had the knives and forks- no luck.
Never works out like that, does it? I bought a nice 27 disc DVD set of Bergerac for a few dollars last week, only to realize when I got home that the set was missing 1 volume (3 discs). Went back to the shop this past weekend but all I found were some old workout DVDs and a dinged up copy of Starship Troopers.
Anyone have a story with a happy ending, a return trip where you found the item that was missing?
Nice finds this week @lukastreasuretrove
I signed up for maxsold at some point, but anytime I glance at their emails it all looks like junk to me. Same with Goodwill finds. Maybe worth a second look, though.
I don’t know why there is such a market for framed menus, are people hanging those on walls? But I looked up Eugene Savage menus and I have to admit, if you’re gonna spend a few hundred bucks on some old menus, his are pretty nice!
I have been feeling lately like the Amazon people make scavenging a little easier, which seems counterintuitive, but they’re all competing for the same books they can scan until they hear their dumb cha-ching sound. So the weird and unusual stuff is mostly untouched, or at least, that’s how it’s gone at most of the sales I’ve hit recently. It feels like a change from 3-4 years ago. Maybe I’m just describing scavenging, and this was also the case 10+ years ago before the rise of book scanning, and 20+ years ago when selling online was in its relative infancy. People flock to certain types of items and things slip through the cracks, and that’s where we come in.
When I was in my early-mid 20s, a friend of mine gave me a pair of his old Red Wings. I’m in my mid 30s now and still have those boots, and they are great especially in winter. $150 is almost a bargain for how good they are, especially considering that same $150 only buys (1) Mr. Christmas Stepping Mickey. Disney people are great, though. Love em (and their wallets).
Some of the stuff that people build with Legos is amazing. Truly art. Like this stadium, for example.
I think you’re right that a lot of sellers lose steam after a big event happens in their life and don’t get it back for a while or never get it back and move on to other things. I wonder often if that would have happened to me if I had never found your podcast. After all, how many people really make a go of it selling on eBay and stick with it? There’s a reason a lot of the Youtube gurus are focused on clicks and courses and discord and bots and all that stuff. I’m sure that works for a little while. But something tells me in five years, they’ll have moved on to something else while (I hope) we’re all still here posting about how eBay VR is treating us.
In my experience, lots make the most sense when your market is collectors or maybe certain types of resellers who also collect. That’s not how a lot of clothes reselling works but I think makes sense for DVD, magazine and book buyers, and definitely with collectors of cards and other collectibles like coins and stamps. It is easy to buy a box full of Boston Red Sox cards, there are thousands of listings for lots of Red Sox cards at any given time, but most of them are junk cards from the 1980s (or even more contemporary junk cards — they are called “commons” now since cards are too expensive to be “junk” quality) and I think that’s why my lots have been selling so well. The buyer gets 10 cards and while most of the cards cost me $2 or less, I fill the lots with cards of popular players and hot rookies and star players from years ago. So it’s a curated lot for a more casual collector, but someone who has at least a little knowledge of cards and is a fan of their team.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on the different teams to make the lots, really trying to educate myself. It’s taken some trial and error, but it’s nice to see how quickly it’s turned into a pipeline. For example: I have 12 packages to ship tomorrow, and 5 of them are my small team lots. 2 of them (Philly Eagles and San Fran 49ers) I have sold multiple lots of the team in the last few weeks. Each lot is between $8 to $15 in profit, and what’s interesting is I’m not sure I would make that much if I sold the cards individually on eBay or consignment. They are worth more together than as individual cards. I think I have developed a good system to restock the lots where the profit is consistent. Still a few more months to get the listings (and my inventory) built up where I have a lot for every team in every sport, but I’m getting there. Not sure I’ll make these forever, but right now I’m really enjoying them. Love when they sell, a nice thick envelope goes in the outgoing mail and I put another lot on the desk to get scanned and listed.
I have been picking up magazines here and there, and I really enjoy them too. Easy to store and ship and it’s interesting to see the old advertisements and the way print has changed. Whenever I find some old media, it makes me think that part of our job as scavengers is saving treasures from getting lost forever by getting them into the hands of someone who cares about them.
Yeah, I am home again for about a month now and getting back to the routine in the last few weeks after a while of just going through the motions. I was barely even posting here and I missed it. It feels good to get back to the work, I have a little bit of a new energy since things were not normal for so long. It should be a fun summer of continuing to tweak the store and shape it in ways that I like.
The lot listings are fun to make. I have done them here and there in the past, but never consistently. I had a lot of hours to think with all the time spent with my grandfather and driving to and from seeing him. Mostly I was spending that time collecting life, but occasionally I had some eBay ideas and it’s nice to start to put them into action. It took some tweaking to figure out the best strategy to create these lots so they sell somewhat quickly and so I can reload them once they sell, and still make a profit. But now I am full steam ahead with these types of listings. Spent quite a bit of time sorting my inventory boxes so I can potentially make one for every team in every sport and file it away into the appropriate box until it sells.
I would say about half of these lots sell to a buyer in the same state as the team. So probably a casual collector buying a few cards of their favorite team or favorite players. Each one brings me an $8 to $15 profit, which can really start to add up when I sell 5 or 6 in a weekend like I did this weekend. The popular teams can sell very fast, for example I’ve sold 4 New York Yankees lots since April and 3 San Francisco 49ers.
Also sold a magazine lot and poetry lot in the last week or two, so this method of selling has been very profitable for me lately.
Amazing week of sales. Really exciting to see your big investment pay off so quickly. Hope the sales keep coming!
