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Just finished the Town Hall Meeting and I was impressed. It is quick summary showed to me at least that they are listening, are aware of many of the things we have read and talked about and that addressing those issues are in the works.
Not a lot of detail, but this format is not for that, just a precursor to what is to come. Even things that won’t be in tomorrow’s Update but are still on the drawing board for later on this year.
They touch on the Managed Payment $.25 fee. Also I like that they are willing to change some of the IS and also allow us to write in some of them and in turn as they learn they will add some that are pertinent and also admit their mistake of including some that were not pertinent.
A few good tid-bits in there, in my opinion.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Yeah.. actually Hairspray is Lacquer based which is comprised of Keytones, acetone and Tyuoline. [sp?]
We keep a small pint can of lacquer thinner and of acetone in our office, along with Lighter Fluid which is Benzine, which is essentially dry cleaner fluid.
The lacquer thinner and acetone will most likely take out the color, but the lighter fluid is probably ok [but test on another item or location].
The lighter fluid has a high flash point so it dries very quickly. Soak the tag with it, rub between your ringers and then blow on it hard on both sides. It evaporates almost instantly just like they dry clean a garment at the cleaners only they now use something else that is not as flammable as lighter fluid.
By the way many permanent markers are lacquer based. Lacquer, acetone will melt plastic. Benzine will not. As an experiment, squirt a little lighter fluid out on a saucer, then blow hard and long on it and watch as it dries up just as fast as alcohol.
So you have a few experiments to conduct. Let us know your results.
Mike at MDCGFA in Atl.
Just a suggestion.
Yes, agree with Sharyn. This is what we do, plus we offer free automatic returns. We also always, reply once, stating approx. what Sharyn said.
That’s it. We ant every customer to be happy. If they are not, then file for a Return, state your reason and Ebay issues then a shipping label and tells them they have 5 days to send it back. Once we get it, we will inspect it and if all is well, we will refund. Easy as that.
I think the Ebay Auto return program is great and takes many people just phishing by surprise. as soon as they ask for a return and click, they get a return label. Too much trouble for most busy people to pack it back up and return it.
Yes we pay for return shipping and it’s part of doing business, but so few actually do the return. 90% of the time if not more, you never hear from them and if they leave a neg. feedback, Ebay takes care of it.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
@Simplicio .. Agree with your assessment. Also, there is a lot of “hidden” areas for storage in a home. Some maybe not for long term but will help you scale up some before a seller is forced to go to extra outside storage.
In a garage, park your car outside and create 6 or 7 ft. high shelves and arrange then library style so you can get to them from both sides.
Old refrigerators with the doors off can be used for storage using all the shelving and bins it has.
If you have a garage, then go up high and build a perimeter shelf all the way around all 4 side, even above the garage door.
In the attic, many homes have truss roof rafters. Build shelves between them. Use your attic stairs to go up and down. No stairs, but only a small scuttle hole, have a handyman open that small hole up and install attic stairs.
Store things under all the beds and couches with low plastic storage bins with pull out drawers
In your personal clothes closet use, all above and below space and use plastic shoe boxes and stack vertically.
If you live in a 2 story and have stairs going up, open up the wall under the treads and create nice looking storage under them.
Any furniture that has empty drawers or are full of junk. Dump the junk and use as storage.
Buy-find low profile, flat top decorative storage trunks and use them as a coffee table, side tables and end of the bed storage and put items in those.Use trunk of your car[s] and glove compartment and stack bins in your back seat.
If you have a basement, same thing, store thing under the stairs going down.Exposed studs in an unfinished basement, mount brackets and make board shelves across the faces of the open studs.
Of course, the obvious, free standing shelving lined up library style in an open basement
Then of course the obvious, build a smaller, storage shed out back if you have the property before renting. One it is closer than a drive to storage unit and second, it is much cheaper than $350 a month x 12 mos. = $4,200 per year, well $4,200 or double that [2 years of outside storage] is $8,400 which without looking should buy a fairly good sized outside shed and after 24 months it is free storage. Need more, get a bigger one or buy a second one and put them side by side. But this is a bigger investment up front.We have about 1,200 items, all hard goods, metal and ceramic in our garage and we have space to maybe get that up to 2,500 we guess before we would tap into the attic space. We already have a neat transport system up and down from the attic once we go there. We figure another few thousand up in the attic area with built in shelves between the trusses. With hard goods the attic and basement environment doesn’t affect them.
Also, we have a way to account for the location of any bin within our SKU Number system built into SixBit already.
So, some creative thinking may help to delay the jump to an outside storage unit.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Showing on my Manage All Orders page. And maybe customize tab may be out of view.
I know this may be obvious to an old pro like yourself, but try signing our of Ebay, closing Ebay and everything else, reboot your rig and then open and sign back in again and see what you get.
At times, just like our cell phones, everything needs to be reset and let it “Burp”, then things start working correctly again.
Mike @ MDCGFA
For Ryanne: We do as Clarity does. We include our SKU at the very bottom of our description area also. And in SixBit we have a custom field.
nother sugesstion is that we used to put our SKU numbers at the end of the “Condtion” field.
If you guys are using InkFrog does it have a section for a SKU so you can use InkFrog as a stand alone Inventory Control System like the old Turbo Lister, WonderLister and SixBit does or does InkFrog not handle Inventory Control?
If Ink Frog allows you to make custom fields, make one and put your SKU there as a backup. I am not saying use it in place of but as in addition to. In other words have your SKU in to places. On Ebay and within your 3rd party app.
If InkFrog does allow Custom Fields, then you can hopefully do a bulk copy of the regular sku field into the custom field. Yes it is duplicate data but those SKU numbers are your life blood of finding, reconcilling and reporting on your inventory as a whole.
By also having then SKU numbers in InkFrog [2 places], you can every month or so, export a few chosen comuns of data into an excel spread sheet as a .CSV file and have a stapled together printed hard copy log of your complete inventory. Just last week I had to refer back to my hard copy for something I had to find left over from the antique booth days.
Just a few tips that may help in the future.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art
Troy.. this is killing me and our helper Lisa also. We still have listings left over from the WonderLister over to SixBit transition about a year and half ago.
I think we still have several hundred to go. Tedious, oh man yes, because not only are we dealing with the New IS fields, but also we still have to delete some old WL wrappers and also apply the new SixBit templates to all of those and re-list as new.
Very time consuming and then to get everything croos posted into Etsy if it qualifies.
mike mdcgfa
I am right here with Sharyn on this. This all was mentioned a year or two here on SL and the message was the same. Track everything you use for your business or business purposes. It adds up to a whole lot. It is these things that are the hidden [soft] costs to running a business, being at home using more resources for your business during office hours.
We have 3,923 of house, office, garage and full finished basement. We take the business SF as deduction. That is square footage of dedicated bonus room office over garage at 264 sf., 440 of garage for storage, and 640sf of finished basement for art studio and wood working / framing shop. So, 1344 sf of business only space. That’s about 33% deduction off mortgage, taxes, elec. bill, gas bill.
Then we take a portion of the internet as subscriptions for research, Worthpoint research as subscription, business cell phones, mileage [we use Mile IQ that tracks our every movement in the car and creates a report of all our sourcing and business trips] for travel mileage, then also all our cleaning supplies like metal polish, Windex, paper towels, toilet paper for cleaning and stuffing, solvents, art supplies like paint, canvas, painters tapes, shelving, brushes, framing materials, wire, screws, nails, new tools [depreciate these], all shipping supplies, boxes, shipping tape, misc. office supplies, computers, software, research books and magazines, office furniture, and actually even more.
Now of course these are all categorized in Quicken as broader categories and once classified and mapped to a specific category, then once a month we do our bank and credit card downloads, and everything is categorized into its proper accounting category.
The devil is in the details, and if you watch those details then you are good to go. This detailed process has cut our business profits down to Zero and taxes to zero for about 10 years now. But you must have an infrastructure set up to capture and classify everything that is business related.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Good Point Sharyn. And also this forum has not ever been a kind of “social” platform. Some joke at times, me included, but not a whole bunch of Likes, thumbs up’s, and atta boy’s. We all seem to be more of an informational forum covering all the things sellers at different levels get faced with and trying to get answers to the best protocol of how to handle something, do something or deal with Ebay issues.
Lately Ebay and Etsy have thrown enough screw balls at us sellers and the SL sellers try to figure it out. We don’t complain much, other than an Ugghh here we go again Ebay comment, but mostly, now how do we deal with it approach. Maybe a few have quit SL and Ebay as a whole out of frustration but mostly here seems to be more problem solving or asking how in the world did you do that type of thing.
Of course Jay and Ryanne are good gate keepers also and only the Big Trash Elf Himself knows how many SL members get the boot. I do remember during the Blog / Forum switch, I was getting tired of all the anonymous posters getting very argumentative and Jay said how look we are here to help. If you don’t want to pitch in and help or are only going to be mean and stir up a pot of trouble and make personal attacks then leave.
Now we have to request from Ryanne to join [maybe she does background checks on all of us] LOL :-] but with all of us using some type of name or handle it seems to have been fairly peaceful and focused for several years now.
mc
@WVR: I remember the thread. My long list of questions and your reply. But as Sharyn just mentioned, I did edits. I waited on the first edit, but did a quick second one and my reply to you disappeared. I emailed Ryanne and she found it and re-posted it, but it is showing under here member name.
Try searching under her name or some keyword contained and you may find it. I saw it after she re-posted it.
But yes, quick edits glitch the forum up. On my longer posts [“walls of text” as Jay like’s to call them]I Finally just started typing replies in MSWord, editing there and then copying and pasting. But that still won’t help if you do a quick edit on the forum.
Hint: If on a PC hold down the CTRL KEY and hit “F” for find and you will get the MS Quick search bar across the bottom of the Forum and you can search for a key word there or use the Forum’s search box. But I like the MS Find because you have 1 or 2 options, one is to highlight the search term so it’s easy to spot.
mc @ MDCGFA
I remember your posts now because I showed it to my wife. Her two favorite places. Ulta and Sephora. All she wants for Christmas are Gift Cards from those two stores and of course cash cards.
She said when I showed her your posts, she said I wouldn’t sell a thing until I built my personal stash up. When we were first married back in 1969 and we went up to CT. for my grad school work, she worked for Pfizer Corp who owned Coty Cosmetics and she also repp’ed for Elizabeth Ardin. She used to get tons of the left over Gifts that went along with their Purchase specials. very nice stuff, like complete eye shadow kits, foundations, new line perfumes in kits. Not like the Oscar’s bags, but nice Gifts that came with special purchases.
She was a Cosmetics rep before going into the dental field. If we go to the Mall of GA for me to go into Staples Office supply for something, BOOM, she swings left and says I’ll be up in Ulta. I get through and always have to go get her, then I walk around behind her for another hour. How many shades of red go these companies make, and why do women seem to think they have to try every one on or every fragrence. UUggh!!
She also said you had to be very deligent to do what you are doing and she can see how it all works, but you have to keep your eye on every sale, every BOGO or the Buy One Get one at XX? Off. And best of all are to know the Good Free Gift with Purchase.
Well kiddo $19,000 a month on discounted cosmetics is amazing. Also a lot of SL members are more into vintage and used goods and seem to be mostly Ebay, Etsy, Mercari, Posh and the likes for the older, used stuff. All your products, I would assume are NEW and still shrink wrapped.
Have you thought about your own store on like WooCommerce or Shopify and run it along side your Amazon sales until you gain traffic and momentum for your own store? Brnd your store somehow as the cosmetic alternative to Ulta and Sephora. BUT also watch out for VERO’s. Many companies are getting touchy about selling ther new stuff and even used stuff now days, if you are not a licensed or authorized seller. Wonder how that works in the cosmetics industry since they are so brand and image conscious.
Take care… Mike at MDCGFA
@Something Fantastic: You must have caught some of the members here out with the Flu on the same day and Jay and Ryanne out of the office and out on their job site. Who among us would not Congratulate $57k of Sales in a 90 day period.
A huge “Great Job” from me, Congratulations and Welcome Back.
One of the things that many members have been focused on more so than numbers over the past several years is going more into the weeds as jay calls it about how to handle increasing inventory, building systems and infrastructure, looking deeper into your numbers and knowing what they mean and scaling your businesses than maybe the Kudos about Sales numbers. But I see many, “Wow Great Sales, or Cool Find and Flip here, maybe just not as often as in the past. But your numbers are what many would love to have here on SL.
Great job, keep up the good work and Don’t be Shy. If you need any help ask, if not then try to help some others. You may be a good member to usher in what I think will be an upcoming topic “Buying WholeSale” and things like that.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
P.S. One thing you might also consider. Scroll all the way down to the bottom on any forum page and look at the small print. It will give you the count of the members that are signed in at any one time here on SL. As of right now, there are only a few members logged in and SL has approx. 6,000 members but only a few are active at any one time. It also says that the largest number of logged in members was 18 back in March [I think] in 2018. And if they are multi tasking and listing and reading as i do at times, it may be nothing more of a “shortage of eyes” on the postings and that’s why maybe you got a low number of “Atta’ Boys or Kudos” at the time.
Cool. Thanks for the info Troy. I will be doing some comparison research tomorrow and see what I can decide on.
mike
Thanks Troy. She has been bed ridden most of the time. But next Wed. is her last chemo and then a month off and then just 2 quick 15 min. radiation treatments on March 23rd and she is done and God willing all the treatments will have killed off all the cancer cells and she will be in remission, we are praying. Then evey six weeks doctor follow-ups for several years to keep an eye on everything.
Yep been getting up most mornings between 4am-6am and trying to do as much on the Ebay and Etsy stores, plus doing some web work and online marketing for the owner of the fellow who bought my old spray foam business. Then meals, our cat got sick, house chores and helping my daughter, I am a very tired puppy.
Glad to hear that you seem to be back in the swing of things and seems that Veronica is doing a great job keeping the item listings and flow going.
Thanks for the kudos and will make sure Susan sees your post.
Take care..
Your brother by another mother… MikeHey Guys and Troy you didn’t think I was going to let a pod-cast from you go by without having something to say. I can see Jay rolling his eyes and muttering, “Here we go, another wall of text from Mike”.
Same sales drop for us. We increased the inventory by about 50% from 2018 and by the end of 2019 we were down approx. 23% from 2018 in gross sales.
You and I talked about the Oct. drop when we last spoke. We saw the biggest drop about Oct. also. That was when Ebay did the “Item Specific” big changes in clothing. And Ebay is still making changes in other categories and has been an ongoing move.
Ebay has added a bunch of recommended and required item specifics, but what I am seeing is they are leaving out a bunch of what we think are pertinent data fields. So, I have just added some of our own custom fields. SixBit has helped with doing all of that in bulk.
When cross posting to Etsy don’t forget that Etsy has implemented the “forced” Free Shipping program. Anything over $36 is highly stressed to be Free Shipping so our Etsy prices are higher by estimated shipping to Zone 6 built into the prices.
We also dropped most clothing long ago and we have always been into hard goods and have half of our total inventory cross listed on Etsy and at half the number of items on Etsy, we gross at about half of our Ebay gross. So, we predict if we had all our inventory on Etsy we would do about the same Gross amount on Etsy. And, Etsy is less costly.
We also went to Free Shipping on Ebay last Oct. to try to overcome the drop we were seeing. Over the last 4 months, Sales volume stayed about the same but what we see is that all our close by state sales [zones1 to 3] have dropped off and Sales to Cal., Washington state, Oregon, etc. all Zone 8 increased a large amount. So, we think the phrase pushed by Ebay “build in the price to midway, then the lost money to far away zone 8 will be made up by the sales in zones 1 to 3. Well, the Sales in the closer zones “dropped off”. So, the closer sales are not supplementing the loss on the zone 8 sales because we only built in a zone 5 and 6 into the prices. And in hard goods that are in the 4 to 6 lb. range can be $10 to $15 more to ship onto that zone 7 and 8 that was NOT built in.
So, after I got those answers from Wabash River Valley relics and studying his store, and hearing Jay and Ryanne tried Free Shipping and changed back I am going to do the same. So, today I am bulk editing in SixBit and changing everything 100% back to calculated shipping and make an offer no matter what the selling price or size or weight. Our helper said she was so glad to get back to a much more simplified listing and cutting down on the number of templates.
We are like you troy, we dropped using wrappers in SixBit and just have templates set up for our most popular categories.
Lastly, we have been ready to go public with our Shopify store but have been holding up due to Sue’s illness, but she is a few weeks away from being through, so think I am going to go ahead and do a full export into the Shopify store. My thoughts are why not just build a store of our own.
We use the Duo version of SixBit so just like you say, we create the listing in the Ebay tab, then click the “populate from Ebay” option and the complete listing from Ebay is moved over to Etsy. Then we update the selling price and it’s good to go. And if we also add Shopify that will automatically be populated also.
We have also renamed all our photos going back 8 or 9 years and stored them in a 4-terra byte external drive and also have that drive backed up in the cloud. The same photos are used for Etsy and as I said they are auto added to Etsy and Shopify.
The trick is to always use the square camera, which we have on our camera.
One other trick is to use the double bracket codes [[color]], [[brand]], [[title]], etc., etc. in the SixBit description area and not use the wrappers or put description like copy in a wrapper. With use of the codes, SB pulls all of these IS into the description are along with the title and then this allows all the item specifics and description text to be pulled over into the Etsy listing when the Populate from option is used. So a complete Etsy listing is created except for a few minor quick clicks and tags that takes less than 30 seconds to complete. All of the shipping wieghts, photos, full description which thanks to the codes, contains all the Ebay Item Specifics now into Etsy.
Yes Jay, Troy is correct that you would do very well on Etsy, but to do it by hand without SixBit Duo version. You would have to create them by hand like Troy is doing for his fewer items. It will take you just as long to list your items by hand on Etsy as it has taken you on Ebay.
Troy, remember I told you about the hard goods categories last year. I told you so, LOL 🙂
And don’t forget, like I was mentioning back then, sell higher cost items, aim for selling items over $40 up to $100 and be willing to pay more for the items.
Buying Wholesale is something we do with the SmartParts we have mfg. And an advantage of being a Corp. business structure we have a Fed. ID number and a Georgia State tax Exempt number so we can buy wholesale with almost any body and have been thinking about this also. We have a good friend who is a retired International Lawyer and knows a lot about importing goods from other countries also.
Ok… got to get going here and get back to removing all the free shipping off 1,200 items and adding Make an Offer.
Good discussion guys… great to hear the comments targeted to where our heads have been for a while now.
BTW… Couldn’t think about scaling 3 platforms without SixBit and yes, I am 71 years old and Susan is 68 so, we must do this because we need the extra income streams plus, we like it also.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment
