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Hey Liz. I’m willing to bet you’ve got treasure in there. The key is to be very specific in your listings. I’ve listed some New York slides with the street names in the title and have sold them quickly because of that (the gentleman worked at a law firm on that street and wanted to know if I had more). If you’ve got some pictures store fronts that are no longer in business, absolutely put that in the title. Your main purchasers will be looking for images that are no longer obtainable. So the more details you put in your listing, the better.
Thanks. It depends on the subject matter. Touristy slides like these are long tail for sure. I’ve sold a couple of these listings so far for $30 each. On average, I’ll make a slide sale every 2 or 3 weeks. Several months ago I listed individual old race car slides that sold very quickly. I made over $1000 with those.
And out of those 800+, I “junked” about half of them. Blurry photos, pictures of ocean waves or fields or flowers, or generally anything that is uninteresting goes into a big box that I’ll eventually sell as a lot (with full disclosure that they’ve been picked through of course).
The slides that I’ve been working with came from a huge auction buy with about a carload of carousels full of them. Luckily, they were all titled and organized by date. So I’ll usually work with one carousel of slides at a time. Last week’s set was huge though, and I wanted to do them all at one time since the research would be fresh in my mind. What I do is go through and make little piles of similar subjects whether it be specific cities or buildings. Then, out of those little piles I’ll scan in 4 or 6 of the best ones onto my computer where I’ll add a watermark using Photoshop. Then I’ll take that whole little pile and line them up on a backlit slide viewer for a final picture of all of them. Depending on how many are in each bundle, I’ll either make that my main listing picture or one of the best scans. I’ve got the process pretty down pat, its the research that can take some time though.
Here’s an example of one of my slide listings:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303543412811I don’t know why I love doing slides as much as I do. I think It takes a certain combo appreciation of photography and history to deal with them (and lots of patience (and even more free time)). I used to work at a photography shop and got used to scanning and reprinting them. After a while, you get good at picking out the slides that are historically or artistically desirable or just junk, though what’s junk and treasure are subjective of course. One piece of advise I can give to anyone trying to differentiate the two, if you can imaging an image on the cover of an indie rock album, someone will buy it. 🙂
April 12 – 18
Total Items in Store: 3,934
Items Sold: 48
Total Sales : $1,349
* Above yearly average of $969
Highest Price: $98 (Lifetime Cookware Stainless Stock Pot)
Average Price: $28
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $68
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $3
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 58Another nice week of sales! Seems like those stimulus checks are hitting the streets. Steph and I still haven’t gotten ours yet though. We both tried that IRS website and entered our direct deposit info. I keep getting an error . Apparently the system wasn’t coded properly to handle a refund of zero. Boo!
Not much new on our end. Still staying at home and working. No different than it’s been for the last 14 months since going full time. I powered through about 800 35mm slides all last week. They all were of a trip to Europe in 1980. They weren’t the most remarkable things to go through but I’m glad it’s done and no longer staring at me from the corner of the room.
April 5 – 11
Total Items in Store: 3,926
Items Sold: 31
Total Sales : $1,115
* Above yearly average of $972
Highest Price: $170 (Jackson Dynamic Electron Vacuum Tube Tester)
Average Price: $36
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $35
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $6
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 43This past week was spent very unproductively. I’m lucky to have gotten 40 listings done honestly. Every day was a struggle to get off my butt and work. It must be my cabin fever getting the best of me. Maybe I needed a week of being lazy to reset my brain a little.
That’s so cool that you’re starting your own coffee business. Steph and I have always talked about how fun it would be to do something like that. I wish you the best of luck and I’ll check out your coffee suppliers’ store too.
March 29 – April 4
Total Items in Store: 3,914
Items Sold: 35
Total Sales : $988
* Above yearly average of $972
Highest Price: $185 (Distressed Red Afghanistan Hand Knotted Wool Rug)
Average Price: $28
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $78
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 60I had some pretty solid numbers this past week. There were a lot of lower priced sales, but a couple $100+ items saved my average a bit. Not much else is new around here. Just keeping our heads down and listing as usual. It’s a good thing Steph and I have become acclimated to staying at home. I see our friends going stir-crazy cooped up inside. I feel bad for all the extroverts out there right now.
We’re sorry to hear about your Airbnb business. I’m sure in the back of your minds that you knew it might happen but I can imagine it was a shock and a bummer anyway. I hope small independent businesses like yours can get some sort of assistance with all of this.
Oh yeah something is definitely wonky right now. None of my templates are showing up. I can’t get to my listings page or my seller hub page. I’m kinda glad to know its not just me.
Antique Frog, I’ve once sold a copy of Grammar Of Ornament too! Mine went for only $170, but it was in really rough condition. None of the pages were attached to the binding and was even missing a few of them. The cover was a wreck. I’m surprised I even got that much for it. But what a neat book it was to look through. I was half tempted to just sell the individual pages in frames or something.
March 22 – 28
Total Items in Store: 3,890
Items Sold: 39
Total Sales : $1,112
* Above yearly average of $966
Highest Price: $135 (Set of 8 Fred Press MCM Glass Tumblers Atomic Sun & Moon)
Average Price: $29
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $51
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 63Strong numbers last week. I’m just waiting for the dive in sales that might or might not come. Though alternatively, with the stimulus check that’s being given out in a few weeks, we might see a small spike in profits. As the general population who are stuck inside for weeks on end receive that extra boost in money, a lot of them will likely shop online as a cure for boredom.
My big takeaway from this whole pandemic is how lucky Steph and I have been. We both sell on eBay full time. We both have more than plenty of back-logged inventory to last us months. Our finances are in relatively good order. And we live away from the city so there’s less of a chance that we’ll get sick. We’re still practicing social distancing of course, but it’s just a little more easy where we’re at. And to top it off, we’re still making plenty of money with eBay. We’re really counting our blessings this time.
Maybe some of you might remember a couple of years back I posted about our basement getting flooded. We have since moved to a nice house, but I’ve learned that it happened again to that place a couple of days ago. The same exact thing occurred – the creek next to it got jammed up and overflowed. The basements of all the houses on the street were full of water. I don’t know the full extent of the damage, but if it was anything like what we went through then they’re having a really bad time. I’m so glad we got out of there when we did.
March 15 – 21
Total Items in Store: 3,861
Items Sold: 39
Total Sales : $874
* Below yearly average of $952
Highest Price: $85 (Cleveland Twist Drill Company Bit Index Holder)
Average Price: $22
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $79
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 137Sales this week were pretty good. Not great, but not bad either. I really can’t complain though seeing how the rest of the world is doing lately. Every day, the news just keeps getting worse for a lot of people. We have a friend who had two jobs, one as a bartender and one as a barista. She got laid off of both of them because of the mandatory shutdowns. So at least Steph and I can keep working and pulling in an income.
Not much new to report. All of the auctions that I planned on going to have been canceled. The good news is that I’ve got a whole room full of stuff to list so I won’t be without for a while. And we’ve got our nest egg to fall back on in case things get really bad. Things could always be much worse.
March 8 – 14
Total Items in Store: 3,768
Items Sold: 42
Total Sales : $1,301
* Above yearly average of $941
Highest Price: $200 (Six Tiki Mugs made by Mendez Ruiz Ceramica)
Average Price: $31
Returns: 0
Cost of Goods Sold: $96
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 92I did a lot better this week than I thought I did. On one day, I sold a $5 spoon and that was it. The rest of the week felt kinda sluggish so imagine my surprise to find out that I surpassed $1K.
I’m also having some issues with GoDaddy Bookkeeping. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that my Sales category wasn’t correct, that it was incorrectly including the shipping income. I haven’t heard back from support since when they told me that they’re escalating it to “tier three”, whatever that means. But I did some investigating and it seems to be pulling incorrect numbers only on the items that eBay is collecting sales tax from. The sales from states that don’t have the internet sales tax laws yet are showing up just fine. I’m sure that GoDaddy is aware of this already, but I went ahead and emailed them my findings anyway.
Not much else has been going on. Just hunkering down amidst the pandemic and being thankful that I no longer have to deal with hundreds of people face to face on a weekly basis anymore.
Yes, I think storage won’t be an issue anytime soon. The house we purchased use to be a bed and breakfast. It’s got 5 bedrooms and a huge basement that use to be the owner’s living quarters. So far, my whole operation is situated in my basement and Steph’s is in one of the bedrooms. But if those starts filling up, we’ve got a couple more spare rooms to utilize, not to mention our own personal living spaces throughout the house if the need be.
March 1 – 7
Total Items in Store: 3,711
Items Sold: 33
Total Sales : $993
* Above yearly average of $925
Highest Price: $250 (Paqui Carolina Reaper Pepper One Chip Challenge HELL IN A BOX Kit)
Average Price: $30
Returns: 1
Cost of Goods Sold: $241
Costs of Goods Purchased this Week: $0
Number of New Items Listed this Week: 162This week started out with a whimper and ended with a bang. I was very happy with all my sales on Friday and Saturday.
I finally upgraded to an Anchor store! I did that math and found that I would actually be saving money if I accounted for the extra $150 a quarter eBay supply coupon rather than the $50. And I think I discovered something cool. I’m positive I used my $50 coupon for 1st quarter already. When I upgraded to anchor, I automatically had my $150 coupon ready for me to use! And it worked too. So if anybody is thinking about upgrading their store, make sure you use your shipping supply coupon before doing so.
I got my taxes back from my CPA recently. I actually overpaid on my quarterly estimates! So I don’t have to pay a dime. Instead of receiving a return, I opted instead to apply it toward 2020s quarterly estimates so they’ll be a bit lower. Woot!
