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Very nice sales! As for cashback cards, I use Capital One Quicksilver the one that Samuel L Jackson promotes, it’s very simple 1.5% back on everything. Another option I hear is good is the cards (Citi Double Cash) that give you 1% now and then another 1% when you pay the card every month, essentially the highest percent cash back on everything card.
Very informative post MDC about employees. My goal for this year is to take on at least one employee. I wonder what you do or used to do when you say your “plant”. Did you own a manufacturing plant of some kind? I think that would be tons of fun to start a small manufacturing plant. I used to be in engineering at a metal working plant.
It’s interesting how employees have so many rights in the work place. I used to work at a union plant and I always heard things like “Not my job description” from the operators. I always thought that behavior stemmed from the union. My naive thoughts were if there wasn’t a union you could tell the employee to do whatever you wanted them to do within reason. Your statements make me think it isn’t much like that.
The problem is the thrift stores. On certain shoes soles you will not remove the mark without also taking color away from the sole. In other words, you can’t bring it back to the way it was before they marked on them. These stores should be using price stickers instead of markers that destroy the merchandise. Think about how the markings may reduce the value of the item before you purchase it.
Sales: $994.26
Sales qty: 41
Average sale price: $24.25Sales never fully recovered since after Christmas despite running higher percentage sales. People are either broke from spending too much on Christmas or they are drunk from NYE and can’t login to purchase my items.
In building my business spreadsheet I was pleased to learn very close to exactly how much I net after taxes per month and even per item. My average profit margin is 42% or I net 42 cents for ever dollar of sales.
You need help if you can’t list as fast as you can source. If you are getting
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quality
items and can bring home a lot more than you can list then you should get some help. For example me, I’m a one man operation now but my sales and the amount I list a week are nearly equaling out. My weekly sales are peaking out. Without more listed each day I wouldn’t be able to grow revenue.
Dec 18 to 24, 2016
Total sales: $1,352.72
Total # of sales: 50
Avg sale price: $27.05 (record high)Great beginning of the week and holiday inspired crash on Wed with only 80 something in sales. Recovered the week by running 30% off (regularly do 25-27%). If sales aren’t going your way, slash prices. This strategy has worked well for me. Keep in mind all your inventory is worthless until it sells so don’t feel bad about losing some margin with a sale. (Also keep in mind I price everything high relative to what sold, if you price in the middle then a more conservative sale would be appropriate).
I’ve not listed over the holidays but instead I’ve been working on an Excel spreadsheet that would work in place of spending money on Quickbooks, GoDaddy, and TurboTax. Once it is fully bug free and all tax formulas are working I’ll make a post about it and make it available. In the mean time, if anyone has something similar I’d like to share ideas.
Which IRS sheet is that? Also, what percent of what you paid to your employees was your tax liability? You see, you are an example of proving that these things don’t have to be handled by a 3rd party if you are a small business. I can see a 3rd party advantage if you have dozens or hundreds of employees but not a few.
You can build a business selling clothing for less than $20 or even $15. That is because of the Goodwill Outlets. If you choose this model you simply need a way to list more. Look at sellers like Pittsburgh Mike that sell Gap, Old Navy, etc.
I don’t have an Outlet so I choose the best model for my area. $20 shipped is the minimum I will pick up to be worth my time. Use the simple 3X rule to see if the margin is right. If its purchased for $7 I must be certain it will sell for $21. This rule gets more obsolete the more expensive the item is so use an online calculator in those cases. My average COGS is $3 and my average price sold is $23. So on average I try to do beyond the 3X rule.
I wonder what your method for valuing your items for resale are? This is key to your business.
For people like me, who have only eBay transactions on their PayPal account, you can download all transaction info from a time period of your choosing. I think you can even make it so that it gives you a monthly report or weekly via email automatically. This will give you all revenue, fees, and shipping cost in a spreadsheet file. This is essentially your selling end info.
On the buying end, I have always manually kept a spreadsheet of all expenses and cost of goods. It now even keeps track of my mileage. I do a cost average method for my COGS, which is simple. Everything I do in my business I keep simple and reduce overhead to near zero.
I am waiting for my ID number from the Dept of Revenue but I paid the cost of $25 to get it Thursday. I think this counts as registering my business. What I wasn’t sure of is if it counts for registering for sales tax or not. I am just trying to do the steps it takes to get a re-seller sales tax exempt cert for use at my Goodwills.
November 6 to 12, 2016
Total sales: $1,313.84
Total # of sales: 57November 13 to 19, 2016
Total sales: $1,462.86
Total # of sales: 61November 20 to 26, 2016
Total sales: $1,396.5
Total # of sales: 56November 27 to Dec 3, 2016
Total sales: $1,565.33
Total # of sales: 63December 4 to 10, 2016
Total sales: $1,563.52
Total # of sales: 61December 11 to 17, 2016
Total sales: $1,637.58
Total # of sales: 70I’d love to see if free shipping has an advantage versus charged shipping and equal price shipped. I have a feeling it does since it makes sense to me that Cassini would favor free shipping.
Are you paying your helper in cash? It seems like paying them through a payroll system plus all of the tax implications seem to make it not viable for a small eBay business to have one employee.
I wonder how many of the people in this community have the tax exempt certificate? First I’ve heard of it just recently and its a savings for me of 7% on all purchases. Only needed to register for it which was $25 one time (not yearly) (your state will vary).
Even if all sizes were the same and they had the kind of QC to do that, they would always vary because once you wash clothes and then dry in a machine with heat they will change size.
I want to know what exactly GoDaddy does that is more efficient/effective than downloading your PayPal year report of all transactions. I am trying to decide on whether I need GoDaddy or not. I could see it would be helpful if you used your PayPal for multiple things like personal use or Amazon. Since I only use PayPal for Ebay transactions I can just look at my PayPal report CSV and see every item I’ve sold including fees, shipping, and store subscriptions.
I can’t believe I’m just now learning about these two things:
1.) On day one of selling (unless you don’t plan to be doing this as a business), setup your State Sales Tax. You setup through Ebay however you need to also get a license through your state. Some states don’t have it. Mine does. I should have been charging an additional 7% to my customers who are in the same state as me.
2.) You can get a certificate where you don’t pay the 7% sales tax on your receipts at thrift stores! Meaning, you fill out a form and send to the government stating that you are a reseller. You don’t pay the 7% sales tax on the sweater you buy at Goodwill! Unbelievable! This might be that resellers license talked about by the original poster.About accountants. I personally can’t find a good accountant familiar with eCommerce. I am approaching the point where I can do my own taxes and do not need a CPA. If you do a simple buy and sell on Ebay business, I suspect a CPA is overkill depending on how many hours you can devote to learning about taxes. All you need to know about is form 1040, schedule C, schedule SE, and pay your State Sales Tax.
I hope in the future someone can write a Tax Guide For Ebay/Amazon and sticky it to this forum. Such a guide doesn’t exist yet on the sources I know of.
It looks like 30% of what you pay them is about what you will pay the IRS. Anyone know ways to reduce this? How do you do your taxes for the employers on this blog? I’m hearing there is no way to classify your help as “independent contractors” unless they are literately the overseas listers that can be found online. IF I recall you can pay helpers up to $1,800 before having to report. Jay are you making progress on this issue? You have to figure it out by $1,800 hah.
I can post numbers when I get home. Putting on the snow tires to pick during blizzards and get the competitive advantage.
Trump is supposed to decrease business tax by half which might help everyone. Also, my ACA bill is supposed to go from $40 to $70 next year, he could make that lesser. It’s probably a good idea to not be worried or in fear unless you are an illegal, criminal, or a terrorist.
When you pay your employees, do you pay your accountant a $40 fee for making out the check every time (fee applied for every pay-check)? When I heard this from a prospective CPA I thought it was a bit off. Why cant I pay in cash above the table? Can anyone give insight on how to have an employee as cheap as possible (not talking about paying them cheaply). Can someone chime in to tell me their experience with how much is actually taxed from your net sales (how much are you paying after deductions as a percentage of your net after pp/ebay fees + shipping + cost of item sourced.) Lastly, do you pay a tax to sales inside your state on Ebay?
• Total Items in Store: 705
• Items Sold: 57
• Total Sales $1,337
• Average Price Sold: $23.46Good week. I thought it was a bit slow at one point so I did a 25% off sale (5% higher than usual) which really helped. I am planning for an employee. I wonder how you guys found an employee, my idea is Craigslist. I think an ideal employee would be a college student or high school that is taking photography classes and already has their own equipment. They could work from their home doing the photography and packaging part of my business. Anyone know how to protect your business from theft or negligence resulting in damage to your equipment (if I were to loan out some). I suppose a lawyer would have to make up a contract. What is an ideal employee for this kind of job? It would probably pay around $10 which is $2.75 more than minimum wage here. Part time hours but could lead to growing opportunities for them.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a forum look like reddit. That way you could easily manage replies to a post inside a thread.
