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I have made a tiny little change over the last few days related to my buying process which is so small that you all might laugh. As many of you know, I scroll through thousands of auction listings to find the vast majority of my inventory. This means opening a lot of tabs, a lot of clicking and dragging and scrolling and copying/pasting item numbers into Gixen, the bid sniper program I use. It can be tedious and there are days where it really feels like work. But in terms of profit per hour, I’ve yet to find a more lucrative way of scavenging.
I’ve revamped this process a lot over the last month. My most recent change has been to use the home, end, and page up/down keys instead of all that clicking and dragging and scrolling. This has made for a more pleasant experience for my hands and wrists and it’s also saved me some time. I think because there’s less opportunity to accidentally misclick or (more likely) allow myself to drag the cursor into another tab which leads me to distraction. Distraction makes everything take so much longer!
Amazing what a big difference the little things can make.
You find the best yard sale stuff! Love the Snoopy ornament/decoration and isn’t the best thing about scavenging finding cool stuff you like at a bargain price? But it’s even better to sell them for $100ish — especially when you avoid the shipping mix-up by the skin of your teeth.
I have to remember to use those advanced shipping skills when I start listing (and hopefully shipping) a few bins worth of bulky stuff over the next few weeks. It is such a bummer when those pre-packed listings sit unsold though…a constant reminder of what’s not selling. š
Printer story was funny (definitely brought back fond memories of early SL episodes) and such a demonstration of how many people value their items…either “what they paid for it” or “basically junk” with almost no in between. Very weird but hey if it helps us make a living…
So many great points and you’ve certainly given me things to think about with my own business.
Lesson 1: Interesting numbers on new listings vs sold, I bet mine are really similar. Maybe I will track that this year. Always a no-brainer to list more but psychologically it’s so easy to go “eh, who cares if I don’t list 3 items today, I can skip one day” especially when life stuff pops up. But the eBay algorithm really cares! A solid template which I don’t need to modify much and a backlog of photographed items have been my biggest aid in creating consistent listings. Ending a few old items and selling similar is a useful “trick”, too. It will be a lot of trial and error maintaining consistent listings this year as I expand outside of mostly one niche to new categories.
Lesson 2: New inventory acquisition and costs are so important for any size seller. You can really make or break a business by spending too much or too little. I learned in the last few years that I can easily spend hundreds in a week if I win 30 or 40 good quality trading card auctions from the same sellers. This helped me build up a big enough inventory to sustain me on multiple platforms but it also created a ton of work. I’ve become much more selective about buying new inventory online over the last month, and we’ll see how long that holds. I will end up spending some of that money in other places like at a few of my favorite thrifts or my beloved library sales, but even there I have been trying to get more selective. $10 profit months down the line isn’t always worth the time it takes to list, store and package up the sold item, especially since I charge a flat rate shipping price that may not always cover 100% of fees.
Lesson 3: Really interesting data on Sixbit and Etsy. I’ve never done much research into Sixbit since it doesn’t fit my needs, but I wouldn’t have guessed it were so expensive. I suppose the automation of the platform is a huge time saver for a large seller. It’s so interesting how different items sell on different sites. I’ve seen this over the last year with my trading cards on two different sites, eBay vs COMC. There is a rhyme and a reason behind the selling patterns on each site, and learning those rhythms can be very profitable. But it’s also not always predictable.
Lesson 4: My problem has been a little bit different than yours, but in the same vein. I’ve struggled with the amount of time I spend listing versus buying (or scavenging) for at least the last year. I also felt like I was working a lot more hours than I wanted to. So about a month ago, I started tracking my work hours and I’ve already learned a few things. One nice lesson was that I don’t work quite as much as I thought I did, usually around 40 hours a week. Second thing i learned was that tracking my time made me much conscious of how I was spending that time. It’s definitely made me more disciplined about things that are easy to slip, like listing every day or spending some time each week organizing inventory.
Maybe everyone else is already doing these things, I really don’t know. But they’ve been eye opening for me.
Appreciate the thoughts on different marketplaces. I always love your posts. However, I have a much stronger belief in eBay’s staying power than I think you might. eBay offers a lot of benefits and features that other platforms don’t, with two of the biggest being auctions and the money-back guarantee. I also think it means something that the platform’s been around as something of an online flea market since the nineties. There’s a pre-existing user base that is still going to be working (and buying things) for another few decades at least, and eBay is likely to be the platform for those users to find their weird one-off items or their hobby/collectible items.
I agree with @lukastreasuretrove about the weaknesses of Facebook marketplace particularly the scammers. My personal experience has also been that most people my age (I’m 36) and younger don’t use Facebook much if at all, and I don’t expect that to change considering all of the issues Facebook has had with selling people’s personal information.
I am excited to see your Etsy sales trend over the next few months. I think there is always a sales boost when you list a lot of new items to a platform as you did with Etsy this past week. But how does that maintain over a few months? That’s what will be interesting to learn.
I love your goals 2, 3 and 4. These must be common problems since I’m dealing with all of them too. I wonder if we can keep each other accountable with our goals. There’s always the numbers thread but maybe some kind of weekly check-in / goals discussion thread? Might get some scavengers who are reading but not posting to join us as well…
Sucks about the deadbeat buyer, but obviously it’s all part of the game. Maybe this is morbid, but I wonder sometimes how many non-paying buyers had something horrible happen to them. Like they’re in jail, a hospital bed or a casket. Obviously the vast majority of non payers are just your typical eBay flakes but I’m sure we’ve all had a few buyers whose disappearance was actually something very sad.
I will be curious how fast your lot sells after relisting. I’ve noticed that sometimes my unpaid items sell really, really quickly after I relist them.
Great sales, Zach. Like @julie-b, I also love the starburst clock even though it’s not to my taste.
Really smart pricing on the gas station mug as well. A lot of $20 sales in Terapeak, but most of those are newer mugs or amateur sellers with $10+ shipping. It makes perfect sense that yours sold for full price. How long did it take for your mug to sell?
That Goodwill DVD haul is practically from another time. Unreal! I’m happy if I find one or two weird DVD’s at my local thrifts, and maybe half the time the DVD is too scratched up or doesn’t match the case.
Your Yu Yu Hakusho listing is so nice compared to comps of the cheaper more recent $50 box sets. But those older Funimation DVDs can gain a real cult following sometimes.
I love that old compass too. Looks like a medieval torture device.
Wow, that’s a crazy price for a coffee mug! If anyone got curious, like I did, why this pattern is worth so much, I found this article which gets into why. I’m sure social media is a huge factor in its value compared to 20 years ago as well.
Mike, it’s so nice to see you in the forums again. Your long posts were one of the reasons I started posting here in the first place, they were full of great info and positivity. I hope the best for you and your family and please keep posting, it gets especially quiet here from Thursday to Sunday and it would be great to have fellow scavengers to chat with throughout the week!
I’m glad you and your family are in better health. Hoping for a much more normal 2023 for all of you. Your positive attitude and listing goals are a huge inspiration to me and, I’m sure, many others around here. Can’t wait to read more about your sales and hopefully a lot more $1000 weeks in the near future.
It is nice to see some old names posting in this thread. Hopefully with a new year just around the corner, more scavengers old and new, will start posting their numbers on these forums again. I know we have more active members and lurkers than posters. Don’t be shy!
My eBay store continues to shrink in size through a combination of auctions and aggressive sales. As @Jay predicted a few months back, I am moving towards selling the vast majority of my trading cards listings through my consignment port on COMC as opposed to my eBay store. It is all a matter of what makes the most sense in terms of spending less time to make the same amount of money or more.
I have a pretty clear vision for how I can grow my eBay store once again in 2023 through a combination of trading cards listings which sell very quickly (<30 days), cards listings which don’t sell well on COMC (like my lowest priced sale this week) and other niches that I know well. For now those are sports memorabilia, books and other media. But I am excited to experiment with new types of items and get my hands dirty in different ways. That’s one of the most fun parts of selling on eBay. I have a nice backlog of interesting, relatively inexpensive items to get me started over the next few months and it will be really excited to share these listings and sales with all of you.
11/27/2022 ā 12/8/2022
Total items in store: 830
Items sold: 60
Gross sales: $2621.26 (up 3% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1766.97 (down 3% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $43.69 (down 14% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $134.47 ā Domantas Sabonis white sparkle prizm rookie card
Lowest price sold (net): $8.90ā 10 card lot of New England Patriots cards
Had a stretch from about 10 PM on Tuesday until an hour ago with zero sales and no offers except for a few weak counteroffers when I sent offers to watchers. Then two sales within the last five minutes. Just keep listing, the buyers are out there in the ether…somewhere.
Iām paying more for promoted listings and taking lower offers. It makes me feel like Iām not making as much and working a lot harder for it.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. A year ago, I had never used promoted listings and would regularly have 200+ items with watchers who I could send offers to. I would be overly selective and only send 10% or 15% offers on select items, stubbornly thinking I would wait out “better” listings to see if they sold at full price. I had all my best offer settings at about 75% of buy it now prices. In hindsight, I was weeding out the low ballers and time wasters, but I also missed out on some good offers and some interested buyers who moved on to something else they were interested in where the seller was more flexible.
I think this is an easy trap to fall into considering the relative novelty of the send offers to watchers, compared to how long eBay has been around as a selling platform. But I’ve been trying to focus more on how eBay is now and look at my sales from the larger perspective. Do I really need to wait for “full price” when full price is often just my best guess at an item’s true value? On certain listings I will continue to wait to get “my” price, but so far I’ve found that I never regret sending a 20% offer or upping my promoted listings to 5%. Mostly because it’s led to some items selling quicker than I expect or some long-tail items finally selling. There is a logical endpoint to what percentage offers or promoted listings will work for each of us. But I think experimenting is very important with the way the ebay algorithm rewards consistent activity in your store.
This was such a great recap, thanks for writing it all out. It’s always a rush trying to beat the crowds on the first day of a sale but there is something so satisfying about strolling in later or last day and finding some gems. This sounds like the scavenge of the year for you! I’m looking forward to reading all next year about your sales which came from this trip.
