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Beverly, I actually bought it at the auction because of Sheldon’s videos. Too bad it wasn’t in better shape.
Oct. 22-28
Total Items in Store: 762
Items Sold: 11
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $414
Highest Price: $130 (Griswold Cast Iron No. 8 Waffle Iron)
Average Price: $38
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $127
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $0Hey! What a coincidence! I just bought an Instant Pot last week! I’ve only done some “baked” potatoes in it so far, but I’m really excited to try new recipes. I might try rice tonight to see if it does just as good of a job as my Zojirushi did before it got ruined in the flood.
So I didn’t have a bad week last week, but it doesn’t even come close to the previous week. But I can’t complain… I’m making money. And I finally visited a local CPA to discuss my business. It was a pretty positive meeting. He said I was doing great in terms of keeping track of my numbers and milage. It’s too late to pay quarterly taxes but next year I’ll start doing it.
I had to scope this Sharp Shopper out. It looks like the closest one to us is just north of Pittsburgh and is set to open around February. I’ll have to check it out! I just need a deep freezer and I’ll be set.
Last week was my highest grossing week on eBay ever. I was super ecstatic! Here are a bunch of highlights…
I acquired this gnarly looking hand scythe in a box lot at an auction over a year ago. Looking back at my records, it seems that it was the only sellable item in that lot, so it cost me $10. It had a lot of rust but I just had a feeling that if I restored it a bit, someone would eventually pay a good price for it. So I took the wood handle off, hung it in my electrolysis vat and “scienced” the rust off. It turned out really nice! Lots of pitting, but I think it added to the handmade feel of it. Reattached the handle, listed it for $75 and it sold for full price.
Primitive Hand ScytheHere’s one of the many slides I sold last week as auctions. I may have mentioned before, I bought a whole case of these glass slides for $40 so they came to about .20 cents each. I started off listing about 15 per week as auctions just as an experiment. I would start them off at what I wanted to sell them for just to see what happened. Well there must have been a number of people who wanted the set I listed last week. I was getting bids all over the place. This particular slide I started out at $20 because that what I realistically thought it was worth. It jumped to $125 in the last few minutes! I sold about $725 in slides in total last week and that brings my running total to over $2000. Not a bad $40 investment!
Glass Korean War SlideThis brings me to my fantastic sale of the week, and my highest priced item ever sold. I acquired these keypad panels at an auction last summer. They were in a box lot of other electrical items that I paid a total of $20. I had no way to test them except a makeshift AC adaptor that came with them. I didn’t know if using that adaptor would blow them up, so I risked the most beat up looking one. To my surprise, it powered up and looked like it worked fine. So I tested the rest, confirmed that they at least powered on, and listed them for a crazy amount… $1200. It took a while, but I jumped on a best offer of $750. I thought that was a good price for something that I paid so little for. I just hope they work out for the person and he doesn’t need to return them. So far, so good.
Electric Keypad PanelsHere’s a sale I made toward the end of the week. I got the “magic spell” sound on my phone and a guy was wanting to know some weird dimensions to a wood firkin bucket that I had listed. I got home and gave him the measurements and he immediately sent me a best offer of $72, just a few dollars less than my asking price of 75. Those are the BOs that I like! I got this item at an auction for $25. If it was in better shape, I would have priced it higher. But the bands were falling off and the joints weren’t tight. I’m still happy for the sale!
Primitive Wood Firkin BucketOctober birthdays are the best! Mine was on the 3rd. I’ll have to check out Columbus’ thrift stores one of these days. I get so used to driving to Pittsburgh that I always just forget about Columbus. And that sounds like quite a haul!
Thanks! Yeah, I’m slowly getting by store back to it’s former size. The mental barrier is the hardest obstacle at this point. I feel like I’m subconsciously not trying as hard as I did before the flood. And I’ll catching myself thinking about where I could have been by now had it not happened. But after a week like last, I found a big burst of motivation.
Oct. 15-21
Total Items in Store: 713
Items Sold: 25
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $1,810 (!!!)
Highest Price: $750 (Four Intelligent Instrumentation Operator Keypad Terminal Panels)
Average Price: $72 lol
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $77
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $0BEST. WEEK. EVER! It may seem pretty average for a store like you guys’ but to me this was incredible. It was mostly thanks to a very high dollar sale on Wednesday, but I also did very well with my weekly photo slide auctions. I sold over $700 in slides last week to my huge surprise. It must have been a hot lot. A few other notable sales included an old wooden bentwood bucket and a scary looking wheat hand scythe for $72 and $75 respectively. I wish every week was like this.
I’m really glad you mentioned checking your invoice on the podcast this week. I was curious and upon looking found 5 cases where I was being charged a dollar extra for Gallery Plus. Bummer. They were for somewhat older listings too so I’m wondering how much extra I’ve been billed over the past months because of it.
This week, I’m going to force myself to get back into the game. I’ve been too lax on listing for various reasons and my store size is slowly dwindling. I wanted to make it to 1K items before the start of the new year but I don’t think that’ll happen now.
Ha, I’ve made quite of few of those kinds of mistakes! But I’ve learned to think of them as just inexpensive lessons. So what if I lose a few bucks and take a loss on a sale? I could think of far more expensive ways to learn. And that’s what I tell my partner when she makes a mistake in weight or price. Every single person who’s made it in this business has made the same mistakes in their humble beginnings. Brush it off and keep listing!
I took last week off from eBay and Scavenger Life while I was on vacation. I sold a lot of items that I’ve had in my store for a very long time. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks of sales.
I use to pick up these microwavable cooking ware items whenever I saw them because I always thought they were so cool. You’ll see them at thrift stores all the time. But I found that they don’t really sell quickly for me (or maybe I’m asking too much, I don’t know). So I was surprised when this set of 6 meal containers sold for full price of $50 (probably paid a total of $2 for them all). Looking back at the photos, I’ve realised how far I’ve come in terms of photographing my items. This was listed way back when I first started selling.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302174808915Here’s another item that I was pleasantly surprised sold for full price! I picked this antique gunpowder loading tool up at an auction for only $30. I was determined to get it after I looked up some sold prices on eBay and was even willing to pay a lot more for it. But I guess nobody else saw the value like I did. It took a while and I got a LOT of half-priced offers, but it finally found a home for $350.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302326102096Here’s an item that I was pleased to sell. This came out of a lot of old things that I bought at an auction for $25 (4 sellable items at $6.25 each). I was really after a prayer rug, so the needlepoints were just extra. I have no knowledge or interest in this kind of stuff, but I thought what the hey. So I listed this as well as the other needlepoints for $25 each. It only took about 2 weeks before this first piece sold for full price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302470443685I knew I had something special when I acquired this cast iron elephant cigarette dispenser out of a box lot. I paid quite a bit for the lot at $115 (7 sellable items at ~$16.50 each). It was nice because it was all intact with no major damage, original paint, fully functional and still had the original little ashtray that seemed to be missing in a lot of other listings. I priced it high with the intent to take a best offer, but along came a buyer who bought it outright for full price. I was quite pleased!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302436395442I wanted to share this sale just because it was the oldest item in my inventory and one of the very first things I’ve listed back before I even understood how eBay works. I remember those days when something sold for $20 or $30, it made my week! Well anyways, this showed me ho\w far I’ve come and all the lessons I’ve learned to get here. I actually lost money on this particular sale. I paid $18 for a box lot of old toy cars. It was a learning experience for sure. I ended up selling this particular toy car for $5. My weight must have been off because I ended up spending twice as much on shipping than what the buyer paid, so my net profit was actually in the red. Oh well, it could have been worse.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302416746478Oct. 8-14
Total Items in Store: 717
Items Sold: 11
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $367
Highest Price: $175 (Vintage Cast Iron Elephant Cigarette Dispenser and Ashtray)
Average Price: $33
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $40
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $254 (LOTS of scavenging while on vacation)It feels good to be back home from vacation. And I bet you two are feeling the same! Putting vacation mode on my store really turned out nice. Nobody minded not having their items shipped until we got home. Yesterday, I packed and prepared 17 items for shipment. It took me a couple hours, so I can’t imagine how long it took you, Ryanne, to pack over 200!
We did a lot of thrift shopping in several different states on our trip. We probably hit up at least 30 stores. I must say, we were a little disappointed in Georgia. Just not a lot of good stuff. But South and North Carolina were gold mines. And so was Virginia actually. And it seemed like the further away you got from major cities, the better stuff there were. Maybe because there are fewer people and the better stuff doesn’t get picked through at fast. I found some cool stuff, but I went all out at one Goodwill in SC. I’ll occasionally check out the music section for old stuff and I’m glad I did this time. Someone must have donated their entire old school metal and hip hop cassette tape collection. I went ALL OUT and spent $120 on over 200 cassettes. Lots of obscure bands and groups that I’ve never even heard of. I was both excited and nervous about dropping that much cash on something that I don’t have much experience with, but my good feelings are hardly ever wrong. I even got a 10% discount when I asked about it. 🙂
One of your callers this week had some good advise about going to Goodwill Outlet stores. Gloves are VERY important! There has always been broken glass and sharp objects in those bins every time I’ve gone. The best gloves are those mechanics gloves that can be found in the automotive aisle in Walmart. They’re about $15 a pair, but they’re just right for protection and finger mobility. Another piece of advice is to go with a partner. It’s a good idea to have someone watching your cart while you’re elbow to elbow with other people because you WILL get stuff stolen out of your cart otherwise. It’s a whole different world in those stores, and it’s not for everyone. But I think I’m lucky in that at my closest one, people are at least respectful enough to not claim ownership of entire bins like you guys mentioned.
I think I might set HFR up on my store since you mentioned it. For the “Return Reason Is:” checkboxes, would you say it’s safe to check them all? I can’t think of any reason why not.
Well my theory was that it happens due to accepting the return from the mobile app, but I guess that disproves that. That does sound like a complete hassle. And it irked me too that the eBay rep was just like eh, that’s the way you’ve gotta do it. I couldn’t get them to understand that I’ve never had to do it that way in the past.
But I think there was some box or button that needs checked or something prior to accepting the return in order to purchase the label through eBay. And if you don’t have it checked, there’s no going back to it once you click accept. I don’t get enough returns to have the process memorized, but that’s what I think is going on. The next time I do get a return, I’m going to go through everything meticulously before clicking anything.
Stock21, I had the same problem a couple weeks ago. I’ve had several returns in my time with ebay, but this was the first time that it wouldn’t let me just purchase a label through them. Same exact situation as you. I too called eBay and couldn’t get an answer as to why it was happening. I ended up just refunding the person because it was such a low-value item. Just curious, did you accept the return on your phone or on a computer?
Oct. 1-7
Total Items in Store: 727
Items Sold: 14
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $675
Highest Price: $350 (Vintage Ideal Mfg Co. Powder Measure Reloading Tool)
Average Price: $48
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $75
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $0I’m kind of late in posting my numbers. We’re on vacation this week in Savannah, Georgia. It’s so beautiful down here. We tried to do some scavenging but the thrift stores aren’t very good in this area from what we’ve seen. And it must not be auction season either. We were contemplating moving down here, but if we can’t source things to sell then it might be a problem. Is there anyone in the forums from this area?
Wow! Nice sale on the dishes! They look really cool but I would have never guessed they would be worth that much. I’ll have to add that brand to my lookout list.
And since you mentioned Hallmark ornaments, I’m like you in that they don’t really interest me, but I found out that some of them can bring in lots of dough. I went to an estate auction of a collector, and I thought maybe the tray lots would maybe bring $15 or $20. Nope. They were going for hundreds!
