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That’s a cool sale. DIdn’t know PSA graded photos as well, but I guess it makes sense. You’re always educating us.
I wasn’t aware PSA graded photos before buying this one, either. I came across the original auction from one of the consignment sellers I buy from every week, and the bid was low enough that I figured it was worth a gamble of $20 or so. I had no illusions of winning the auction, but it was listed in some strange category and not the best title. One of the perils of selling your items through a consignor.
I had glanced at a trading card message board thread about type 1 photos a few weeks before coming across the auction for the Malone photo. A lot of my death pile inventory are purchases like this. I got particularly lucky with this one because it was such a desirable player and a rookie photo. Type 1 photos from a random year or random player aren’t worth quite as much, graded or not.
Well with this item I can lower the BIN price to $300 and it will sell pretty much instantly. That factors into my greediness.
Yeah, this is such a huge thing with the market for trading cards and I’m sure lots of other collectibles too. With certain items, there is a pretty standard market value where someone, maybe a flipper or maybe a collector, is going to snap up that listing almost immediately. I hate to sell at that price point when I know I can hold out for a little bit more, but there will always be more stuff to buy and sell. Sometimes the extra $100 or whatever is what I actually want that week. The key is finding a good use for that money.
I will be curious to see how quickly yours sells. With 13 watchers and yours being the only large among all the active listings, I would probably hold out if I was you as well. I will be curious if your eventual buyer comes from promoted listings. My experience has been that items with a lot of watchers usually sell through promoted listings. Probably because seeing an item with 15 watchers kicks people’s FOMO into high gear.
It was nice to recoup almost what my son paid for them new but I got a direct, personal experience of how much more effort eBay is putting into selling sneakers compared to everything else I normally sell, which did not make me very happy.
I occasionally ship to the authentication center for trading cards, which is in Florida, and I have had a good experience every time. I’m really glad that eBay has created these programs. It makes those $100+ sales much less stressful from the selling end and while there’s an additional step before the buyer gets their items, I think that’s worth it for the extra peace of mind.
Maximize your gross sales by sourcing higher dollar items and account for and maximize all your expenses. Find ways to “deduct daily life” as much as you can.
As always, great advice. Taxes are one piece of the puzzle to this scavenging life. But they’re relatively easy to prepare for, as long as some kind of accounting/COGS/record keeping is a part of your weekly or monthly routine. And there are so many opportunities to take appropriate deductions. Even within eBay, sales tax, shipping costs and other fees (store, scheduled listings, etc) really start to add up after a year of sales.
For eBay, I promote at the recommended level with a 5% max. I have sold so many items where similar items for selling for less that I have to believe the ads boost sales. Yes, they boost cost, too, but I don’t have any listings that I wouldn’t take 5% off to make the sale. 43% of my sales are promoted listings.
This is such great information to think about when selling on eBay in 2023. I had never used promoted listings before last year, but I can’t even imagine how much I would have sold if I used it before that! I’ve also found about 40% of my sales are promoted listings.
I think promoting the listings is especially useful where there are similar items at the same price point. Maybe less useful for unique items, but I like to stick with one template and make minimal changes when I am listing. So I promote everything at 5%. I don’t miss the 5% and plan to play around with raising the percentage even higher for slow moving items or expensive items.
I countered a $300 offer on that Carhartt Jacket and it expired. I really want $340 minimum for it and I think I’ll get it eventually. Still…maybe I shouldn’t have been so greedy and just took that offer.
One of the things I’ve been doing with sales starting to slow down, in addition to (mostly) following the same systems as you, is to accept more of these offers which are just below my target price. For me, that has often meant lowering my minimum offer settings so I actually see these offers. Or sending out 25% coupons or offers to watchers.
As I continue to reduce the number of trading cards in my eBay store, I’ve been looking at the offer history page on a lot of items. It’s revealed some interesting patterns. Biggest one is that my prices are often too high. Sometimes that first offer really is the best offer. Other times, I will hold out for an extra $10 or $20 for months when it would make more sense to take the slightly lower offer (still profit!) and list some other new items.
This was one of my slowest weeks ever, but I planned it this way by removing 300 listings from my store to sell at auction. Those sales will be in next week’s numbers. As always with auctions, most of my listings didn’t sell. Granting that I set my minimum bid to the absolute minimum bid I would sell for. I would recommend this to anyone who tries auctions. Bidding wars still happen, but they are rare. Don’t go with a $0.99 auction and end up disappointed.
To be honest, I’m thrilled with these numbers considering the size of my inventory. Both my high and low sales were from non trading card items and they were both listings that I created within the previous week. Still sports-adjacent stuff (a graded photo and a leather bound book) but it’s nice to branch out and see quick sales that also made me a nice profit. I’m hopeful that will continue as I further expand the types of items I sell. But I have plenty of nice trading card listings to sustain me as well. It will take a while to get it all listed, but that’s a good challenge to have.
1/22/2023 to 1/28/2023
Total items in store: 358
Items sold: 15 (8 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 7 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1056.12 (down 76% from one year ago)
Net sales: $682.86 (down 79% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $70.41 (up 14% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $189.57 — Karl Malone rookie type 1 photo PSA authentic
Lowest price sold (net): $11.83— Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris Easton Press
I’m also willing to take low dollar sales to move stuff out when its time has run it’s course. Which is still tricky for me after so many years of list it and forget it.
@ice-queen This is so important, I think, with eBay in 2023 compared to when the podcast started. Fortunately we have so many more options for how to move older inventory than we used to. Do you have a preferred method for how you move old inventory?
I like ending old listings over a few months and use sell similar to relist them. Sometimes this leads to an immediate sale, sometimes it takes a few weeks and sometimes it doesn’t sell even after I sell similar and lower the price. But it gives these old items a “new” item number which I think gets them in front of more eyes, and it forces me to reengage with the listings. Usually I find that my price is too high or I can mess with keywords in my title and maybe get a sale that way.
I’ve had decent success with sending coupons to watchers and running markdown sales. I like to go 25% or even higher on old items. I think that’s the number where buyers really start to think “oh, this is a decent deal, maybe I should jump on it before someone else does.” My experience with buying on eBay has also taught me that some sellers are very stingy with discounts, so I like to think that giving a decent coupon or discount helps me stand out in a sea of a million sellers.
I also run auctions since I mostly sell in the collectibles categories. I recommend doing them if you sell in a niche where they are appropriate. You get free auction listings in collectibles every month with a store, may as well use them. I usually run a batch of auctions at the end of every month.
But auctions are very fickle. So make sure you set your minimum bid at the lowest you are willing to accept. My experience is that if your starting bids are a reasonable approximation of an item’s “value” on a good day, then about 10% to 15% of your listings will sell. Most will only get one bid. But you will get a few buyers who buy multiple items to combine shipping or look through your buy it now listings to add on to their purchase or buy from you again a few weeks later. Treat these buyers well, even if it means losing a few bucks on shipping or throwing in a little freebie. Selling to repeat buyers is (again, my experience) much lower stress than a sale to a new customer, and I’ve found they’re often so grateful to be dealing with a human being who recognizes them as a customer rather than a faceless corporation sending them a doodad and a packing slip.
Welcome back to the forums and I hope you keep posting.
If you are building death piles of $10 long tail items and you don’t have a sound storage or listing strategy then you should readjust.
Once your knowledge base grows to the point you can pick out ALL the low hanging fruit at any sale, you have to have some checks/balances to keep from buying too much.
Quoted for emphasis. I can say from experience it’s not fun to build a mess of death piles of $10 long tail items. Well, buying the stuff is fine but figuring out to organize, sell it, what to do with all of it, and then some stuff that’s “worth” $10 may actually never sell unless you cut the price to $7 or $4 or even $2.
I’ve created a set of rules for scavenging this year that I have to follow in order to meet my goals.
- Items <$50, 90 day STR = 100% or greater
- Items $50-100, 90 Day STR = 50% or greater
- Items $100+, No STR requirement
I love this and have basically applied it to my own store. I will probably relax the requirements slightly as I rebuild my store inventory from a few hundred to maybe 1000 (?) over the spring and summer, but I think it’s a good set of organizing principles to follow if any of the following apply to your eBay store:
- You’re limited by space in terms of inventory storage.
- Another platform works well for some of the items you sell.
- You don’t “need” the extra eBay income that comes from the cycle of scavenging and listing and shipping and repeat.
#1 has always been a big factor for me. I’m sure in a couple years once I have moved past the city-adjacent/small apartment life, my scavenging habits will change.
#2 has been eye-opening for myself, @mark-s and I’m sure some others. Granting that eBay has some tremendous strengths that other platforms don’t and I couldn’t imagine not selling on eBay. But that doesn’t mean my eBay store has to have thousands and thousands of items, either.
#3 is the dream for most of us. Like maybe when eBay sales build up enough to afford you the opportunity to open an airbnb or 2 & a coffee shop? Or once those things become a larger source of income than eBay. But at whatever level you’re selling, especially if eBay is your main source of income or you want to do it full-time, there’s always the question of what owning your time really means.
If I am going to be sitting on an item for weeks, months or years – better it’s a $1.00 item than a $35.00 item.
What are your thoughts?This has always been my frame of reference, but the most important piece that hasn’t already been mentioned is that it has to be an item that I’m interested in listing. At least for me, it can be very easy to go “eh I only paid $1 I’ll list something else today” and then put off listing the $1 item for months at a time. Especially if it has low sell through rate or it’s not something I personally find interesting/valuable. Except it’s very easy to accumulate lots of $1 items as we all know.
Those purchases are vital to becoming a full time seller because they build up your inventory, your sales and you gain a lot of knowledge by buying and selling these “worthless” items, but clearly organized and labeled storage is so important. No use tearing your hair out over finding that $1 item which you sold for $7 after eight months of listing.
I will create 5 drafts every morning before work.
The goal is to put up at least 5 new listings and “sell similar” my oldest 5 listings every day this week and every week thereafter.
This is great practical advice for a seller with any size store and really it’s the updated version of list every day. Now of course the question is how do you stick to it? But sell similar is so quick, and if you have pictures ready, a few new listings each day should only take a few minutes.
A neat tool on iphones I wasn’t previously aware of was ‘shared albums’ in photos app. I set up shared albums on both of our phones and created a shared “ebay” album on her phone.
I just learned yesterday how to transfer files from my phone to my computer using a USB. Previously I would take the pictures, save to Google drive, download from the computer, maybe even rename the files. With the trading cards which I scan front and back, I used to scan one by one and now I do six at a time and crop the photos. It would be ideal to do things in the most optimized way from the start, but sometimes it takes a while to change a process or learn a new way of doing this. But those time saving tricks really add up…
This week’s sales were nothing remarkable, but also pretty solid for a store that’s run significantly than 1000 items for a few months now. When I started selling full-time about 15 months ago, my recipe for sales was 40, 50, 60 and sometimes more sales in a week, every single week, to get to $2000 in gross sales. This covered my bills and new inventory purchases and it also kept me in a constant cycle of buying and selling and listing and shipping.
Now that I am selling most of my trading cards on another platform which automates a lot of the work, I am content to hit $1500 in sales each week on eBay and there are a lot of different ways to get there. But mostly my formula has been a handful of $100+ sales (this week I had four) mixed in with $25 and under sales that I have multiple quantities (easy to relist) plus whatever else happens to go out the door that week. I’ve developed a better eye for what will sell quickly, and I have a little more free time and money each week. It’s fun to see these changes affect my sales and my life.
I have a batch of 500 auctions ending this upcoming Sunday and Monday, as I continue to tighten up my inventory, so the few weeks after that will be interesting. I’ll only have 200ish items in my store by this time next Tuesday! Some of the unsold auctions will get relisted and I have plenty of trading cards ready to list, too, but it is extremely rare that I ever list more than 10 items in a day. I really went full tilt with these auctions, basically cleaning out any trading card inventory older than 50 days. Usually when I list 500 auctions I expect to sell about 50, but I am thinking that number will be higher than that this time around. My lowest minimum bids are $10 and $15 so it’s not a fire sale. It will be fun to see how it goes and then build the store inventory back up from there.
1/15/2023 to 1/21/2023
Total items in store: 710
Items sold: 27 (11 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 13 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1698.36 (down 27% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1193.17 (down 27% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $60.66 (up 35% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $147.04 — Marcus Rashford 2016-17 Panini Select auto jersey ##/149
Lowest price sold (net): $13.10— Dave Bancroft 2012 National Treasures bat card ##/99
Great info, thank you both! I will need to reorganize my packaging material shelves to make room for some of the stuff you described before I get into listing my most fragile framed items. I only have small bubble wrap since that’s all I’ve ever really needed. But the packaging you’ve both described isn’t nearly as complicated as what I built it up to in my mind.
I had the reverse once, family member throws out art.
This is practically a criminal offense to anyone who’s a creative type, though I have a particular retired family member who takes intro to art classes and “gifts” amateurish paintings to far too many victims. The frames are cheap and tacky looking too. I hesitate to call that art.
A while later I put them into auction. They fetched over a hundred pounds. Turns out he had the same name as a more well-known artist- can’t remember the name- and at least two bidders must have jumped to the wrong conclusion.
I always get Monet and Manet confused! I like to think that these buyers are happily celebrating the creative genius of a previously unknown artist rather than discarding the unwanted painting of some well-named schlub. But I suppose once I sell an item, I’m fine with the new owner using it for a ritual sacrifice if that’s what they choose to do. Just as long as they keep their voodoo to themselves…
Sold these for an offer of $40. Listed for $79.99. This is somehow in the authenticity guarantee program. They’re getting a bit carried away with that program if these shoes are falling into it!
I get this with trading cards sometimes but they are pretty good about identifying which items belong and which don’t and a consistent pricing threshold of $250. I bet with shoes it is certain styles that get triggered regardless of price.
I love the authenticity program so much, it makes those $250 and up sales so much less stressful. I know there are horror stories but I’ve great experiences so far.
