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Haven’t had a chance to listen to this week’s podcast yet, going to be doing it while I wake up to work tomorrow 😉
Anyway numbers, much better this week, we got granted Top Rated and Powerseller within the last week and we noticed an immediate sales boost which has remained steady so far, we’re hoping it can continue as long as possible!
Week 5 (23-29)
Number of Active Listings: 742
Items Sold: 11
Avg Selling Price: $31.51
Cost of Goods Sold: -$8.98
Total Sales: $346.66
Returns/Refunds: -$31.99
Unpaid Items: $0.00Had to take a return on a shirt which was a bummer but it got returned no worries so relisted, no fuss. Best sale this week was a cup and saucer set that I found for $4.98 and just sold last Friday for $120 🙂
Yeh I know that, and I know it’s no reason to be excited coz its just being fed to me only, but it still weirded me out a bit seeing my stuff there haha.
Very slow week for us 🙁 but on the plus side we crossed the 600 listings mark 🙂
Week 3 (09-15)
Number of Active Listings: 603
Items Sold: 4
Avg Selling Price: $24.19
Cost of Goods Sold: $0.00
Total Sales: $96.76
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00Things have been getting slower and slower for us over the past weeks, I’m putting it down to it being winter (slow period here) and tax time. Makes it harder to stay motivated but pushing through, goal this week is to at least get to 650 listings although I think we should get closer to 700
As far as scavenging, our local op shop (thrift store) has been doing a $1 sale over the past month so we’ve been visiting only the one place, always come out with about 20 new items to list each time. Best was probably a pair of Calvin Klein jeans new with tags that we snapped up for $1.
Yep I’ve sold systems without AC adapters and I tested them using the AC adapters I have for my current systems. I’m actually a games collector and so I’m in the advantageous position of having almost every cable or accessory I’d ever need for any system. I’ve got an old Sega Master System currently in my deathpile without any cords, but I was able to test it using the cords from my personal unit 😉
This may sound silly, but have you checked if there’s a box that says anything along the lines of “Scale to fit media”
This will normally bring the size down to fit your page.
Fell a bit behind on the book keeping this week so my numbers are coming late 🙂
Week 2 (02-08)
Number of Active Listings: 535
Items Sold: 7
Avg Selling Price: $17.77
Cost of Goods Sold :-$4.00
Total Sales: $124.36
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00Been pretty slow for us for the past 2 months. Things have picked up slightly but not surprising considering the time of year. Just continuing to list as much as we can, our goal this week was at least 10 listings a day and we’re already smashing that so far 🙂
Hi hi again! So I went missing for a couple of weeks, I run a record label also and one of my artists had an album release so had to focus on that for a while.
For those that are curious here’s a clip we got released just a couple of weeks ago, you can spot me as the doctor with the face mask on 😉
Anyway, ebay has slowed down a lot but that’s because we had to leave it alone for a while. No listings done for close to a month now but, we’re back in the swing of things starting this week 🙂 Still got some sales though so still happy.
Not going to bother posting my numbers though, most weeks were sub $150 total sales, except for 1 week where we sold a gold coin for $500, which was a nice boost.
Catching up on the Scavenger Life episodes I missed now 🙂
Enjoyed listening to the podcast this morning as I woke up and got into ebay mode 🙂
Anyway my numbers
Week 1 (07-13)
Number of Active Listings: 502
Items In Store: 743
Items Sold: 10
Avg Selling Price: $29.15
Cost of Goods Sold: -$24.00
Total Sales: $291.53
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00
Highest Value Item Sold: Pokemon Black and White 2 Strategy Guide…. This one went for $48, although profit wasn’t great. I’d made a miscalculation on our express shipping costs and next thing you know, $27 in shipping when I’d only charged $5. Oh well, lesson learnt, still made a healthy $16 profit all up. My best profit for the week was on a necktie, bought for 50c, sold for $30.Things are starting to pick up again which is nice. Also we finally got over the 500 listings milestone, so we were pretty happy with hitting that goal. Unfortunately a large chunk of those 500 listings are lower dollar jewellery items, but slowly our inventory is becoming more and more high value as we go along.
Actually the business policies are super easy to use once setup and you don’t need that many. You can still set the dimensions and weight in the listing, so you can have a calculated shipping option that can cover many different scenarios. 1 Business policy can be used for a small item or a large item, if you’re using calculated. If you need multiple flat rates then that’s different.
So for example, if it were an item to go in a box, you could setup a policy called “Cardboard Boxes” and set your postage policy up with handling to accomodate your cost for boxes. Then for each item whack in the dimensions and weight, pick the Cardboard Box policy and off you go, rest is done for you, including your global shipping options.
We have very few policies setup and they manage to cover our entire inventory so far, with lots of unique porcelain items, clothing, jewellery and games. Nothing large enough for freight though.
500g ebay satchel
3kg ebay satchel
Padded Mailers
Mail Boxes
Free ShippingThose 5 policies cover all our shipping policy needs. Well 10 technically coz we also copied them with a No International shipping option, for items we can’t send internationally (ie. currency etc.)
We use 5 different size mail boxes at the moment and the policy covers all of them.
I would say the biggest advantage with using business policies is when it comes to making a change. When you guys go on holiday and adjust your handling times page by page at the moment, if you setup policies all you’d have to do is edit the policy handling time and it would automatically apply to all the listings that use it.
I too, originally thought that business policies were more catered towards high volume, commodity item sellers, but I sell unique preowned items and once I took the time to set it all up, I’m so glad I did.
It also made listing time a lot quicker, just pick your payment, postage and return policy from a list and you’re done.
Our numbers
Week 1 (30-06)
Number of Active Listings: 420
Items In Store: 663
Items Sold: 11
Avg Selling Price: $15.29
Cost of Goods Sold :$0.00
Total Sales: $168.25
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00We had an ok amount of sales but unfortunately they were all low dollar items this week. Starting to get a bit scary but we’re using the motivation to list like crazy, we were happy to reach as high as 420 listings by the weeks end.
Nothing too interesting while scavenging this week, just stocked up on lots of jeans, jackets and tops. Coolest thing I found was probably a white leather marble jacket from a brand called D’Revi, made in Mexico. I went all out and spent $7 on it, just coz I thought it looked cool.
Yep keep calling ebay, a buyer can’t leave negative feedback because you didn’t teach him how to use the item, regardless of if you ignored him or not.
If the first person doesn’t agree with you, call again and keep trying until someone helps you. You shouldn’t cop a negative feedback for that, and you’ve offered the buyer a full refund also, so you should get that feedback removed.
Week 23-29
Number of Active Listings: 342
Items In Store: 563
Items Sold: 4
Avg Selling Price: $27.54
Cost of Goods Sold: -$5.50
Total Sales: $110.15
Returns/Refunds: $0.00
Unpaid Items: $0.00
Highest Price: $50 for a copy of Donkey Kong Country on Super Nintendo. Had a double lying around.Slow week here for us. Only a few sales and more lower end items. On the plus side was a resonably good week for us in listing as we managed to get about 80 new items up since last week. Could do better, but still happy with that 🙂
Yeh using drafts is an invaluable tool for quick listing, one that I admittedly under-utilise. I herald from a background way back in graphic design and have become so accustom to editing my photos in photoshop that every time I use the ebay sliders I get frustrated. I know it’s a psychological thing…. but I guess I hold myself to certain (unrealistic) standards with my photos and most of the time the ebay inbuilt editor can’t match up to that for me. Not only that but for some reason the listing page on ebay is one that I can’t get past. It’s perfectly easy and quick to use, don’t get me wrong, I understand it and know what I’m doing but for some reason it still takes me forever. I think I’m just too meticulous and end up re-checking every field like 20 times, which just wastes time.
It’s for that reason I abandoned listing and focus on photos. I have a similar setup to what you described, I do photos and shipping, partner does listing and book keeping. We both kinda do customer service, whoever has ebay the most handy at the time. I do still take 95% of my photos on my DSLR and then edit the photos in photoshop, which I save to Google Drive folders along with a document containing item details. I know it isn’t the most efficient way, but I have also become pretty quick with using photoshop, so most photos take a max of 20 seconds to edit, save, sort and upload for me.
I watched a fair few of his vids today… he has a solid model but it honestly just sounds like a chore to me. He doesn’t go scavenging, he buys pallets of bulk preowned clothing and then focuses everything on efficiency and faster turnover, like he wanted at least a 1/3 sell through rate. Saying he wanted to get his shipping to 100 items shipped per hour and stuff like that. Great business thinking…. but not my cuppa tea. I do really appreciate all the videos he has up where he goes into detail about how ebay operates and also tax and cogs and all that, even down to how he was approaching graphic designers and all of that stuff. It’s nice to see someone so open and transparent with all of that. Sounds like a great way to become a millionaire, don’t get me wrong, it just also sounds like no fun. I also heard in one of his interviews that his goal is mainly to create a commercial business that he can then sell. He was talking about his struggles trying to move to a commercial space because noone wants to buy a business that’s run from home. Not sure if that’s still his goal though.
So ye, I think he’s worth checking out, he seems smart enough and has a model that works. It just doesn’t gel with what I want from my own business and life I suppose though.
