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Wow, that’s an amazing score! Scavenge of the year contender, for sure. I’m not shocked that people were bidding up the firearms books, but really surprised that every one of them passed up these other collectible books. Especially with old catalogs in there. $2 for 5 boxes!!! Unreal. I can’t wait to see the stuff you sell…
A couple weeks worth of numbers here as I try and get back to an eBay routine. It’s amazing what eBay can provide even when you don’t have a lot of time for it. I haven’t had as much time as I would like this month to branch out from my individual trading card listings, but I add new listings every day or two from my backlog of photographed items, and these last few weeks had 1 or 2 sales from listings in other categories. Nice to see.
3/5/2023 to 3/11/2023
Items sold: 21 (12 via best offer, 9 via seller initiated offer, 12 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $998.90 (down 59% from one year ago)
Net sales: $673.82 (down 62% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $47.57 (down 6% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $121.09— Malik Monk 2017-18 Panini Dominion gold autographed patch rookie card #01/10
Lowest price sold (net): $16.01— 10 card lot of Atlanta Falcons football cards
3/12/2023 to 3/18/2023
Items sold: 26 (14 via best offer, 11 via seller initiated offer, 15 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1874.15 (down 24% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1308.76 (down 21% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $72.08 (up 39% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $196.97— Ja Morant 2019 Panini Prizm Draft red black snakeskin shortprint PSA 9
Lowest price sold (net): $11.47— St. Louis Cardinals Topps Museum 4 player jersey card
Also very late to the party because of non-eBay stuff kicking my butt. Seems to be going around this community right now. Must be contagious. Hope everyone else is taking time for themselves and doing well.
In happier news, a nice week of sales to report here. Running 400 auctions will boost your numbers nicely, but I hit the $1000 benchmark even without the auctions. Thankful again to have built up such a robust trading card inventory during the pandemic. It’s a nice fallback when life gets hectic.
2/26/2023 to 3/4/2023
Total items in store: 410 BIN/BO, 0 auction, 410 total
Items sold: 47 (34 via auction, 10 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 11 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2536.87 (down 18% from one year ago, $1349.28 via auction, $1187.59 via fixed price)
Net sales: $1719.69 (down 23% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $53.98 (down 4% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $145.58— Julius Randle 2014-15 Panini Select tie dye prizm RC #03/25 PSA 9
Julius Randle is one of the best players on the Knicks, who are doing well this year, but last year both he and the team struggled through the basketball season. I picked up a few of his cards then since I figured there was nowhere to go but up, and I’ve been cashing out on them over the last few months.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.98— Taylor Lewan unnumbered autographed rookie card from 2014 Panini Rookies and Stars set
Lewan, a star offensive lineman, was recently released from his longtime team the Tennessee Titans, and it’s an open question if he’ll move to another team because of injuries. I had a few sales of his autographs over the week, and I think all of them shipped to either Tennessee (his pro team) or Michigan (college). Fandom can be very nostalgic. This was an auction sale with a minimum bid of $9.99, it had been listed in my store at $19.99 for quite a while. I don’t list many items at that price point anymore, but it was still profit as I only paid around $2 for the card.
One of the first places I ever scavenged was the Princeton Record Exchange, digging through boxes and crates of used CDs. I haven’t been there in a few years and really need to make a trip for nostalgia reasons!
Princeton is absolutely the kind of area where Too Good to Go might get really popular. I think your suspicions about some places using TGTG for advertising are spot-on, at least in suburban areas if it’s a business which doesn’t have a lot of food waste. I think almost every bakery and bagel shop and pizza place would benefit from using TGTG, just in terms of cutting down food waste and making a very few bucks in the process. Restaurants and other places, I think it depends.
But some of those places offer incredible deals. There is one specific restaurant in Philly which I make a habit of going to because you get a whole huge meal for $6 and it’s delicious. But my favorite is an artisan chocolate shop near me which gives out a few bags every week at the same time on the same day. I am not a big sweets person but these are good quality chocolates. A lot of their chocolates have some corporate branding on them (like for apartment buildings or real estate companies) or they are a little imperfect (in the spirit of TGTG) but still delicious. I would never know about this shop otherwise, would just walk right past it, but it has changed me. Good chocolate (like coffee and some other things) is worth paying for.
One of the things I love most about the auctions is how consistent they are. I set my opening bid price at about half of my BIN price, and while it’s always a mystery which specific items will sell, it’s fairly consistent that about 10% sell. From this most recent batch, the auctions which ended on Sunday, 13 listings sold out of 150, and for the ones ending yesterday, 21 sold out of 250. January I had exactly 50 sell out of 500, with Monday also performing better. Not sure if that is a coincidence or not, but something I’ll have to think about.
Something else I like about these auctions is that when I relist the items to my store, sometimes they sell. In fact, I had two sales like that yesterday, and both items sold for higher than the minimum bid price. Just another reminder that this is more of an art than a science. But it’s always a good feeling when things sell. I had more sales yesterday than I did all last week. It’s a different way of selling than list and forget until you hear the cha-ching sound a few times a day, but it’s a big confidence boost to experiment and see things work out well. A reminder that we can try different things whenever we want, keep what we like and tweak until we have a workflow that we’re happy with.
I did some digging last night after I saw your post, because I got curious whether eBay had ever done layoffs before. In fact they laid off more workers in 2008 citing the economy that time. And compared to Amazon’s layoffs, eBay’s are small. So not sure this is much to worry about, though of course it’s a shame for those employees and the sad reality of corporate capitalism.
I also found a discussion thread about the layoffs on the eBay forums which was started by none other than our old friend MyCottage. Come back MyCottage!
I have been posting my numbers very last minute the last few weeks, so let’s break that habit and get them done earlier. Easy to do when sales are as slow as they were last week!
But that will happen when 0 items over $100 sell. Plus my monthly auctions, which will reflect in next week’s numbers, did great this time around and I still have 150 more auctions which close tonight. Use up those free auction listings if you have collectibles items, folks. Even if it means setting minimum bids at half your buy it now, which is what I do. Trading cards are the most popular category for auctions, so I am “lucky” in that sense, but I think there are a lot of buyers who like bidding and trying to win as opposed to the one-click buy-now mentality that exists on basically every other marketplace platform.
2/19/2023 to 2/25/2023
Total items in store: 301 BIN/BO, 150 auction, 451 total
Items sold: 15 (11 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 7 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $727.76 (down 77% from one year ago)
Net sales: $494.20 (down 78% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $48.52 (down 9% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $64.93— Jessie Diggins 2018 Topps Olympics nordic skiing autograph
Lowest price sold (net): $13.17— Jake Daubert 2012 National Treasures bat card ##/99 — second week in a row that a Jake Daubert bat card is my low price sale…you love to see a pipeline of consistent sales like this!
It’s always so interesting to think about how we break down our numbers…my numbers look terrible on the surface compared to a year ago, but because I’m selling on another platform, things are fine. And even within eBay, sales are pretty strong…I’m down 11% compared to last month and 15% compared to last quarter, but that’s all within reasonable expectations. I often wonder if this is the case for people who post here every once in a blue moon about how sales are bad, without a lot of details, and then disappear again for a while.
I would definitely not go as far as to transfer the info to the description for 12,000 (or even 1,200) listings. As long as relevant condition info is somewhere in the listing, and consistent with the item specifics you select, you’ll be covered as far as any potential returns or INAD cases go. And most buyers don’t read the item description anyway. 🙂
Great info as always in your posts. My own experience mostly tracks yours as far as the relative value of listing in batches, which was my modus operandi for a few years, versus listing daily as I’ve been doing for the last year or so. I’m just not sure how much it really matters! I’ve found that listing regularly makes me feel like I have more control over my business and my sales, something that was (in my opinion) one of the most important lessons that I learned from the podcast. There are a lot of people who resell full-time and are absolutely miserable and stressed out doing it, and if I’m not listing and my listings aren’t selling, I can find myself in that place pretty easily. It’s less common now that I use multiple platforms to sell but it’s still possible to overanalyze and get myself there.
I’m very uncertain about how much of an impact traffic and impressions have on sales, particularly with unique one-off items. I think the buy and hold mentality is a really smart way of looking at any reselling business. One thing I’ve learned with that over the last few years is to be a little more flexible about lowering my best offer threshold or price. And maybe just accept that first offer instead of holding out for a hypothetical offer that’s 10% or $20 higher. Sometimes the first offer is the highest one.
@ChristineR I thought you meant old trading cards, so I got real excited that maybe you were gonna get some steals for cheap or I could pass along my expertise and save you from buying some “old” 1960s cards in crappy condition. Used cars, blah who cares about that. 🙂
I think you’re both right about the high prices, I see this a lot with cards since there was such a renewal of interest in cards during the early part of the pandemic. Mostly from the gamblers but I know that some of the new buyers are people who have disposable income and indulge in their hobby every so often without much consideration for getting a good deal or even what things are generally worth. Also a lot of people in the reselling game who simply don’t have a good sense for business, especially with concepts like selling at a loss or understanding why something is not worth what they thought it might be or what it used to be.
We’ve discussed this before, but if you go to any of the big thrift chains, there are people buying all sorts of things at prices where I would never touch them. There are some great back episodes of the pod where you and Ryanne talk about the different types of buyers at your local auctions, too.
Today is a rare cold day in the Northeast, and I’m planning on spending the majority of the day inside listing. I have my monthly auctions ending tomorrow and Monday, and already have over $700 worth of items with bids, so this batch will be a success even if I receive no last-minute bids. 3 of my 26 sales last week were outside of my usual trading cards — a $23 obscure CD, a $21 Willie Mays Easton Press autobiography, a $24 Brett Favre etched crystal. Plus I sold two 10 card lots of players from the same team — listings that I can create over and over again for minimal investment beyond time. On the next cold or rainy day, I plan on having a nice marathon creating these lot listings.
My store is changing rapidly, and it’s a lot of fun when it’s going well like this. Maybe March will be very slow, but I’m hopeful a big listing weekend will keep the sales coming even though my store is teeny-tiny now.
2/12/2023 to 2/18/2023
Total items in store: 270 BIN/BO, 400 auction, 670 total
Items sold: 26 (7 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1600.91 (down 45% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1125.73 (down 43% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $61.57 (up 11% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $258.41— Justin Herbert 2021 Panini Select cosmic prizm card
My second $200+ sale from my 4 card cosmic prizm pack in two weeks! It will also be my last as the other two cards were much less valuable and the cosmic prizm packs sold out within about 20 minutes of their release. Still a nice profit on a pack that cost me the equivalent of about $75.
Lowest price sold (net): $12.19— Jake Daubert 2012 National Treasures bat card ##/99
Jake Daubert played pro baseball so long ago that his primary team was based in Brooklyn…but not the Dodgers, the Superbas. I bought this card on the consignment site I use COMC using credit I’ve earned from sales on that platform, then had it shipped to me (along with many other cards) to sell on eBay. I receive a package from COMC every few weeks and I ship them one every few weeks with all of my new purchases. It’s a beautiful pipeline. Old time players autograph and memorabilia cards are often a quick and consistent seller since there is a finite limit to how many can be manufactured, unlike more contemporary players where the production numbers can get very high.
I set one flat shipping rate up long ago with my trading card listings and have kept it ever since, even as I’ve moved into selling different types of items. I love it. It makes things simple for buyers and I think it encourages multiple purchases.
My set up is a flat shipping rule, add $0.00 for extra items. I have experimented with free shipping with 5+ items or free shipping over a set $$ amount ($50 or $100) and all of them get used by buyers occasionally. Considering it costs nothing but a few minutes to set these promotional rates up, I think they’re worth it for every eBay seller of almost any size. Maybe you lose a couple bucks on shipping here and there, but the extra sales more than make up for that.
Great discipline sticking to your sourcing strategy.I think you did it right in terms of getting the good stuff without buying a bunch of stuff that won’t get listed. You basically found all the cool stuff from my childhood. Amazing to see what some of it sells for. That madball especially!
Wow, that Tod Pardon piece is gorgeous! There is a terapeak sale for earrings at $225 from February 2021 and the only active listing, also earrings, is $595 and 15 watchers. Pricing an item like this is so interesting and I wonder if eBay is even the best platform for something like it. I’m confident you’ll do well with it, regardless.
