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Great to see your store is up and running again. Your Terry Reid is a great example of the lessons J & R taught all of us over the years. Yours was the highest sale of any of his signed albums in the last year. I’m sure you could have lowered the price to $300 or $250 or less and sold it quicker. But your listing was the only signed version of that album (I assume his debut or most important record) which must be why it sold for more.
Great pictures too. Every little flaw on the sleeve is clearly visible. eBay bucks for last quarter came in at the beginning of last week, so maybe that was the little incentive your buyer needed to click the buy it now button.
I ship 3 times a week, typically Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays unless (like this week) there’s a postal holiday. Typically I send out between 25 to 40 packages on a Monday and 6 to 10 on each of the other shipping days. This has been pretty consistent for the last month.
Last week, I was good about listing every day and had fairly consistent sales (though nothing much over $100). I figured between listing so often and the long holiday weekend, I’d have a huge stack of mail to send out on Monday. Instead, the opposite happened. When I woke up, I saw no new offers, which meant I had only 3 (!!!) sales from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning. It was a very slow end to a slow week, at least compared to my last few months. It can get discouraging when things don’t sell, especially when you use all the tricks like markdown sales and sending offers to watchers.
But one of the things about scavenging is that almost anything you can do for your store is better than getting discouraged. Take some pictures, especially items from your death piles. Finish some drafts. Edit your prices. Create a sale or coupon.
The faucet turned back on for me on Sunday. I dropped off 23 packages today and have 12 more packed up for tomorrow. All in all, it was a normal weekend of sales. The sales just happened to fall on Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. Maybe next week it will be Thursday and Friday and Saturday. There’s no point in trying to predict.
10/3/2021 – 10/9/2021
Total items in store: 3453 (up from 3438)
Items sold: 47 (30 via best offer, 6 via seller initiated offer, 4 repeat buyers)
Gross sales: $2104.99 (up 82% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1437.52 (up 85% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $7.64 — Max Carey Lumberjacks jumbo boxtopper
This is the kind of sale we all love as scavengers, turning $1 into $7 over and over. In February, I won a lot auction which contained 6 of these oversized, intricately cut Lumberjacks cards. The title was a little bit unclear (it wasn’t obvious from the main picture or title how many cards were in the lot) but mostly I won the auction for $10 total because auctions are an inefficient way to sell your items. I’ve sold 4 of the 6 for $10 to $20 each, and the other 2 will sell eventually. Maybe in two years. 🙂
Highest price sold (net): $84.63 — Bobby Hull O-Pee-Chee Superstars autograph
Bobby Hull is one of the greatest hockey players of all time and also one of the most prolific autograph signers. It’s fairly easy to find one of his autographs for $25 or less. This card sold for $100 plus shipping to Canada because it is a rare insert in the highly collected O-Pee-Chee platinum sets. Most autographs from this set go for $50 or more, regardless of who the player is. I may have underpriced this one as it sold very quickly for full price, but it had some fairly obvious wear since the card design is so intricate. Like most of my inventory, this card was originally purchased at auction and the title left out some key information (in this case, the desirable set name).
You can find a lot of good deals on inventory by finding the right volume sellers or developing search terms which allow you to find items which have more value than the listing shows. It is really the best feature of the platform. I am lucky enough to have a niche which has had millions of auction listings ending every night for 20+ years. But I think most niches have bargains available on eBay right this moment as I type this. It is just about figuring out the right process to find those valuable items.
9/25/2021 – 10/2/2021
New addition to the eBay sales page this week, or new to me at least. Buyer insights, which sorts buyers into new buyers and repeat buyers. It’s really amazing how many more tools and insights eBay has given us sellers in the last year or two — send offers to watchers, coded coupons, Terapeak for all sellers and I’m sure there are other additions I’m not remembering at the moment.
The goals for any scavenger are still the same. Trust your processes. Sell trash, be free. List more, sell more. And engage with a buyer’s message at your own risk!
But it’s nice to have more tools to help things along.
9/26/2021 – 10/2/2021
Total items in store: 3438
Items sold: 65 (42 via best offer, 15 via seller initiated offer, 3 repeat buyers)
Gross sales: $2627.82 (up 102% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1830.04 (up 103% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $4.68 — Jose Canseco bat card
I’ve had this priced at 11.99 + 3.49 shipping for over a year and it’s had a few watchers but no bites or even offers. No real surprise, it’s a fairly generic modern card and there are two other active listings for the card at 7.99 + shipping and 11.99 with free shipping. I’ve had this card listed for a while. When I was building up my store from 200 listings to 1000 and from 1000 to 2000, it was a lot of $10 cards bought for $1.75 and $15 books bought for 50 cents at a library sale. I still have a soft spot for items like that, but you need to sell so many of them to make $1000 a week or whatever your $$ goal is. So I try and stick to $20 and above listings unless it’s something I’m confident will sell quickly or I have multiples and can easily relist if it sells.
I recently ran a markdown sale where I only put items with watchers on sale. This Canseco bat card was one of the marked down items, and it ultimately sold for $6.50 +3.49 shipping — about half my original listing price, less than half after fees and maybe $2 profit after it’s all said and done. But right in line with the sold price for the two other Canseco Topps Pristine bat cards that sold in the last year.
Highest price sold (net): $145.53 — Jesus Sanchez Bowman Chrome blue refractor autograph
The Miami Marlins are not one of the teams playing in baseball’s playoffs, which just started tonight. So over the last few months of the season, they started giving their younger Marlins and best minor league Marlins a chance to prove their worth. Jesus Sanchez, an outfielder, was one of their top performers, and this card sold shortly after he had a game where he hit two home runs. I bought the card at auction earlier in the season after selling another (less expensive) Sanchez autograph while he was tearing the cover off the ball for the Marlins minor league team the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. Because Sanchez was unproven at the time, his cards were less expensive and I was able to get the card for a good deal compared to what it was selling for then. Auctions are strange, so ending prices can vary wildly for any number of reasons. I figured Sanchez was likely to get a chance to play for the major league Marlins this year, and if he went on a good hitting streak, prices would rise. If not, well he’s young and there’s always next year. Most of my purchases follow this sort of thought process. Some work out. Others don’t. Sometimes I wait 6 months before something sells. Other times it takes 6 hours.
There are almost 100 Sanchez autographs up for auction as I type this, and hundreds if not thousands more at buy it now/best offer. This one was a little more valuable than most because it’s his 1st card (from 2017) and it’s a colorful refractor from the higher quality Bowman Chrome set, which has been a popular set since the 90’s. There are ten other 2017 Sanchez blue refractor autographs listed right now, and the lowest price is $300. Mine was listed for $200 and I accepted an offer of $175. Maybe the next one sells for $300. Most likely, since the season is over for Sanchez and the Marlins, those $300 blue refractors won’t sell until next season unless the seller gets impatient and sends them to auction. In which case, I will probably be bidding!
If Sanchez becomes the next big star player, his card prices will be even higher next year. In all likelihood, he’ll get injured or have a few struggles. So good luck to him, and by extension the buyer of this card. I’m rooting for you both. But not for more than the time it takes me to type this sentence, because there’s a lot more stuff to list.
@julie-b (and anyone else who uses the flat rate packaging):
Just a heads up that USPS is in the process of reducing the size of various flat rate boxes — particularly the small flat rate, large and regional B2 boxes. The regional B2 Box will see the biggest decrease losing almost 2 inches width and 1 1/4″ length. From what I’ve read, the USPS will continue sending out the old sizes until they’ve used up all their back stock. So if any of the sizes are especially important, I would stock up now. And generally good to order supplies now in advance of the holiday rush, anyway.
Here is a recent article which confirms your exact glitch.
I have two suggestions, based more in my experience with eBay glitches than this specific problem which has not affected me.
The first idea is to end your items and sell similar. Sell similar (rather than relist) gives your items a new item number. If the glitch is connected to items listed over x days, this will resolve your problem (at least temporarily). I had an issue a few years ago with old listings disappearing and this was how a helpful eBay rep helped identify the problem and eventually how we resolved it.
The second idea is to switch your shipping policies from calculated to flat rate. I suggest this because all of my listings are flat rate shipping, and I’ve never experienced this problem. So that indicates to me the calculated shipping may be part of what’s causing the glitch. This is obviously much more labor intensive than my first suggestion. I only bring it up because I think it would still be worth a try compared to sending and receiving all those messages with buyers, particularly because for every buyer that’s messaging you, there are probably as many (or more) who see the “seller does not ship to you” message and give up. I know I probably would as a buyer.
Sorry you’re going through this and please keep us updated. I’m confident that the collective wisdom of this community can help you figure out a workaround if my suggestions don’t work and your problems persist.
I was wondering why my pending sales were so low! At least the 30th/1st fell on a weekend and start of a new quarter. eBay bucks coming out in the next few days should provide a nice boost in sales…
No, I use the same account for buying and selling (I know, bad move). I’ll have to see if you get terapeak with the $5 store.
You don’t need a store subscription to use Terapeak. From eBay’s Terapeak page:
Terapeak Product Research is available under the “Research” tab in Seller Hub and is free to all sellers.
I think this is a fairly new change. I believe as recently as last year you needed a store subscription to use Terapeak. But no more. Another positive change from eBay which is a sharp contrast from most other selling platforms where it’s difficult to find sales data.
I have gotten a ton of really silly-low offers on my items with best offer enabled recently. Like something listed for $20 will get an offer of $1 or something for $50 will get an offer of $5.
@cdils — When creating your next listing, underneath the price there are checkboxes for “auto-accept offers above” and “auto decline offers below.” Click the auto decline below checkbox, and type in the lowest price you will accept in the box, and you won’t even see those $1 offers.Keep in mind that buyers have 5 offers on an item, so if you set up auto-decline, a truly interested buyer can and will offer again.
Auto-decline is one of those tools which are useful for any seller (even someone selling things out of their closet), but definitely as your inventory grows to an entire shelf or larger, simply because it cuts down on wasted time.
Terapeak search results go back a year versus regular eBay searches which only go back 90 days. Terapeak also provides for the exact sale price of an item sold through best offer. It’s especially useful for items which are rare and may only sell a few times a year, and for items which sell very frequently but at different price points depending on item quality, condition, and other variables.
I hadn’t seen this issue with Terapeak limits until this week. I use Terapeak a ton when I’m researching items to buy, since I purchase almost my inventory through eBay auctions and my main niche (modern trading cards) is volatile where prices can change from week to week and month to month. Also auctions are inherently volatile. I didn’t think that I hit 250 searches yesterday but it’s possible depending on what eBay counts as a search.
Do you have separate buying and selling IDs? That seems like one workaround to allow for more searches. I primarily use eBay when I’m researching on my buying ID, but I also use it on my selling ID to research what to price items the items I’m listing. I think that’s probably why I haven’t run into this issue before, even though I’m sure I run more than 200+ searches on days when I’m listing a large number of items and researching a large number of auctions.
If I hit the Terapeak limit again this week, I’ll be sure to post in the thread and let you know. But I would be surprised if I do.
@mark-s —
I always enjoy reading your posts and the way you break down your week. I am 500 listings behind you (around 3400) but like you, I’ve increased my inventory significantly since June and am excited about what Q4 and next year will hold for my store. And I am going to do my best to catch up to you in listings!
I love seeing the vintage technology flips. I will be interested to see how the market for VCRs changes over the next few years as we get more distance from the end of VCR production. Like the vintage typewriter market, I think there will always be a market there, especially for higher quality items.
Love to see all the optimism in the thread heading into the new week. I have definitely noticed less eBay activity (both buying and selling), especially on the weekends, over the last few weeks. But listing consistently has helped me avoid a major downturn in sales even if a few individual days have been slow. And seeing how my sales compared to this time last year is always encouraging. Find those little reminders which show you that your store is growing and focus on them.
This weekend, I put serious thought into selecting items for a 30% markdown sale. My usual process is to quickly select 500 items by category or sometimes by size (bulky items) and offer a low discount of 15% to 20%. I do sales like that once or twice a month and generally see about $200 – $400 in net sales from those markdowns. I figured I’d try a different process this time and see how it went.
If this weekend is any indication, this method of marking down items might be more successful. If that’s the case, I’ll create a separate thread about my processes once I have enough to data to analyze them in some depth.
Utilizing tools like sales, sending offers to buyers and coded coupons is so important to us eBay scavengers in 2021. Amazing to think about how much the eBay selling platform has changed (in my opinion for the better!) in the last few years.
9/19/2021 – 9/25/2021
Total items in store: 3395
Items sold: 63 (41 from best offer, 12 from sending offers to buyers)
Gross sales: $2819.03 (up 97% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2031.92 (up 102% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $4.19 — vintage graded tennis card of Martina Navratilova
I’m not a collector, so I don’t feel regret or sadness when something sells. Quite the opposite. It’s exciting to get the adrenaline of the sale notification and I like knowing that the cards and other items I sell are going to their “forever home” or one step closer to it. But this sale was a bummer.
It’s not really because I made $1 profit (at most) after COGS. That’s obviously not what I was hoping for, but it will happen sometimes. Sometimes you might even lose a few bucks on a sale, but getting the physical space for new inventory and cash in your pocket is worth it.
But I’m a little bummed at this sale because these Sportscaster cards have an interesting story. The set was released from 1977 to 1979, covered all sorts of sports (everything from baseball to hockey to sumo wrestling and martial arts) and was sold in the US and abroad via magazine subscription 24 for $1.89. The 2000+ card set contains some of the earliest cards of all the great sports stars of the late 20th century — Wayne Gretzky, Muhammad Ali, Pele, Bruce Lee, Steve Prefontaine and so many others. Most people didn’t subscribe for the full runs, so many of the cards are quite rare compared to your more widely available 1970s Topps sets. Despite that, Sportscaster cards are not worth much — regardless of quality of player, regardless of graded or not graded, regardless of anything.
I completely understand why collectors don’t value these cards much. The cards are oversized (larger than 4″x6″) and because of that, storing them is a pain. It is easy to find protective supplies for standard sized cards, but harder for weird sized stuff like these cards. And the set is gigantic at over 2,000 cards. So where is the collector base for them? A few, like the Wayne Gretzky (one of his earliest cards) are valuable, particularly in a high grade, but most will sell for a buck or two ungraded and $10 to $20 bucks graded.
Seeing how low the demand for this set is made me think about the passage of time. How many of these cards will be around in 20 years, let alone have any interested buyers? Even a lot of the websites cataloguing the set, including one that had scans of every card, have dead links or have completely disappeared despite all the internet preservation tools in existence.
Most likely, the set’s legacy will continue on in the future in a new form. The late company Donruss used the design for standard sized cards in 2004 with some of the popular attributes of modern cards like variations and serial numbering. That set is practically vintage and lacking in a collector base at this point, so maybe the card world is due for a Sportscasters set in the next few years with autographs and shiny foil and whatever the next hot new card trend is.
Maybe that’s not sad, after all. Maybe that’s how things move forward and move on.
Highest price sold (net): $150.07 — Mason Crosby autographed printing plate
Crosby has been the kicker for the Green Bay Packers since 2007 and in fact won their game tonight with a last second field goal. There is a fairly robust market for rare cards of the best kickers, primarily because they have historically been ignored by the major card companies and received few cards. This is completely understandable, since the more casual fans (and collectors) want cards of the star quarterbacks and running backs and receivers, not kickers.
But these fan favorite cards do sell well, and this Crosby card in particular had higher value because it’s one of the 4 metal plates used to make the card and it’s his autographed rookie. Printing plates of lesser players without the autograph regularly sell for $5 or less, but the right player or autograph combination can go for much more, as this sale shows. I could have sold this plate a year ago for around $100, but received my full asking price by waiting.
This was one of three sales on Friday which all netted around $150. One of the others was a 20 year old autographed rookie of retired quarterback Kurt Warner. This card had very noticeable damage, but Warner’s rookie cards and autographs have value because he has such a classic underdog story that there’s a biopic coming out about him later this year. (Which is probably why the card sold, now that I think about it.)
The third was a red numbered to 5 autographed gem graded rookie of Chicago Cubs catcher Willson Contreras, one of the best players from their World Series teams. The Cubs have fallen on tough times and are moving towards younger players, so Contreras is probably set to move on to a new team next year, as most of his teammates from those great Cubs teams already have. This buyer was from Illinois, so I imagine this card has to be one of the centerpieces of their collection and memories of those winning teams.
Technically, my largest sale this week was an order of about 15 hockey cards to one buyer which totaled over $250. This was notable because the buyer said they’d pay two weeks ago, then asked for more time twice. That leads to non-payment almost every time, but in this case the buyer paid on Friday like they said they would. After they paid, the buyer sent me a long message thanking me for my patience and promising to place another large order in the near future. That almost never happens, either, but maybe lightning will strike twice in this case. If anything, it was another reminder that bad buyers are the exception and not the rule.
For whatever one seller’s experience is worth — my process is basically something like what you’ve described. The biggest tip I have is to try and have a constant pipeline of items that are already photographed and just need to be listed. This way, even if you have a busy day or no energy/desire to list, you can still squeeze in a few new listings.
Related to that, I’m a huge advocate for batching listing processes as much as possible, both on micro and macro levels. For example, I ship 3 days a week (M-W-F) and I really don’t mess around with shipping except on those days. I will often print the labels a day before I ship but that takes just a minute or two. I take photos (in my current niche, the sports cards, this is typically front and back scans of individual cards) a few times a week and I edit them a few times a week (usually different days).
Most importantly, I try to list at least a few items every day, or almost every day. I think there’s a pretty decent case to be made that a steady stream of new listings is a big plus with eBay’s search algorithm and might even increase your sales to some degree. And of course that’s the biggest key to building up your listings — more sales means you can reinvest more into new inventory which leads to more new listings and the cycle continues.
I am sure others have different productivity tips (and I hope so, I love these types of discussions) but this is what has worked best for me.
PS – One last tip, and this might be controversial, but I don’t use drafts at all. When I sit down to list something, it’s getting listed no matter what. Even if the pictures aren’t perfect, even if I’m not 100% confident in what price to list it at or even if (and this happens a lot) I really don’t feel like it because the listing takes extra work or shipping the item will be a pain for whatever reason.
I’m sure this has led to some sales where I could have gotten a higher price and others where maybe they could have sold a lot faster. But I prefer to look at things with the big picture in mind — one listing, whether it sells or not, is never worth spending too much time on. No matter how cool or rare or expensive the item is, there will always be others.
@lukastreasuretrove — Amazing backstory to those books, and very cool that your research on them can become a collaborative process with your partner as well. I can almost imagine the dishes that came out of the chef’s kitchen as a result of their culinary education and passion and training. I’m looking forward to reading all about other sales you make from this lot in the future.
PS – If you or anyone else ever come across Nathan Myrvhold’s 40 pound, 2500 page 2011 cookbook set Modernist Cuisine, it’s an easy $400 for the full set. So pick it up…just make sure to lift with your legs when you do!
Not sure how to tag someone – but for Lucastreasuretrove –
On the side underneath your display name and location, you will see an @+name. I believe that’s the username you registered with which is why it’s different than the display name. Copy and paste the @name and you can tag someone. like this: @cdils
Welcome home @retro-treasures-wv !!
We are all eagerly looking forward to your store reopening, and posting your numbers, but one of the many great things about eBay is that it can always wait. Keep resting and recuperating and know that we’re all rooting for you.
