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I’m so glad to see your numbers this week. Continued good health for you and your family. eBay buyers will always find your stuff when you’re ready to focus on selling again.
I had a nice week of sales last week due to a large auction batch. Setting up the auctions was quick and painless, but the packing and shipping felt a lot more like work than my typical day to day. But it was a nice way to get a quick boost in sales. I am thinking about running another batch of auctions to end on Cyber Monday. The free listings are one of the perks of having a store, may as well use them.
11/6/2022 – 11/12/2022
Total items in store: 904 (down from 1255 last week, most of the discrepancy is from unsold auctions which I haven’t relisted yet)
Items sold: 71 (4 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $3008.59 (up 44% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2088.95 (up 48% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $42.37 (up 3% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 16 hours (same as last week)
Highest price sold (net): $119.51 — Vince Carter Topps buyback rookie card hand numbered to 100
Lowest price sold (net): $7.35— Gino Odjick Pinnacle Tough Times autograph
I have many copies of this card and have regularly sold about one a month in the $15 range for the last six months. Since I have been messing around with auctions, I figured I would try an auction with a start bid of $9.99 and see how that went. The ending price was $9.99. Shows you how auctions go most of the time.
Some more auction numbers and my thoughts.
I had 300 auctions end last Sunday. 21 sold from bids and 279 did not sell. I had 247 auctions end last Monday. 1 sold via a best offer, 32 sold from bids and 214 did not sell. I’m not sure I would draw too many conclusions from this as I think my Monday batch were “better” items or at least better items for auction.
I did $1780 in sales via auction and surprisingly $1200 in sales from fixed price listings. I had one order of four fixed price listings for almost $300 so that certainly helped my overall numbers, but even without that, I was happy with these numbers.
Almost everything sold for minimum bid or one or two bids up. This is why it’s so important to set your minimum bid at the true minimum you would take for an item. Just two items led to a true bidding war, and those were very timely listings — autographed rookie cards of players who had starring roles in the World Series. I got lucky with those but even with that, the bidding wars only added up to an extra $75.
Almost everything was paid for within the first three days. The only listing that looks like it will go completely unpaid went for a mere $10. I might spread out my auctions over a few days next time to see what effect that has, if any.
Part of my auction success is because trading cards are the #1 subcategory for auctions, but I sent some of my other random unique inventory to auction and received two sales. This 100+ year old book sold for a bid of $30 after months of no activity as a $50 BIN/best offer listing, and the buyer already left happy feedback. This photography book went unsold at auction but had 1 watcher who (I assume) is the same watcher who accepted my 20% offer after I relisted it.
Three buyers added onto their single item purchase with other items from my store in the same order. I scheduled all of my auctions start times staggered a few minutes apart hoping to get more buyers who grabbed multiple items. I wonder if that might be less common with “new eBay” than it used to be a few years ago, but honestly it was well worth the $50 in scheduled listing fees to set the auctions up and forget about them until they were done.
There was not a ton of rhyme or reason to what sold. Some of the items were “bargain” prices and some were very close to my BIN/best offer price. Some were older listings which had not had much activity in the last six months and others had received offers which I had auto-declined and ended up selling to that same buyer for at or near their offer price. There are a lot of different factors which go into why an item sells and when it sells, and I think it’s helpful to play around with your listings regardless of what you sell or how big your store is, and see what works best for you. Especially now that bulk editor is as fast as it is.
Wow, that’s quite a find anywhere, but at a Goodwill in 2022 it’s really something! Was it in the original box or all piled together into a random box? Amazing how high quality stuff ends up in a random thrift store…
Thinking about you. Hope you and your family are doing well today. Take good care of yourself.
Congrats @Ryanne on your performance, we’re all rooting for you in the next round! And thanks to you, I finally learned what the hell regionals are!
I had an incredibly slow week of sales, but I did it to myself. I have 550 auctions ending between tonight and tomorrow. It’s not a fire sale. I was very deliberate about setting the minimum bid price at the absolute lowest I would accept for that listing. I wouldn’t recommend doing auctions any other way. A lot of listings, even those that get watchers, just sell for the minimum bid.
I have plenty of unlisted inventory at this point, both trading cards and other items, so I figured I may as well take some chances over the last few months of the year. This week, once I get all the unsold auctions listed, I will try a public coupon or markdown sale. I have to think about what I want to do for Black Friday. I’m hopeful eBay will offer some kind of eBay bucks promo, but maybe that program is dead.
So far, my favorite item to receive a bid is this antiquarian religious book. I had it listed at $50 or best offer for over a year. I only paid a few bucks for it and books are not a main source of my income, so I’m really happy with any sales over $20.
10/30/2022 – 11/5/2022
Total items in store: 1255 (up from 1157 last week, but this number is only higher because I relisted 150 auctions which went unsold from my last auction batch a month ago)
Items sold: 25 (1 via best offer — which I don’t think is right, so maybe this feature’s broken?, 6 via seller initiated offer, 10 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1441.22 (down 61% from one year ago)
Net sales: $781.18 (down 71% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $57.65 (up 20% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 16 hours (down from 20 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $125.25 — Cristian Javier 2021 Panini Select auto jersey button prizm rookie card #/5
This sold the same day that the Astros pitched a no-hitter in the World Series. I had the card listed at $70 for the last few months, but I saw the score in the fifth inning and no hits from the Phillies and decided to double the price of the card. It still sold immediately after the game.
I have another Javier autograph in my auction batch that ends tomorrow. It’s not quite as nice as this card (higher serial number, no jersey or button relic) but has still been bid up to $46. It will be interesting to see how high it goes.
Lowest price sold (net): $12.59— 10 card lot of New York Giants cards
I buy in large enough quantities that I often end up with cards which are not valuable enough to list on eBay individually or sell on consignment but not completely worthless, so I thought I would experiment by making a few lots of “hot” teams to see if they sold. Last week I sold 4 out of 7, so that’s a promising start. I’d love to figure out a system where I could list 10-20 of these lots in a week without it becoming a huge time sink.
Great info, thanks for sharing your knowledge. It is so interesting how what looks “similar” using Terapeak or other research is often quite different. Small nuances in items are such a huge determinant of value. Of course, we as sellers always have choices to make, and as you said low starting bids often lead to low sold prices. But I think some casual sellers are just happy to get their $8.
I have been keeping an eye on advent calendars this year just to get a feel for what sells and what doesn’t. Amazing that you were able to find Harry Potter ones for $0.98! It is so interesting what gets marked down and what doesn’t.
How much did you pay for the mid century modern salad serving set? I really love that style…guess I know what kind of dishes I’ll be looking for eventually!
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Need to stay away from sourcing and list some things around here.
I am in the same boat as you, and kept this in mind convincing myself to skip a flea market trip even though it’s unseasonably warm in the northeast today. Pretty proud of that, the great thing about the flea market is that it will always be there.
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The rest of my goals are to just find enough room by stacking up boxes and bins to store the rest of his stuff until I can get to it.
Wow, this sounds pretty overwhelming, and my inventory is all in one room which has about half neatly organized and stocked boxes and bins and the rest kind of a mess. It can be hard to make progress when you’re at your max as far as space goes.
Do you start by throwing out all the junk first? Put like items together? Set aside the good stuff? Or just tackle one box/bin at a time?
The rest of my goals are to just find enough room by stacking up boxes and bins to store the rest of his stuff until I can get to it.
Wow, this sounds pretty overwhelming, and my inventory is all in one room which has about half neatly organized and stocked boxes and bins and the rest kind of a mess. It can be hard to make progress when you’re at your max as far as space goes.
Do you start by throwing out all the junk first? Put like items together? Set aside the good stuff? Or just tackle one box/bin at a time?
Need to stay away from sourcing and list some things around here.
I am in the same boat as you, and kept this in mind convincing myself to skip a flea market trip even though it’s unseasonably warm in the northeast today. Pretty proud of that, the great thing about the flea market is that it will always be there.
Our store has evolved into complete diversity since we never know what people will buy. It’s always scared me to be too dependent on any one category.
I had never really planned to focus only on one category, as long as I sold on eBay I have always dabbled in selling weird books and music because I love that stuff. But the sports card bubble from early in the pandemic really helped focus me in on the one niche and it just kept growing from there. Partially because of rising prices across the board and also the market fluctuations created many more buying opportunities.
The big challenge is that there’s a huge investment of both time and money in buying in large quantities. I reinvested a huge amount of my profit from the last couple years because I wanted to get to the point where I am now with a huge inventory between eBay and consignment. This gives me a lot more options and flexibility for how to spend my time in the next few years. But there was also risk involved. It’s worked out well so far, but there’s always that question lingering of what if the sports card market or the economy crashes. So I’ve been getting much more aggressive about selling lately. Probably much harder for a collector to do than a scavenger.
Congrats on the great week of sales! When I looked for your USS Albany badge in Terapeak, I also found this sale from August of a beat-up employee badge for $7 plus shipping. Good deal? Huge steal? Or too beat up to be worth much?
It’s pretty amazing to see the details in yours versus the other beat-up one.
I saw a booth with all sorts of crocheted things for sale. I think that crocheting & knitting these days is mostly for the pleasure of doing it and not as much for the actual use
It’s always interesting to me to see these booths because I always wonder, why not just do an etsy shop? Wouldn’t that provide a much wider customer base, plus skip the labor of setting up at these fairs? But I think for some people, they genuinely don’t care about profiting from their hobby and even look at any profit as wrong or bad. Or it’s about the socializing aspect of it.
How will you handle the Lionel train parts? Those seem like they might be pretty valuable depending on what you have and condition.
This was my favorite sale of last week, a large contemporary photography book for $50 to a buyer in South America via a US freight forwarding address. I picked it up at a library sale for around $5. So many books at these sales which only have value as paperweights but it’s always fun to find the gems.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/134266678499
