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I feel good when things take just a few weeks to sell. Makes be believe I priced it about right.
I like when things sell, period, and never regret it if something sells the same day even though I’m sure I’ve left money on the table plenty of times. But I agree that a week or two listing period is basically the ideal length of time for no regrets. Bonus points if it sells buy it now with no haggling and the buyer is within your shipping region.
This is always a great topic for discussion. I used to do this back in the day — media items on one ID, trading cards and sports memorabilia on another. I think it was when I was at that place where I had enough listings for a basic store but not nearly enough to justify the cost of the next level up.
Since the new ebay algorithm weighs new listings so heavily, I think that right now having one store for everything is almost always the right decision, if only because you will get more buyers by having more listings.
I think it’s pretty hard to build repeat customers and multiple item sales unless you have a large store in a hot niche for collectors’ items. I’m thinking sports cards, for example…
I get repeat customers and multiple item sales every so often in the sports cards niche, but both are rare even though I have almost 10,000 feedback and 0 negatives or neutrals and I go the extra mile to provide the best customer service. I imagine they are almost non-existent for smaller stores or sellers who have a lackadaisical attitude about customer service. Most collectors chase after very specific wants for their collection, and flippers look for the good deals to flip. These impulses, more than anything else, is what drives them send that offer or click the buy it now. I send out coded coupons to buyer groups every so often and get a few extra sales that way and a few times a week I’ll get a repeat buyer or multi item sale. So the tools we have been given from eBay help somewhat, and they are all worth trying.
But mostly eBay is still the unglamorous work: list a pile of items, wait a few days for one to sell, a few weeks for another sale, and a few months or years for another.
One of the cool things about my scavenger life, which is mostly centered around looking through thousands of listings from these big consignment sellers, is that occasionally I get to come across listings where I would never know anything about. Consignment sellers just sell whatever can make them a buck, but that doesn’t mean they always do it well. Here’s this week’s example, which cost me a mere $7.50 because of the wacky title.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/363949188225?nordt=true&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
I’m sure I won’t get rich off this guy (if I ever get around to listing it), but it’s really beautiful. If anyone knows anything about old letter openers, I’d love to know more. Not even sure where to get started to educate myself.
I have noticed a slight uptick in sales of media items over the last few weeks. Probably because I have added a few new books and media listings in the last month. Here are two examples of weird out of print CDs which sold for me this week. Very longtail (2+ years on both) but these types of items often sell for full price as long as they are unique enough that no others are listed and priced reasonably.
I love that cross stitch for all the reasons you mentioned. Definitely kitschy. Vintage (and even modern) cross stitch kits and magazines are always worth a second look, especially since they’re often very inexpensive. I have a pile of Rowan knitting magazines which I paid maybe $5 for the pile and your sale was a reminder to get them photographed and listed, because they sell pretty fast.
How did you come up with the price for this one? It is such a unique piece.
The SL edit the post too fast glitch is how you know that you truly belong in these forums. 🙂
PS: Would anyone be interested if I were to put together albums of the stuff I find in the trash each week? Usually it’s pretty mundane stuff, but it’s always crazy to see what people throw away, lol.
I would be really interested to see this. There are a few guys in my small town who drive around the day before trash collection and fill up their pickup truck bed with scrap metal and whatever else of value that was left out at the curb. I always want to stop them and find out their whole deal. How do they get rid of all that stuff? How much work do they have to put in to modify/fix the stuff they find? How much profit do they really make?
It really is amazing how easily people just throw stuff out.
Hey, CT. Welcome (back) and great posts. I have focused heavily on sports and non-sports trading cards in the last few years, but I know very little about TCG, so I will learn a lot from your posts I’m sure. I use eBay for 90% of my buying, picking through auction listings (mostly the big consignment sellers) and reselling using BIN/best offer. It is amazing how inefficient the modern trading card market is. This year, I also started using COMC which has become its own self-sustaining income stream like TCGPlayer is for you.
Aside from the trading cards and dumpster finds, do you ever hit any rummage sales or library sales? Aside from the occasional good independent thrift store, those are the best places I’ve found for true scavenging, at least in the Philly area.
It is exciting to see the new Scavenge of the week / Sale of the week forum to hopefully give us another thread for discussions throughout the week. Especially those of you who are reading but may not post your numbers every week! I am excited to hear more about everyone’s sales and what they find. I got more items listed than usual last week, and I’m sure that the forum being so active had a lot to do with why.
8/21/2022 – 8/27/2022
Total items in store: 1378 (up from 1358 last week)
Items sold: 41 (20 via best offer, 9 via seller initiated offer, 26 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2273.53 (down 40% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1625,77 (down 39% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $55.25 (up 21% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 16 hours (up from 14 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $189.83 — Derwin James Panini Select gold prizm autograph rookie #/10
Lowest price sold (net): $8.37 — Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan Volume 5 softcover book
Sorry to hear about the post office mishap Christine. Those are rare with USPS in the grand scheme of things but still frustrating. I usually use shipcover for insurance and their claims process has always easy and painless. I hope your usps claim goes just as smoothly.
The damage is really a shame because the plate you sold is so beautiful! How significant of an impact does crazing and other defects have on the value of vintage pottery? I am a novice with this stuff so it’s fun to learn.
The crazing on yours looks pretty minor to me. I would think most crazing wouldn’t be as bad as chips or cracks. But collectors can be very particular about certain things.
@retro-treasures-wv gave you so much great advice already but I thought of a few things to add.1. Some of your oldest listings are at or near their first birthday. I’m pretty confident that part of the new eBay algorithm (well, “new” since the early days of the podcast) is that you want to at least “touch” those listings in some way — meaning, edit the price or title at a bare minimum. Me personally, I would probably end your oldest 50 so listings (maybe everything from the farmchair set and back?), cut the prices by $10 (or more) and sell similar. Do all 50 in one evening and you’ll have 50 “new” listings, or do 10 batches of 5 listings and you’ll have “new” listings for 10 days straight. I don’t think it matters which, and like retro said some of the items are very longtail. But worth a try.
2. With your book listings, I have some suggestions related to specific listings. I love weird and/or old book listings! Buyer beware: this is the advice of a very amateur book selling guy with many more books in to be listed piles than books actually listed. But this guy went out the door with yesterday’s mail at least…
A. The Virginia Practice books — definitely want to put Virginia Practice (the title of the book) and the author’s names Waddell and Handford in the title. Also, how much of market is there (at any price) for five year old books where the law has likely changed? I only see one sale of this book from any year in Terapeak over the last 365 days.
B. I think the condition notes at the end of your titles, specifically the Casca paperbacks, are not needed. These condition grades in the title aren’t as common with eBay media listings as they were even a few years ago, probably because the space is completely dominated by massive secondhand media sellers where condition is an afterthought at best. Use the space in the title to add the author’s name Barry Sadler. Or maybe just lot up the pair of Casca books and list them for around $10? That seems to be the range of what they will collectively sell for (even 1st editions) and there are a lot of active listings for both, especially for Pirate #15.
C. I would donate Chapman sailing, there are a number of active listings for the 51st edition in the $10 and under range. I would probably also donate Divers Guide to Hawaii, there are none on eBay but 4 on Amazon and 2 of those are under $5.
D. The Mary Leakey monograph you have is an interesting and unique piece of history, and I love it which is why I saved it for last. Also very longtail item.
I would change up the listing’s title quite a bit as you have two very long words paleoanthropologist and monograph which I don’t think are doing much work for you in terms of finding interested buyers. In the trading cards niche, autographs are always abbreviated to auto, but booksellers tend to go with signed. So I would title the listing something like:
Mary Leakey signed Excavation of Burial Mounds in Ngorongoro Crater 1966 fossils
I really wanted to get Tanzania in there but it’s one character too long. Maybe you take out one of the of’s or in’s.
I would also double the price, or more, on the listing. You already have 4 watchers and there are a number of sold Mary Leakey signed items over $100.
I hope this was helpful to you. I loved writing it and hope others will share their stores and listings so we can keep having discussions like this. Lots of great advice this week!
Your post is full of so much great advice and wisdom, we should have a weekly thread let retro analyze your ebay store. I think this is my favorite part.
in my experience no amount of sales or relisting makes the very long tail stuff sell faster. I’ve done 50% off sales on my really old listings many times and it has never sold a single item.
Completely agree with this. it is always worth trying to end older items, cut their prices, send out offers to watchers, coupons and there are probably other tricks and tools available which I’m forgetting as I type this. Most of these things take just a few minutes (if not seconds) and every so often they lead to a sale.
But some items have 1 or 2 potential buyers max and you might need to sit on the item for a year (or more) in order for them to eventually find your listing, regardless of price or anything else. Are items like this even worth listing at all? In certain cases (rare/$$$/unique), sure, and everyone’s tolerance is going to be different based on inventory space and other factors.
But in general, it’s important to remind ourselves to (mostly) list items with a demonstrated history of sales and list consistently.
While coats have an abysmal $50/sq ft rating, shoes are $250/sq ft, clothing is $325/sq ft, and small misc is over $400/sq ft.
This is so far outside my niche but I love the discussion and it’s such an interesting way to think about inventory! I can see the rationale behind the discrepancy between $$/sq ft in coats versus small misc items, but it’s amazing to me how high clothing is. Without you running the numbers, I would have guessed clothing would be closer to coats in value per sq ft. But I guess clothing is not nearly as bulky. And you are probably selling clothes closer to 12 months a year, versus coats where at least 4 months out of the year there is very little interest in anyone buying coats at all.
I dream about running into one of those big bucks coats at the thrift stores in my small town. Just to say I sold one once. I think that is one of the signs you know you’re a scavenger when…
Have you ever had issues with counterfeit cards? I remember buying a Bo Jackson card as a kid at a card show in a plastic holder. I took it out and it was fake – not even close to being a good fake either.
There are so many combinations of printing technologies with ultra modern cards (foil, thick cardstock, acetate, die cutting) that it would be unfathomably expensive and difficult for a counterfeiter to replicate all of it. And there are new sets produced on an almost weekly basis for almost every sport so it would be logistically difficult as well.
That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of suspicious activity within trading cards, like any other collectible. There are a lot of fake and misrepresented cards from the mid-1990s, when companies first started releasing special inserts and there was a lot of consolidation of card manufacturers and companies going out of business. And there have been plenty of huge trading card sellers documented to be involved in trimming and altering cards without disclosure to increase their grades, or at least to turn a blind eye to it. But these frauds are (mostly) about making tens of thousands, not the $20 cards or even the $500 cards, and while I hate the fraudulent sales and dishonest sellers, they’re a small fraction of trading card sales.
The fact that this is a hot category and ripe for counterfeiting keeps me from getting into it. I don’t have the time (or desire) to develop the knowledge base you have on cards.
Don’t dismiss them so easily, especially since the counterfeiting really isn’t as much of a problem as you think. Cards have seen such a renaissance in the last few years that I will be surprised if they don’t start popping up at the estate sales and auctions that so many of you frequent.
The best shorthand guide I can offer is to keep an eye out for anything anything very old (1950s and earlier) or anything ultra modern (2000 to present) with a unique feature, like an autograph, memorabilia piece, serial number or interesting card design.
There are plenty of autographed cards worth $1 (or less) and plenty of old cards which aren’t worth much especially in poor condition, but in general this will give you something to go off of. And terapeak is a great resource for card sales if you type in the year of the card (found on the back), the set it’s from, the player and any identifying features (eg auto /150 would be card shorthand for an autographed card serial numbered to 150). Just make sure that you’re matching the card you have with a completed sale, not a different card or active listing.
Also, the only reputable grading companies are PSA, BGS, SGC and maybe CSG. There has been a huge increase in “graded” cards the last few years from companies with no standards or expertise in card grading, and I imagine plenty of those will escape into the wild where uneducated flippers will remember a YouTube video they watched once about cards = $$$$ and they will waste their money.
I don’t know how many of you deal in things like stamps, coins, action figures and things of that nature. I don’t have the time or desire to learn the ins and outs of those niches because I was just never interested in that kind of stuff. But I know enough to know how to ID 925 sterling silver, or the value in certain types of vintage toys. So hopefully I’ve given all of you the equivalent level of knowledge about cards!
I do see that ebay has an authentication process that protects buyers and sellers:
https://pages.ebay.com/authenticity-guarantee-tradingcards/
How has your experience been with that program?
They have rolled the program out on a somewhat limited basis so far, so it’s only cards above a certain $$ amount (it says $249 but I think it’s more like $200) and not if they have certain features. Like graded cards are not eligible. I’ve had maybe four or five sales using the program. It works a lot like Global Shipping where you send the package to an address (in Florida, not Kentucky) and then eBay gets it to the buyer from there. People in the card world are complainers in general (big part of why I hang out here), so of course they mostly hate it, but I love the program. I’ve been surprised at how quickly the package gets to the buyer even with the extra step and it eliminates the possibility of returns for “not as described,” not that those returns have ever been a problem for me anyway.
That’s an interesting mention that it may not be any of our particular stores but actually just fewer people shopping on eBay. I have no idea whats up or down.
According to eBay’s Q2 report, performance actually exceeded estimates and 138 million active daily buyers. Though you would think if sales were up 10% they’d say that!
But I thought this part was especially interesting:
More importantly, the majority of our enthusiast buyers’ spending remains above $3,000 dollars per year, and we continue to see cross-category shopping activity. Simply put, our Focus Category strategy has put all of eBay in a stronger position today and will remain a key driver of our worldwide business.
This seems right around what I would guess based in my experiences, granting that I mostly sell collectibles in one of the Focus Categories.
eBay leadership also seems to recognize how important sellers like us are:
As mentioned in our most recent Impact report, in the US alone we support more than one million jobs, the vast majority coming from small and micro-entrepreneurs, just like so many of you selling on the platform.
I still havent seen any other site that competes with eBay is the weird, vintage items that many of us sell.
eBay’s not perfect, but it’s a great time to have an eBay business. I’m sure other platforms have strengths and weaknesses, but I wonder if sellers who dabble in FB Marketplace, Mercari, etc would do better just by putting their stuff on eBay.
I really love your stories of your sales. Huge congrats on having the foresight to purchase those cards and then circumstances made them valuable a year later!
Thanks. The $20 card sales are a lot more repeatable and sustainable but as my sales have increased, I’ve been following my gut (knowledge base really) on these more expensive cards and the same basic rules still apply. But it’s not every week that I make $600 profit on two cards since buy-in prices have gotten so high on many players and types of cards.
I like your idea of a “scavenge of the week” or “sale of the week” topic. I’ll ask Ryanne to create it on the forum.
Very cool, and I’d be happy to create the new threads for one or both every week.
I know that it helps me to reflect on what’s sold, and why it sold, and I think a dedicated place for that discussion (which is kind of a separate thing from the weekly numbers) will help others as well.
