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Last night, I finally cracked the 400 listing mark in my eBay store. It’s become a nice mix of items. 130 listings in trading card singles. 158 in trading card lots. I do the card listings mostly on Fridays and Saturdays. After years of having a very specific listing process, I’ve streamlined the process as much as possible. Change the title, change the pictures, on to the next one.
The rest of my week is buying and selling for my card business. I have a dedicated shelf for cards I’m shipping to consignment now instead of boxes on the floor. It makes a big difference. Almost everything I purchase on a weekly basis gets sorted within a day or two of receiving it. Then I have some bins and shelves for the random other things I come across in my search for card inventory. These items have become a larger chunk of my eBay business, with over 100 listings (and counting) in random categories. 64 certified autographs, everything from photographs to photocopied old military documents to sketches. Plenty of different sports memorabilia, from full sized bats to signed jerseys to game used pucks. Various types of music memorabilia and old tickets. Some older sports books and media guide booklets.
It is definitely a good idea to run an end and sell similar on your store this week or next, with Black Friday sales coming up. Maybe start a nice markdown sale at 25% or even higher. Even if you don’t sell the types of items people typically buy on Black Friday, give your listings their best opportunity to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
I have some fun stuff to get listed this week. A few autographed shoes. Some old sports toys. A few random collectible statues and bobbleheads. And who knows what I’ll find in my search for my card consignment inventory. I’ve seen a lot of card sellers, even big eBay consignment sellers, come and go over the last few years. Not sure if it’s burnout, the card market changing, maybe they move on to other things, or they were never making a lot of money at all. I get it. It’s hard to make a consistent living doing eBay.
It’s exciting to see my eBay business growing and changing. So much has changed with eBay over the years, and every week I’m surprised at something that sells or how much it sells for. $20 to $40 items still the sweet spot of my eBay store. Now it’s time to put in the work over the next few weeks to get to 500 eBay listings. Not sure how much room I have to grow my eBay store, on top of the card consignment business which is where I make most of the profit for my business. But putting in a little extra time and effort to list things will give me more options for when the consignment sales slow down. It’s nice to see things coming together as we approach the end of 2024.
11/3/2024 to 11/9/2024
Total listings: 412
New listings this week: 32
Items sold: 29 — 15 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 16 via advertising
Gross sales: $1085.28 (down 44% from one year ago)
Net sales: $665.77 (down 45% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $37.42 (up 4% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $45.94 net 1952 Lancaster Red Roses baseball signed yearbook — bought online a couple months ago for about $11
This book on Alexander Calder has really nice glossy photos of his art. I’m assuming that’s why sold prices of the hardback version were $450 and higher. This one was softback, so I listed it at $399. Buyer bought it at full price, and I upgraded to Priority and added in extra insurance.
Wow, Sharyn, what an awesome sale! It is wild how expensive some book prices get. The best one I ever sold was this perfumes book (not my listing obviously) which I sold for $225 quite a few years ago. Found it on a library cart for $2!
Paperboy Arcade Original Manual with Schematics
Oh, man, I still boot up Paperboy emulators every so often when I need that nostalgia hit. I had no idea you were into arcade games! Tell us more about your collection, please. And big sales over time. Such an interesting niche. I’ve never dealt with them for space reasons, but I’ve known a few people who bought and sold arcade cabinets and they always have stories.
You’ve been doing well with your lot listings lately, I’ve got to step up my game with some of the odds and ends I have lying around. Cards and card supplies, books, media, sports memorabilia, signed photographs. Maybe I’ll shoot for two lot listings each day this week and see how that feels.
Sold right after my store refresh.
This is the way of eBay right now. Just getting the ability to send offers to new (or “new”) buyers is huge for completing extra sales. I’ve found that key step for me in the end, sell similar price is to reprice stuff. 9 items out of 10, I never want to hold out for a slightly higher price as much as I want it sold.
I’ve never met a stockbroker who wasn’t deeply boring…same goes for anyone who’s ever tried to talk at me about crypto. You know who I mean, Mike!
I received the lot on Saturday and the Don Bradman photo is in fact signed, with a few notes on the back of his postcard and one or two others about test matches and batsmen and other crickety things. I’m fairly stunned at the sold price you linked and now I have to toss the whole lot onto eBay as is. It would take me 6-8 weeks to get the signature authenticated even if I was heavily motivated to take care of all the paperwork and fees today, which of course I’m not. So we’ll see how this lot does on its own. $4!
@Sharyn Most of the sellers I buy from are consignment companies, so I think the explanation is as simple as their offices are closed weekends.
I think that weekends can occasionally be very slow on eBay. I’ve noticed this in my own store. On the infrequent occasions I have zero sales in a day, or something like 1 sale for $17, it’s almost always a weekend or a holiday when I assume people have other things to do besides browse eBay.
The sellers I buy from have the most auctions ending on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and basically less and less as the week goes on. I find the best deals on Fridays and Saturdays but there’s also an element of luck to it. Not everything that ends on a Saturday goes for a steal price.
However, when I sell a really expensive $250 and up item, it’s usually on a Thursday or Friday, or over the weekend. I also send out more aggressive offers, like 25 to 30 percent, closer to payday and over the weekend. After a batch of end and sell similar is a good time to send offers, too.
I think there are a lot of factors that go into what gets people browsing on eBay or what turns browsers into buyers. But in general, I can say with some confidence that if you run auctions, stick to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday evenings since that’s when the sellers who do almost all auctions have most of theirs end.
I loved your description, Sharyn. Who knew Jungle Jim has been a brand name for so many different types of products!
Wow, those are some great sales! How are you packaging these airplanes up? Lots of bubble wrap, sturdy box?
Even if these are the top sellers…those $20 and $30 sales can really add up over time. I would think you will clearly $1000 profit easily on this collection!
Your pictures on that vignetter (?) system are really nice. Cool item.
That Mcdonald’s happy meal toys lot is interesting…less than a buck per toy! But it all adds up to profit if you get stuff cheaply enough and (especially) ship it all in one box instead of the odd one-off $4 sale here and there. How many toys did you buy originally and what did you pay for them?
I think I had that Koosh game when I was a kid. Loved the texture of that ball…
On a personal note I’m not as surprised this time as the last time. So hoping people move on to shopping more quickly than 2016. The mood was like after 9/11 last time Trump won around here but I think people will get over it faster. Everyone knew this time Kamala might lose.
Unclear what all of this will do to the general economy in 2025 and beyond, but for the time being we will hopefully have a decent holiday shopping season.
Hear you loud and clear on all of this, Christine. I’m very concerned about what the economy will look like 2-3 years, but I think we’ll have a strong next few months. I have an eBay/scavenging theory that the holiday season extends into at least January now. Probably as late as February this year, too.
I did well with a 20% off sale this past week (still one day to go on it) and will probably run the same again the last few weeks of January.
Bought it from one of the biggest card consignment auction sellers in July. eBay auction like all my buys. These consignment companies (mostly) all love their auctions! It’s such a fun way to buy.
The original listing had the title <span class=”onboarding-tourtip onboarding-tourtip-2-3-resultTable search-results-tourtip-wrapper”><span class=”onboarding-tourtip onboarding-tourtip-3-2-activeTab”><span data-item-id=”375510707624″>National Football League NFL Official Game Coin Breast Cancer Awareness</span></span></span>. I didn’t realize the value at first, but I always double-check oddball listings from these big card sellers because it’s learning, which I like, and often I can make a profit, which I also like.
Sharyn, that menu is really something else! It looks like the Wish version of a Rainforest Cafe! How long did it take to sell and where did you originally get it?
Oh, and can’t believe I forgot what is probably my most interesting buy of the week: this set of 1937 Amalgamated Press postcards for just under $4 including combined shipping on a larger order. I generally send stuff like this to consignment and let them figure out what it is, then I figure out pricing. But lately I have been analyzing my consignment expenses, and oversized items trigger a fairly significant increase in fees (anywhere from $1 to $3 extra), so I’m going to keep these with me.
There’s another reason for that. In the first picture of the listing, the postcard on the left has some writing on it. I’m pretty sure it’s a signature. I had a hunch — and a little Terapeak research confirmed — that it’s the signature of legendary cricketer Don Bradman. It will cost me in the $50 range to get the auto authenticated, and there’s a chance the signature won’t pass authentication. But if it does, I think this signed postcard will sell in the $300 range, same as the signed photo in the link. Find out in Sale of the week thread six months from now!
I’m excited to see the changes to running a sale. According to the update, it’s being rolled out slowly and I’m not one of the lucky few who has seen the new setup. Since I was on the markdown page anyway, I ran a 20% sale on most of my store to run this week. If you’re ever going to run a sale, this would be the week to do it — Americans will need a distraction, and what’s a more American distraction than a sale?
In terms of overall sales on the platform, I tend to agree with @Sharyn that no amount of advertising will make much of a difference right now. As a younger millennial I think anyone my age 40 and below tunes out most ads — I don’t have cable, I don’t listen to radio, I use ad blockers and skip ads on any content that I engage with. Plus, it’s not just eBay where sales are in a slump — it’s everywhere. Though I wouldn’t call this year slow — more accurate to say that sales have been inconsistent. I also think it’s possible that the patterns of online retail have changed since to heyday of this podcast that has brought us all together. January and February were pretty strong months for me the last two years. I’m curious if that trend will hold this year, but I expect it will.
I’d love to see eBay introduce a replacement for the eBay bucks program, which was quietly ended in April (though there hadn’t been any offers for over a year), and this time of year seems like the best possible time to do it. Not holding my breath, though.
Definitely slow sales for this time of year, but I expect that to change after the election…hopefully. No better time to focus on what we can control.
In my neck of the eBay woods, this meant that last Thursday I went through almost all of my inventory (everything without a significant number of watchers or open offers), ended all the listings, repriced some of them and sell similar. This led to one big sale (my high sale of the week below) and about a dozen other sales in the last five days. On the big sale and some of the others sales, I dropped the price and my offer settings, but on some of the others I just did an end and sell similar. I don’t think eBay’s algorithm likes when items sit in your store for a few months.
I’ve typically been averaging one to three sales on most days for the last few weeks, so I was pretty happy with the outcome of this little project. I can’t think of a better way to spend an hour or so on eBay unless you’ve got a death pile to tackle…which is on my to-do list for tomorrow and the next few weekends.
10/20/2024 to 10/26/2024
Total listings: 386
New listings this week: 34
Items sold: 19 — 7 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 4 via advertising
Gross sales: $1304.62 (down 31% from one year ago)
Net sales: $918.32 (down 27% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $68.66 (up 97% from one year ago)
High sale of the week: $248.84 net Denver Broncos PSA certified coin from the coin flip — purchased in July, my COGS was $25
