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So hypothetically, let’s say that some of us who are posting and/or reading this thread have some framed art and memorabilia items in their to-be-listed piles, and may or may not be intimidated by the prospect of packaging such bulky items on the off chance that someone out there in eBay land actually buys the darned things, especially when it’s a lot easier to package and sell very small items that can fit in a #000 or #00 envelope or, at worst, a USPS box or envelope.
But also hypothetically, it would be nice to learn some packaging tips from the art experts. You know, just in case anyone else reading this thread thinks about selling art…
Humphrey was a Coventry artist, a founder member of the Avant Garde Coventry Art Circle in the 1930
Love the Humphrey, as you might have guessed from my past posts. I like when my art is vibrant and reminds me I’m alive. By contrast, lot 275 was clearly all the leftovers thrown together into one lot with barely a few seconds thought to it. They might have done better with the hammer price if the first photo was the words “art stuff” scrawled on a napkin.
Not a bad net for all of it, though, and that lotting price is a steal.
I’m also going to start end/sell similar relisting my 5 oldest listings each day. That will have me turning over my ~2000 item store in one year and show some daily activity even if I’m not listing.
Welcome to the dark side. This sell similar trick often leads to no sales for a week straight and then on the eighth day, two items sell in an hour. Then a week later, another one of them sells. Can’t beat it for thirty seconds of work. It definitely puts more eyeballs and watchers on the old listings. I’ve also become much more conscious of lowering the price or the offer settings which is something I never used to care about.
Also, congrats on the to be listed shelf. A big step forward when you’re focused on only sourcing the heavy hitters! It makes it easy to hit 5 listings a day (or whatever your number is) and it’s exciting to fill up that shelf and then empty it and see the stuff sell.
The only time taxes should be a concern is if you didn’t make a plan to set aside money to pay for them (a common theme in self-employed). Don’t be that person!
AKA, Wesley Snipes, Nic Cage, “Cristley knows best” guy.
If you account for taxes all year and properly account for your deductions then taxes should be an afterthought.
Especially since eBay has made accessing our tax info SO MUCH EASIER in the last few years. Sales tax, listing fees, total fees — it’s all right there. Figure out your COGS and other deductions and you’re all set.
One of the hidden best parts of growing an eBay business is paying more taxes because it means you’re really starting to make some serious money.
Thoughts for the week: Regional Boxes are being discontinued after Jan. 22. So, I ordered 100 Regional A Boxes because after Jan. 22, you can use them for regular postage.
Great reminder! Post office box rates are also increasing slightly after January 22nd. So I have two things to take care of by Friday…
Plans for 2023: I am going into this year believing that I can do $100K in sales. If that is true, I need to list about 200 items a month so that I don’t lose ground. So, I have put processes in place to get that accomplished.
I am rooting for you and optimistic based on your early successes with Etsy as well as my own experience last year adding a second trading card specific platform beyond eBay. That increased my sales far more than anything I would have done on eBay.
If you ever fall behind on your listing goal, don’t forget about ending some old items and selling similar like we’ve discussed here a bunch of times. Or using sales and coupons. Lots of different ways to get to whatever your $$ amount goal each week (or month, or year) and certain “tricks” are nice to pull out once a month or every few months to take the pressure off of that constant list-buy-ship grind.
Beautifully put. I see the craziest prices on items these days. I guess everyone is now doing research on their phones and think highest sold is what they’ll good.
I think its a lot like how we kind of have all seen at one point or another with certain thrift stores or estate sales which have a sign or print out with highest active listing or highest sold. Except now it’s anyone and everyone with an electronic device who can “do the pricing.” So any price that is Google-able has become fair game, whether it’s from any site you can sell stuff on, the manufacturer’s website, active price by someone with no real possibility of selling, highest sold, some Amazon drop shipper with a crazy price, or just something they made up.
Its crazy to me how otherwise smart people can be so irrational about the value (or lack thereof) of things they consider selling. Even if you explain to them very patiently many of the intricacies of selling online. Either they cling to the idea that their things are worth $$$$ and not a penny less, or they get impatient and sell too low or just give up and keep it all. Its happened to me too many times, with people from different backgrounds, to be a coincidence. Anyone else?
I’ve made a lot of progress lately with organizing myself and my time in the last few weeks. It’s always nice to have a little breakthrough with how you do things. These incremental changes really add up!
1/8/2023 to 1/14/2023
Total items in store: 612
Items sold: 27 (13 via best offer, 13 via seller initiated offer, 14 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1805.41 (down 53% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1286.77 (down 53% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $66.87 (up 23% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $158.70 — Quinn Hughes Upper Deck Allure black elysium RC #3/3
Sold to a repeat buyer with taste in expensive ultra-modern rookie cards. Since my store has become more tightly focused on 500-1000 quality listings, and this buyer left really positive feedback after every purchase, maybe they will find a few more card they want to buy in my store. Probably not. But it’s more likely now than when I had 2000+ listings, most $25 and under, and I was mostly concerned with churning new listings out and shipping 50+ sales and buying more to keep the cycle going. I think that’s a necessary stage for any online seller and it’s fun in its own way. But a $150 sale takes just as long to package as a $15 sale, and it’s a lot more exciting to focus on finding items which you think will sell quickly and for a nice price. Then I get affirmation and profit.
I paid $97 for this card in June of last year and it sold for my full price $249.99 with a 25% coupon that I include with every packing slip and send to every repeat buyer. So the sold price was $187.59 and my net after fees $158. I wouldn’t spend as much on this card if I were buying it today, but making these “mistakes” with slight overpays has been vital in helping me grow my knowledge about more expensive trading cards. Knowledge is always power with selling online.
Lowest price sold (net): $12.33— Roger Federer 2007 Ace authentic jersey
This is the ninth copy of this card I’ve sold since August, and I still have a few more. It helps that there are just a few sets if you want modern tennis cards, and Federer is maybe the best player in the world. Random pro tennis player’s jersey card is worth a buck at most, but I will be able to sell these Federer jersey cards for $15 until I run out of them. I bought a large lot of them and each one cost me about $4 each after shipping and tax. So I already have another one listed, hopefully by the time you click on it that one will have sold as well.
Rooting for you to change the user name to Retro Treasures FL if that’s how things work out. It will be exciting to follow along and see how it all works out. It’s exciting how many new things this reselling life can provide us. But it sounds like your possible career options can provide your family with some unexpected opportunities, and that’s just as exciting. It’s inspiring to see how well you’re able to balance all these different things successfully.
Are you aware of the Gixen chrome extension?
I am. The way that I do my bidding and buying is by looking through basically all the auctions that specific sellers have, and for the biggest sellers this is typically thousands of auction listings in one night. Then I copy/paste item numbers of the stuff that is undervalued into Gixen. I usually have a few hundred items in bid sniper at any given time, but I rarely win more than 10% of the items I bid on, and often those items are less than $5 each. But buying 20 or 30 from the same seller over the course of a week is how I build my inventory.
Unfortunately the Gixen extension requires me to click into each item which is even more time-consuming than the way I do it now. Maybe they will change that someday, I don’t know. But Gixen as a whole is such a wonderful program, I’d be fine if it stayed the way it is too.
I only also because we have all seen how your online sale became a pipeline and now look like a sustainable business. You’re generating real money. At some point, you’ll pay off debt, have the free time you want, and have money left over.
It’s always interesting to me to see what people choose to do with that extra money.
Yeah me too. I have some dreams for a few years down the line to find my own kind of small town (or cheap city) and do the kinds of things you and Ryanne are doing have been doing in Luray for the last decade. But paying down the debt and being in this area for the family stuff comes first. Then travel a bit and see the world in a way I’ve never been able to. Probably in that process I will find my place and settle down.
These are goals that most people work their whole lives towards and then maybe reach in retirement if they’re lucky. I’ll always be grateful to you and Ryanne for the podcast which showed me (and so many others) a different path. It’s exciting to see my progress, especially since the beginnings of building up an eBay store (or any business I’m sure) often feel like one step forward, two steps back. It takes a while (and a lot of work) before you really start generating a consistent income! But it’s interesting how many possibilities that opens up.
Yes. We have a favorite bagel place. $4 for 15 fresh NYC bagels. Its almost too much.
Philly is an amazing city for Too Good to Go. I got dinner this weekend from my new favorite Greek spot. The surprise bag was a huge container filled with rice, beans and cabbage, vegetables and the main. I bought two bags, one bag had two stuffed peppers and the other had braised lamb in a tomato sauce. All still warm when I got home!
The best deals on Too Good to Go have brought me so much joy and good food. The best places I’ve found near me are an artisan chocolate shop, a deli and a coffee shop which makes these amazing tarts. I love the app and really hope they keep up the same high standards as they grow and expand to more cities.
I forget. Is Net sales: $1164.00 just for your eBay sales? Do you the also have the consignment sales as well in addition? If so, what’s that number look like on average?
Yeah that’s just eBay. My gross consignment sales are in the same range. My net from the consignment is about $500 a week, $750 on good weeks.
It’s an interesting platform with a lot of flippers doing different things. There are a bunch of sellers who price very high and run basically a perma-sale where everything is 50% or even 75% off and a good number of sellers who do that on a smaller scale where all the cards in their port are like 15% or 20% higher than their worth. I think a lot of them price above solds in case the player goes on a hot streak or gets traded to a new team and there’s a new set of collectors and flippers interested in their cards.
I price around the average of actives and solds, or even a little below. It means that a lot of times when they post my new submissions, the best deals will sell within an hour and some within a few seconds. Often those buyers then reprice the card they bought from me even higher. Do they sell after that at the higher price? Beats me. I’m just happy with a sale and move on to the next.
This service has really transformed my business (as you predicted months ago) and it’s made me grateful to operate in the niche I’ve found. Not every niche has so many flippers and very few niches allow you to sell on consignment with this level of control over price on individual items.
I still have some debt to pay down from being broke throughout my 20s and then getting my education.
So I am probably 12-18 months away from really starting to think bigger picture about what direction I want to go in. Definitely want to travel some and then relocate outside of New Jersey once I have a better idea of where I want to go. It all feels very far away sometimes because of the debt and because I kept reinvesting a lot of my profits from the last few years into new inventory. But I saw that what I was doing was working and I figured what do I have to do lose. So I kept at it.
I definitely needed some of this time to figure out how to best use the different platforms that I sell on. My eBay store has never been smaller! But the last few months, basically since November, have been some of my most profitable in terms of total profits…and I’m still chugging along at $1000 a week or more in sales on eBay even with a 600 item store. I remember all the milestones that you and Ryanne documented in the podcast: Airbnb #1, then #2, then the purchase of the building for the coffee shop and the restoration and finally the opening. I look back at my posts from a year or two ago and it’s kind of a similar document of my own journey. I never would have been able to predict a year ago where my business would be today. But maybe that’s how it should be!
I’m sure I will find opportunities over the next year or two which will only be available to me because I have more flexibility with time and money than most people. I’ve already seen this over the last month as I have been able to spend a lot of time with a family member who’s in poor health, mostly because I don’t have a 9 to 5 schedule and can set my own hours.
Everything has its value, and no one knows that better than a scavenger, but spending time with family and loved ones and having the energy to use your “off” time on things you love is priceless. It’s exciting to be able to see my life become more like what I want it to be, especially when I’ve followed a path that most people don’t understand.
I’m so happy to see that you two had a nice vacation and a great week of sales! Did you find a lot of food deals on Too Good to Go while you were there?
I slacked on posting my weekly numbers towards the end of last year, so time to get back in the habit. My approach to selling online has changed a lot over the last year, and the last few months have helped me get a good grasp on what my approach will be in 2023. I created a few threads this weekend in Random Thoughts if you’d like to discuss your own changes and lessons learned as well.
1/1/2023 to 1/7/2023
Total items in store: 584
Items sold: 30 (19 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 10 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1670.09 (down 44% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1164.00 (down 45% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $55.67 (up 8% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $120.01 — Sean O’Malley Panini UFC autograph relic card ##/49
I’ve never watched a single UFC fight willingly and don’t know much more about MMA than you do, but I know how to use Terapeak and this guy is a popular fighter. Sold to a buyer in Canada along with another UFC card.
Lowest price sold (net): $8.44— Dave Bancroft 2012 National Treasures bat card ##/99
Dave Bancroft was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971 and played his last game in 1930. I think it’s pretty cool that they cut up an old bat of his to make some cards and I can understand why a fan of baseball history would shell out $12 for this card. I have been curating the items in my store more carefully over the last few months instead of just buying, listing, shipping and repeat at all hours of the day. This sale was a nice reminder that there are a lot of different ways to make a buck because the buyer bought this card and 6 or 7 others totaling over $200. This card with multiple bat and jersey pieces from different players was the most expensive ($71) and most complicated item. I had quite a few buyers this week who were a repeat customer or purchased multiple items, and I hope thats a good sign of things to come this year.
I used a Rollerball on an Atari once, for about 30 seconds before the sharp shooting pains began.
We live near a vintage arcade (the 1980s era cabinet style arcade games) and just last week I had a “good” time with the game Missile Command. The trackball was not my friend and my missile aim needed some serious work!
Great points, and info. I think these are worthwhile questions for anyone selling regardless of how big or small their store is. It seems like for @mark-s and a few others, the cutoff for buying is something they might list for $50 or higher. For others, including myself, that dollar amount might be a bit lower. I have always used $20 as my own personal cutoff. But as my store has grown, I’ve started to ask myself some questions before I buy something.
1. How much of a pain will it be to create a new listing for this item?
2. How much storage space is it going to take up, and is that space easily accessible?
3. What am I going to do with the listing if it sits for three months (or 6, or 12) with no offers?
These are the particular areas I struggle with in my business on a day to day basis. Yours are likely different but I think we all have these patterns we fall into. They may help us grow our store (in terms of number of listings) but not necessarily help us make a lot more profit or enjoy this scavenging life much more.
These questions have helped me avoid buying a lot of stuff unnecessarily and come up with a plan for some of my death piles and old old listings with no activity.
