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I tried a new experiment, sending out at least 15 offers to watchers every day this week, in addition to listing at least 3 new items every day as I have been, and it all led to a nice week of sales. A coincidence or meaningful data? No clue, but I was surprised to see how quickly — often within a few minutes — interested buyers accepted a 10% or 15% offer. I had 4 sales from offers tonight (out of about 50 offers sent) and 2 on Thursday afternoon out of about 20 offers sent. It’s a reminder that with the eBay app, a potential sale can happen very fast. All it takes is a push notification and a few taps of a phone screen. So send those offers, run those sales, create those coupons.
2/13/2022 – 2/19/2022
Total items in store: 3349 (down from 3363)
Items sold: 62 (34 via best offer, 14 via seller initiated offer)
The sales tab also says that I sold 19 via promoted listings, which can’t be right since I’ve never used promoted listings before. Unless I got auto-enrolled somehow…?Gross sales: $3622.01 (up 30% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2551.37 (up 35% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $5.49 — Joe Staley rookie card
Another sale from aggressively cutting prices on low dollar items — in this case, a rookie card of an offensive lineman who spent his whole career with the San Francisco 49ers. No surprise that the card’s going to live out the rest of its years in sunny California, where it belongs.
Highest price sold (net): $253.04 — Hilary Knight Topps Olympics autograph
Talk about a very small niche — the extremely high card prices of the best cards of athletes in obscure sports, like Hilary Knight who is one of the best women’s hockey players. This sale worked like many of my best sales do — I bought this card before the Olympics (on a message board of all places), and sold it during the Olympics. Ryanne’s influence on how to price unique items helped make me some extra profit, as my price was above the highest sold listings, enough to get a snarky “why is this priced so high?” message from an “interested” buyer which I ignored because I rarely respond to price fishing messages and I knew my pricing logic was sound.
There were no other Hilary Knight Olympics autographs listed when I created my listing, so I figured there was a chance someone would hit the buy it now if the US won the hockey gold medal. They lost to Canada and got silver, but my card sold for full price anyway. I kind of understand why — almost all pro athletes in mainstream American sports sign hundreds to thousands of autographs every single year for dozens of sets, but Hilary Knight only has autographs in a few sets. Maybe 1000 total? And I believe this is her earliest one, from 2014. $300 is a good sale, but most of her autographs go for $100 and up, which is why it was a no-brainer purchase for me at $70. I didn’t expect it to sell quite this fast, but timing is often really important in sales of rare items.
I had a few other interesting high dollar sales this week, my favorites being this card with a piece of the player’s jersey from the NBA Finals and this autograph of one of the top young football defensive players. The jersey card was listed for just a day or two before the buyer sent me an offer that was maybe 15% off my BIN price, and the autograph was listed for a year and a half without a lot of offers. I accepted a counteroffer which was 30% off ($75) from my $250 price.
There was probably merit in holding onto both cards for longer, considering their relative scarcity (10 copies or less of both cards) and the quality of the player and card. It’s likely that one or both will be worth more in the next 6-12 months. I particularly liked the NBA Finals jersey card and completely understand why someone who buys cards for collection or “investment” would pay up for one of those.
But offers over $150 are hard for me to pass up. It used to take a lot of hours working for someone else to make that much money. I’m at about six months of doing this full-time, no other gigs, and every week of doing these numbers is a reminder that as long as I put the time in and continue to adapt and learn and grow, this is my life now. No more working for someone else, or watching the clock, or wasting time and energy at a job I hate. It’s pretty amazing.
This has pretty much been my experience with the handful of dissatisfied customers I’ve had in the last few years. I apologize, offer a full refund without requiring a return, and usually they leave a glowing positive feedback. Sometimes they have even bought from me again.
This is another great very small change by eBay. In theory, this should reduce negative buying experiences for casual eBay users — though, of course, there are a lot of terrible sellers who will do the exact wrong thing by fighting any return and even arguing with their buyer.
I need to free up space before I can scavenge for more. Need to either post items or take them to the local thrift. Taking a hard look at effort to profit ratio and separating out some lower $ items and items I’m just not excited about posting. I think I’ve let the pile demotivate me.
Really great words of wisdom here. I’ve also been fighting with a lot of death piles and leftovers and random stuff that I’m not motivated to list. I’ve found that forcing myself to take the pictures for a few of these types of items every week (last week I did 5) has helped me make a dent over the last 4-6 weeks. Also, this gets me more willing to get rid of stuff.
Clearing the clutter, and having a dedicated space to deal with new purchases / to-be-listed stuff, is such an important part of keeping inventory organized and new listings in the pipeline. At least that’s been my experience. When I get too messy, or overwhelmed, I don’t list as consistently and my processes are much more disorganized.
Good summary of the pros and cons of the winter seller update in the weekly post. I figure 0.3% is a small price to pay for how easily eBay connects us sellers with interested buyers, especially considering all the small changes around the margins which help sellers that eBay has added in the last few years. Of course, if eBay adds another 0.3% fee increase next year, I might be singing a different tune!
This wasn’t a particularly busy or memorable sales week for me, mostly a slow grind with a lot of $25 and under sales. But it’s nice to see those add up as well. There was some nice weather in the Northeast all week, a reminder that spring is coming and hopefully with it, a return to even more sense of normalcy.
2/6/2022 – 2/12/2022
Total items in store: 3363 (up from 3362)
Items sold: 62 (48 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $2569.83 (up 24% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1697.34 (up 20% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $8.81 — Reggie Jackson silver prizm
I have been pretty aggressive about reducing prices on lower inventory the past few months. I need the space for new inventory, and I have realized in these last few months that some amount of my inventory has been sitting in scavenger purgatory. I’ve had the item for a year (or longer), no one’s bought it, no watchers, no offers that weren’t auto-declined or maybe no offers at all. For the $100 and up items, even $50 and up, it’s worth waiting for the right buyer to come along.
But these $25 and under items that aren’t particularly unique? I might have them slightly overpriced or the demand is just not there at the price I have them at. So, even if it means taking $10 or $12 offers, let’s get them out of here. I can buy a few more $25 and under items with the profits from this sale, and in theory, I have a better sense now of what will sell quickly. In theory.
Highest price sold (net): $161.00 — Derrick White orange prizm rookie card #7/9 PSA 10
Derrick White was traded to the Boston Celtics last week, which probably explains the timing of this sale. The value in this card is in the set (a nice quality), the fact that this is one of his rookie cards, the serial numbering #7/9 and the grade. I find sales like this to be fascinating because White is not a star player, best known for his strong defense, and at 27 years old he’s in the middle of his career. So basically, what you see with him now is what you’re likely to get for the next few years. A good player for the team, but usually their cards (even the rare, more valuable ones) are not as expensive compared to more star players or the new young potential star.
In fact, I bought this card at auction two months ago for about $35 —here’s the original listing. The seller in the original listing, COMC, is the largest card seller on eBay as they operate massive consignment warehouses in Washington state. Basically you send them your cards and they handle all the dirty work for a fee (minimum $0.50, often more) plus additional fees when the card sells. Most of COMC’s buying and selling action happens on their website (which I have started to use more frequently as a seller in the last few months, primarily to move $20 and under cards) but COMC also cross-posts their listings to eBay and runs auctions. Their listings don’t always get top dollar since so much of the process (like title creation) is automated, but they are usually decent enough. For example, the original listing for the White card that I won for $35, that listing was fine and had basically the same information that my listing had. It’s just that auctions can be weird and don’t always end with a reflection of an item’s “real” value, especially auctions during the holiday season. Timing had something to do with it in this case as well, but this card was going to sell for a nice profit at some point in the next year as long as White’s performance stayed somewhat in line with his consistent baseline from the last four years. The original purchase was a real steal.
Is it possible that White is one of the stars when the Celtics win the championship in a few months or years, and his cards are all worth a lot more? Sure, that’s how card prices work sometimes, and I guess anything is possible. Sports can make for very unlikely heroes, and I think that’s part of the fun for a lot of fans and especially for card buyers and sellers. But it’s easy to hold out for a higher priced sale that never comes along, or get caught up in haggling over $20 for no real reason other than “what it’s listed for.” I spent $35 and sold for $161 after fees. Heck, even the buyer’s original offer of $150 was a sale that any of us would take 95 times out of 100.
Thanks for the tip, this was very helpful since I get a few customers every week who buy multiple items, so no interest (yet) in requiring immediate payment before sending an offer. I had seen a small decrease in offers since the winter seller update, and it’s possible that having this box checked (without my knowledge) might have been a factor in that.
Hi Sharyn,
It is always difficult to talk people out of their irrational beliefs about what they think something is “worth.” So you will need a hefty dose of luck, along with knowledge. But let me give you some insight.
You have already done some of the work by looking at sold listings. I find that showing people the most recent sold listing — in this case, a sale of $15 with free shipping — will get their head out of the clouds.
Similarly, there are a lot of active listings for Clemens 1985 Topps Tiffany — and almost any other 1980s cards because that was really the beginning of a ten year era of very overproduced cards. This article explains why using a pretty straightforward example at the beginning. If your friend responds better to pictures, here is an article with an infographic explaining why 1980s are mostly worthless from a supply and demand perspective. And if they like story time, I grew up with boxes of cards from these sets in my dad’s closet. So did most collectors who grew up in the 1980s, or had parents who did, and everyone saved those cards. They are so easy to find today, and have been since…well…the 1980s. So the demand is just not there.
Next, here is the PSA population report for the Roger Clemens 1985 Topps Tiffany. I wouldn’t show your friend this because they’ll see 4 digit numbers for sold listings and freak out. But this will allow you to see that the vast majority of graded cards don’t receive a 10 grade. In the case of this Clemens card, PSA has graded 48 with a 10 grade — but they have 644 in a 9 grade, 703 in an 8 grade, and 86 in a 7. Yes, more cards have been graded a 7 than a 10. The average sales price of this Clemens card in a 7 is $150. But the current cost of grading is $100 for non-PSA members. Add in the cost of shipping and insurance (required by PSA), plus the cost of selling on eBay — and I’m sure you can do the math. Even if it’s graded an 8 (not likely)
Also keep in mind that the vast majority of people who submit cards for grading aren’t people like your friend’s husband. They’re card experts who only submit the best of the best cards for grading and submit dozens if not hundreds of cards for grading at a time to save significantly on fees. What looks like a 10 to someone who is not familiar with cards is most likely an 8 or worse. That’s especially true for cards that are 1980s or earlier. Take a look at any of my listings and you’ll see cards which are protected with both a thin sleeve and a thicker hard sleeve. This is how modern cards are treated, since their value is in manufactured scarcity, and many of them still regularly grade less than 10. Cards which haven’t been protected that way — like most from the 1980s — are nearly certain to have some damage. Printing was also less reliable then, so if the centering is off, that will affect a card’s grade even if it’s direct from a set.
Finally, it’s possible that your friend may be confused about the exact card she has. She likely has the year and player correct, but Topps Tiffany was a special version of the regular Topps set, and it’s not as common as the regular 1980s Topps sets. Here is a guide to telling the two apart, and there is a gallery image with an example showing a 1985 Topps Tiffany and regular 1985 Topps card side by side.
I hope this helps you. I can tell you from my own experiences with acquaintances who hear what I do, and feel the need to share with me all the details about the nest egg that their husband/grandfather/uncle has, that they will remain convinced they are sitting on a goldmine no matter what you say. They will also still have their “very expensive” cards the next time you talk to them, and the next, and the next. I think for a lot of people, believing they have these very expensive cards or knickknacks or heirlooms in their closet is a defense mechanism, an ego thing. Like the kinds of people who play the lottery every so often and say things like “got to be in it to win it.” They don’t win, just by the numbers. But people need something to believe in to justify their own irrationality.
<div id=”:1bd” class=”Ar Au Ao”>
<div id=”:1b9″ class=”Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY” tabindex=”1″ role=”textbox” contenteditable=”true” spellcheck=”false” aria-label=”Message Body” aria-multiline=”true”>Therehave been a lot of great conversations and info here lately, and it is helping my productivity. I listed about 20 more items last week than usual. I created at least 3 new listings every day (thanks to inspiration from posts by @retro-treasures-wv and @millionairedojo among others) and it didn’t feel like much, if any, extra time. I have hundreds, if not thousands of good, quality items to list, so it’s nice to see a small improvement in my process. Maybe this can become my new normal level of listing.
With that said, the Northeast is going to see some warmer weather this week and weekend. It’s been a cold winter, so mid-50s is going to feel like summer, and one of the best things about this life is the flexibility to take the time when I want it. No need to ask a boss. No guilt. Things will even sell while I am enjoying the weather and the time. It’s the best perk of building the pipeline.
1/30/2022 – 2/5/2022
Total items in store: 3362 (up from 3319)
Items sold: 60 (34 via best offer, 12 via seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $3747.16 (up 33% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2754.78 (up 40% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $5.10 — Jean-Guy Gendron 1972 Year In Hockey autograph
I have all of my listed inventory on plastic shelving units and bookcases in one bedroom of my apartment, but I’m at that point in my eBay life with 3000+ items where all the extra stuff that’s needed to sell full-time — shipping supplies, death piles, inventory I’m not sure quite what to do with — has been migrating to the desk, then underneath the desk, then to the floor in front of the shelves. Every couple days I get it organized and then it gets messy again. Around the start of this year, I decided I needed to do something before I lived the scavenger’s nightmare and got swallowed up by my stuff.
One of the ways I decided to solve the problem, for now, was by getting more selective about what I would list, and much more aggressive about slashing prices on $15 and under inventory. This has led to a few $7 sales like this autographed card of a hockey player from the 1970s.
Most modern card sets feature current players and teams, but there are a few in each sport every year where the cards span players from throughout the years. I like these kinds of sets since they often sell quickly as long as it’s a decent player and the card has some rarity with a good serial number. This card didn’t have either of those factors, so it sat in my store for at least two years before it was finally purchased.
Ironically, the card traveled just a few towns away to its forever home. I must have spent something like $2 on this card three years ago. I built my store inventory on these $2 purchases to $7 sales. You need a lot of them to actually make money, though.
Highest price sold (net): $508.71 — Joe Burrow rookie card #10/10 graded 8.5
This is an amazing sale for me. I’m sure it’s in my top 5 highest sales all-time. I bought this card for $125 before the season. Prices usually drop when a sport is not in season, but that was a lucky auction win even then. Not one I really expected to win, but that’s how the card buying game goes sometimes. There are so many new sets and cards and auctions that it’s impossible for every card to sell for the “best” price every time.
The card did not receive a perfect grade, but the value in the card is in the type of set Panini Spectra (a thick, colorful and popular high-quality set), the rarity of the serial number #10/10 and the player on the card, Joe Burrow, who was the #1 draft pick quarterback a few years ago. He had a lot of growing pains his first two seasons, in fact his team was pretty terrible, but this year he and his team the Cincinnati Bengals have had a magical run in the playoffs. This card sold within about two minutes of the end of the last game they won which qualified them for the upcoming Super Bowl. In hindsight, I could have raised the price $200 and it still would have sold.
You are probably reading this thinking it’s nuts to spend $600 on a football card. And it’s not even autographed! But so many of the buyers and sellers of expensive cards use money in a different way than scavengers do. Cards are another asset that can go up or down based on a ton of different factors, and in a world where expensive Tom Brady cards are worth tens and hundreds of thousands, $600 for a scarce rookie of one of the up and coming quarterbacks could prove to be a huge bargain in a year…or three years…or ten. It’s very doubtful it will be worth significantly less unless something dramatic happens to alter the modern trading card market or Burrow gets injured or retires unexpectedly, and while those things are possible, there are hundreds and hundreds of expensive Joe Burrow cards selling every day. It’s not like this is his most expensive card. In fact, this is a pretty unremarkable sale of a star player’s rookie card in the modern card world, even though it’s an amazing sale for me.
I don’t have the stomach to hold onto any of these cards for too long, or the slightest notion what the card market will look like in ten years, so I will happily take my $350 profit, reinvest some to keep the pipeline going and put the rest away…at least for now.
My favorite sales this week were cards of more obscure players: numbered rookie card of the Bengals kicker Evan McPherson for $40 (to the UK) and a 15 year old rookie card of Rams offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth for $40. Everyone wants the top cards of quarterbacks, running backs, receivers. Who would want a kicker? But some collectors do. Everyone has their own reasons for why they love the stuff they love.
I like selling these cards most of all. It reminds me of looking through boxes of cards at the local shop as a kid. It has been interesting to see these prices rise over the last few years, with a lot more people interested in buying and selling cards than before the pandemic. I would have sold these types of obscure players cards for $10 or $20 a few years ago. Timing is a factor in these sales as well — these buyers are paying peak prices because the players are about to match up in the Super Bowl. But it’s not just the top players and rarest cards who see their prices rise, it’s everyone and every type of card as long as the card’s got some unique factor to it.
The card market isn’t at the crazy place it was in the frenzy of the early pandemic, but I have the knowledge to know what’s a good deal and what’s not, and with that knowledge comes the potential for profit. Learning how to manage the timing of when to list has been something I always struggled with. So this week was a nice ego boost along with the nice payday. Always great to see those two things align.
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</div>This is great info, and seems to line up with what @annaesthetic23 mentioned in this post where she discusses some of the things she learned from eBay corporate through their Up and Running conferences. I am looking forward to seeing what happens to your sales after spreading out the listings.
There seems a lot of evidence that listing at least a few new items every day is one of the best practices to increase sales. Like you, I have a habit of not listing for a few days and then doing big batches of new listings on the weekends, but I think it’s worth the effort to try and correct that.
I got curious to see if I could find the original listing and sure enough, here it is:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/353854934827?nordt=true&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
The scavenger’s dream listing. Pretty nice pictures and description for a low feedback seller, too.
Amazing purchase, and I loved the video. Very methodical and process oriented, no bs and easy to follow even if you’re not a postcard expert. So many bundles of the same postcard will allow for a ton of $5 to $20 listings where one photo will lead to dozens and maybe even hundreds of sales.
Really good info, thanks for sharing it. My primary niche is trading cards and I would bet that our processes are very similar in terms of what info gets changed from listing to listing and how long the new listings actually take. Figuring out the right listing template and process in these niche collectible categories is a big part of being able to scale up and grow your store. A lot of sellers in my niche only picture the front of the card (not the back) and have a description that just says SEE TITLE, in the interest of building up a store with 100,000 listings or more. That’s not enough info (in my opinion) for an interested buyer, but it also took me a long time to learn that it’s almost never worth it to spend more than ~2-3 minutes creating any one individual listing.
Right now I’m happy with 50 new listings a week, which is about the number of items I sell each week with a ~3000 item store. For the time being, I’m pretty much maxed out in terms of the space I have to store new inventory. But once I get my space more organized or get into a bigger space, I may have to try your listing flow and see how it works for me.
Man, if I had a nickel for every time someone bought some random trinket and then messaged me to ask if I can wait a week or two for them to have the money to pay…
I get this a lot with the trading cards buyers. I would say it’s as high as 25% of buyers. I think a lot of people buying and selling cards are using credit, or the profits from one eBay sale to pay for another purchase. I almost always say yes, take a week if you need it. eBay’s unpaid item assistant makes it so easy to relist…and every so often, not only do these buyers actually pay after asking me to wait a week, but they buy again in the future.
It boggles my mind how someone could live like this, but it is true for a large percentage of Americans I fear.
Some of the early podcast episodes (well 2-3 years ago when I started listening) Jay mentions his work history before he started doing the video jobs and long before eBay, a lot of service jobs and kitchens and whatever else he could find. It was one of the things that made me love the podcast right away because that was similar to how I spent my twenties and even the beginning of my thirties as I was finishing my college degree. A lot of low paying, really hard work jobs that left me tired at the end of the day. It didn’t matter how hard I worked at them because there was really no opportunity for advancement. I made just enough to scrape by, and any time an unexpected bill came up (like car repair or a medical bill) I was screwed. Even working multiple jobs, even as I was doing the “right things” to get ahead in life.
So once in a while, I spent money I “shouldn’t have” to do something fun or get myself something I wanted or needed. I don’t know if it was impulsive or not. It was never backpacking across Europe or anything huge like that. Just enough so that I didn’t spend my entire twenties working and sleeping and going to school.
There are other factors. Financial education in the US is…not great, and it’s so easy to buy things with the click of a button that I think for some people, buying too much online is a real negative problem in their life. But I think my story is common as well. The silver lining is that those experiences are what made me so enthusiastic about my own eBay business and ambitious enough to keep working at it until I was able to make it work full-time. To a lot of people, they need the safety net of that full-time job, and the benefits that go along with it, but I never really had that in the first place.
it would be a crappy time for new sellers to enter the market. The barrier to entry is rising.
The cost to entry is rising, but the barrier to entry is so low compared to even three years ago. I think that’s why prices are higher: flipping and reselling is much more mainstream and accepted, and it’s so easy to sell — all you need is a phone, really. But there are still plenty of places to potentially find cheap inventory: small thrift stores, church sales, library sales, estate and yard sales.
To truly last at this, you need to have a range of skills and expertise. That knowledge base of what’s worth paying $15 at a thrift store is definitely important. The patience or wisdom to keep your money in your pocket instead of buying overpriced stuff is something that takes time to learn. And so does finding the right places to buy from, and finding new places when those start to dry up.
I don’t remember the last time I went to a Goodwill, or similar thrift store, and didn’t see at least one person (usually more) in there scanning stuff on their phone. I have to remember to look at faces when I see them. I would bet that it’s different people every time. That desperate hustle (the MAKE $20K in one week type of hustle) is like the P90X of selling online. Sure, it’s great for the first few weeks, but how many of them really, truly keep it up consistently for even a year?
But your knowledge base will keep you going this year and beyond.
the only thing the eBay corporate facilitators would definitively say about helping the algorithm work in your favor is to list at least a little every day–specifically, don’t go more than 3 days without listing
This is extremely useful information, thanks for sharing it with us. This strikes me as one of the most important questions to ask when sales are slow. I would venture to say that if eBay is going on the record about listing a little every day, then it’s a really important factor to the search algorithm.
Also, good on you for bringing a little money and more importantly awareness to the Innocence Project. They do great work and are horribly underfunded, in some areas barely funded and reliant on volunteers.
My sales are really cyclical – my sales chart looks like a sine wave (nerd alert!).
I can cosign this pattern this week.
I’ll see myself out…
Seriously, though, I’ve noticed that Saturdays/Sundays have been slower for me in the last few months, especially when I have 3+ day gaps without creating any new listings. Even sending out offers to watchers, putting items on sale, etc doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Continually impressed by your weekly numbers, and especially your dedication to pumping out so many new listings week after week. Do you spend a set period of time each day making new listings, or do a large batch for 6-8 hours a few days and spread those new listings out throughout the week?
