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Jumping in: Most items we sell are breakables, over 2 lbs usually and larger than a show box, so no way am i going to spend any time 6 layer wrapping, boxing and shipping something for $3.00 even if it was free. I have a value I place on my time also that I can be selling to other companies that I do a little work for at $25 per hour.
I opted a plan many years ago when Jay, others and I were talking about lowering our purchase price while at the same time trying to increase the selling prices of items.
So for years we have slowly worked on this. But we try not to buy anything at any price unless free that sells for under $19.95 without shipping. We still have cheaper items left over from our antique mall booths but slowly going away.
Out of 1,200 listings only 14 are now under $10 and 338 are over $40 and 77 are over $75 dollars. Still leaves the in between bread and butter stuff between $20 to $40 at about 596
It took us about 3 years to weed out most of the under $10 items left over from those 6 booths of left over stuff. We took hundreds of items to one of our favorite big auction houses locally and auction about 200 items off that were too large for our Ebay ventures.
Back to WBird question and we would suggest rather than spending time on any dealings with moving out $1-$3 items, we would donate them and take a bigger price on them than that. If you don’t need the tax deductions yourself, then donate them to a place that resells the items and the money they will get will go to there cause.
We have a newer thrift store just about 2 miles up the road and we have started just dropping off items left over from 4-7 years old that are in the lower price range. After all costs involved we are only making such a small amount it is just not worth it to us. Our local favorite thirft shop is a ministry and helps younger children in poor families.
It will do your soul good to help others, help yourself to de-clutter, get more space in your inventory, and not burn up your very valuable time. 20 items at $2 each [even $10 each] is just not worth it to us in our opinion. That as you all know along with $1.00 will get you half a cup of coffee around here.
Mike at MDC Galleries and fine Art in Atlanta
Ok Jay.. Let me get this straight … In summary “we are born, grind out 60 hour a week jobs for 35 years, retire with whatever, start buying and selling used “stuff” online somewhere along the line, die and that is it!” and then nothing ….Ohhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. for eternity.
Jay, boy you do have a way to just cut to the meat of the matter.
Mike in Atl. 🙂
@RTWV: Could it possibly be the Item.
I had Ebay pull a 1950’s boxed set of steak knives and turns out knives of any sort were not allowed into that country. Maybe it was the item not the listing.
We laughed at what to call steak knives. Meat cutting utensils, food slicing manual cutters, etc., etc.
mike at MDCGFA
Yep.. Florence Henderson the mom on the Brady Bunch TV Show. she was a singer back in the day.
@ Jay: The best and thickest blown in or batt fiberglass insulation is only 34% “Efficient”. It is very porus [try blowing baby powder through it with a hair dryer. Spray Foam is 92% “efficient”. 300% more efficient than any blown wool or fiberglass product.
Duct tape a 12′ x 12″ x 12″ cube out of fiberglass, pour in a cup of baby powder, reach in with your hand and a hair drywer, turn it on high and blow inside for a few minutes and watch the powder come billowing out. There is a ton of porosity to the blown and batts.
Now take any styro-foam cooler you can buy at any beer, convienance store or walmart. [non-pastic coated of coarse], and do the same test. Viola’… Nothing comes out through the sides, because it is mostly non-porous.. Thus 34% at holding heat in, vs. 92% ability at holding heat in.
Foam will keep your attic within 10-12 degrees of the temperature of your house. With wood, if you load the furnance up at night, you may not even need to burn any more wood until the next day late or maybe even for a 24 hour period.
Easy math…3 times more effective at holding heat inside. I had my house so warm at nights at times, I had to open the windows and let some of the captured heat out.
I will run the thought of bartering out some BandB time for him and his family in the Spring and see what his reaction is. Makes the price, extremely budget friendly for both of you guys. I will PM ou guys after I talk with him and let you know what he thinks.
mike at MDCGFA
@Jay: Maybe you remember I owned a spray foam business called SprayFoam & More for a number of years.
Couple of inches of “closed cell” foam does wonders under the floor when the house is on a crawl space. Now research this, but if you have an attic, when you get the cash, have the attic sprayed with “Open Cell Foam”. The softer foam. It expands to 5″ in about 2-3 seconds. 75% of your heat is lost up and out of your attic as compared to only about 17% lost through walls and windows and even less from the floor.
You will save a whole lot more over just having the floor done. My former Supervisor has taken over my old business. Bet I could maybe I could sell him on the idea of coming up with the truck-rig-trailer with a few sets [drums] of open cell and spray your attic in return for maybe a stay in one of your BandB houses. Him and his family might like touring the caverns and the Shennendoah Valley and maybe going into Washington DC. You guys bartering out [swap] the BandB time in return for a sprayed attic or maybe even some areas in your new storage building. Closed cell works great on metal walls or roofs.
Just a thought.
PM me if you are interested and would like for me to feel George out about his interest.
mike at MDC Galleries
Yep Old Dad: think it was you and I who maybe spoke about the older letter presses before. As I mentioned further down here, that we moved on to screen printing industrial labels, dials and face plates, then die cut them out, same you you, then shipped to our customers.
We did car dashboards, radio and clock face plates and dials, rulers, printed circuits, micro wave and over fronts, flexible touch membrane multi layered switches, electrolumnescent panels and safety signs, decals for many mfg. industrial machines all using screen printing [silk screen is the older term], used the Thompsons and Kluges to not only die cut, but as you to emboss and also do consecutive numbering.
Later on we as we automated most operations we started doing displays and larger format. Did display for Stanley hardware, Michelin Tire, Walmart, Home depot, Delco Batteries, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell [think of all those dangling mobiles and static clean window decals that you can look through from the inside], of course Coca-Cola, Marlboro signs and tons of Gas pump toppers. A whole industry out there that offset litho couldn’t do because they couldn’t run rigig plastic sheets through presses that required flexible sheets to bend around rollers and of course our fine art limited edition prints in our Atelier Div for regional and NY artists.
But als a thing of the past. Now like everyone else here, I sit behind a computer all day selling old, used, discarded items from others junk and reselling it online.
As the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz said…. “What a world, what a world. I am melting, melting”.
mike at MDCGFA
You are welcome. Had a few minutes to do a brain dump before starting next project. Prepping tax info for year end.
As far as the T-Shirts go, you could shrink the image down a bit. About 12″ x 17″ is a preferred size on T-shirts to keep the image from wrapping under the arm pits or from tucking under the belted waste line [if tucked] if not then longer is OK. But you could do a step and repeat design and do an over-all pattern.
As far as ink drying no problem. A small can of “etching ink” can be gotten from Dick Blick Art Supply. You can also get a small tube of “extender”.
You will also need a rubber roller called a brayer. Get a sheet of glass or plexiglass about 12×12. Open the ink, use a 2″ wide putty knife and scoop out about a table spoon of ink and scrape onto the palette [glass]. Then also squirt out some of the clear extender. This will “loosen up” the ink as will as act as a retarder. better still buy some retarder also.
Now take the putty knife and “work” that ink. Mash it down, scrape up, flop it over, still smashing it out. Work that ink up vigorously for about 5 minutes to mix the retarder-extender into it and also and heat from the mashing process. That friction heat “loosen” the ink.
Now take a brayer [rubber roller] with a handle and start rolling that ink up onto that roller, add ink as needed, until you can hear a “tack-tacky-sticky sound] It is sort of an acquired touch or feel. In any case then apply the ink to the plates high areas only by carefully rolling the ink across all those letters and design.
Next place you sheet [I suggest only using a thick sheet like poster boards], thin sheets will crushed and crease down around the letters. Once your board material is placed over the plate, then gently rubber all over the back of the sheet with a old, waded up rag, use a clean brayer or a kitchen rolling pin. Anything to apply even pressure across the back. Then lift up the poster board and place face up to dry. But as soon as you lift up the sheet and place somewhere, do start to ink the plate again. If the ink start to feel like it is drying, keep adding a little more ink, extender and retarder and keep a nice, gooey, sticky paste on your palette and roller and ink the plate as quickly as you can. Rinse and repeat for 125 impressions, dry, sign and you have a limited edition print.
Wash up with mineral spirits and oil the plate. OH BTW. You will need to clean that plate BEFORE you ever start to use it. Sort of restore it. Use fine steel wool and Liquid Wrench Oil to cut all the rust. You have to sort of de-rust it and also get out all the pitting. try not to grind any low spots into the wide flat areas or it won’t ink correctly and will then leave white void areas in your printed image.
Look up how to print wood cuts or linoleum block prints. Same technique.
BTW, Once you get a good clean, black on white image, you can take that to a T-Shirt print shop, have them reduce the image and get you a film positive which they in turn can burn you a silk screen stencil on a frame and either make T-shirts for you or give you the frame and you can buy the squeegee and ink and supplied and do it for your self. I did it for 35 years ++ and built a whole business with 30+ employees in the Screen Printing Business. Only we stopped doing shirts the first year or two and began to specialize in very fine line, tight tolerance industrial work, printed circuits, pressure sensitive decals and industrial face plates to the tune of several million dollars a year in early 1990’s.
Just a thought. You might like printing as a side jig or hobby and you can make your own products or have your images printed on demand by several companies who do that for sellers. Etsy is full of print on demand products all from home grown artists who have their designs, slogans or saying printed on everything they can get their hands on.
Again…Have fun
Mike at MDCGFA
That is a plate for a flatbed printing press. Search for Vandercook Presses. Been around since 1903, I think. There were competitors later which your Google research will show.
That plate is one of the larger ones I have seen but think the larger Vandercook would handle it.The plate was laid face up, flat down on the press bed and “locked into place” maybe even inside of a chase, but this is so large don’t if a chase could be used. Once locked into place a few press proofs would be run to get the exact positioning on the printing substrate [material].
The plate is inked by a series of several rollers that got inked on one far end of the press by spinning up against an ink pan. Then the rollers would traverse all the way across the plate and back to the top. This action deposited ink onto the high part of the plate. Called relief inking, not intaglio inking. Different method used for engraving and etchings.The material, usually large poster board or cardboard sheets would be laid on the press “in register”, by butting up against 3 guides. Two on the sides and one at the short top end. These guides assured that each sheet that was hand feed onto the press, directly on top of the plate was all in the exact position on each sheet.
Next the press would cycle, and several non-inked rollers would pass over the back side of the sheet to be printing and “press” that sheet down with a pre-tested set pressure and return to their starting position. The operator then lifted by hand the sheet up and off the plate / press bed and when flipped over there would be a “correct reading” impression of the plate. That sheet was placed on what is called the “rack” a rolling series of stacked up wire shelves. Starting at the bottom with all racks flipped up, the first sheet was laid face up on that first bottom rack and the next rack lowered down. Most racks i ever worked with decades ago were either 50 or 100 racks per rolling unit. Get too high and you can’t reach the top racks [shelves] with a small ladder. Short operators or helpers had a tough time and usually stopped as far as they could reach up.
Now the operator starts the whole process over again, by engaging the press [long ago by hand pulling the rollers] and in later years by stepping on a foot pedal to activate another cycle. Inking rollers make a pass over the raised area to ink the plate, a sheet is placed in register over the plate, the pressure rollers make a pass, the operator lifts and places on the drying rack and then repeats this cycle.
Sheets this large were mostly hand fed due to lack of auto sheet feeding on the early, giant models.
The operator could usually do about 75 to 125 impressions per hour depending on the material and difficulty in handling.
At the end of the run, the press rollers and plate would be cleaned up with mineral spirits and dried down good, covered with a cardboard sheet with a slight layer of oil to prevent rusting and stored for a future reprint.
The cut-out corners were done later after possibly this client [the insurance company] no longer was a customer or were finished with that product. The print shop, then possibly needed some wood pieces that exact height that this “old-no defunct plate” was and cut two sections out of it to use to build up and fill spaces inside of the chase for a job that required a smaller plate or advertising cut as this type of plate is called.
The cut out pieces were used as “furniture” which is what the fill in wood pieces inside of a chase is called and the centering of the new smaller late for a new customer or job and filling in the blank spaces within the chase is called “locking up”. Little small wedges called “quoins’ pronounced “coins” were used along with a “T” handle key to twist and apply pressure to hold the place inside of the chase in position throughout the press run. Same technique is used for die cutting on a Thompson or kluge Press.
The plate is deep etched as a wrong reading image so when it is transferred [Offset Printing] in modern terms, comes out “correct reading” on the finished piece.
What was printed may have been trade show signs, large lobby posters or advertising pieces. As an insurance company I wouldn’t think they were printing any type of boxes or packaging materials.
So, I know there are a few older printers here on SL from some of my past discussions, so maybe some of them can correct me or add to the knowledge.
BTW look at the side edge of the plate. Do you see two [2] layers? If so that would be a metal plate maybe about an 1/8″ to 1/4″ thick [depending on the depth of the etched letter] and then mounted onto a wood [usually maple] base to make one, the whole thing lighter and easier to handle and get into and out of the press and also to bring the whole thickness up to what is printers standard type high requirement [a universal standard] of approx. .923″ to .937″ high.
The Vandercook presses are really a mechanized version of the Gutenberg Press which was the first press ever built and used to print the first Bibles ever printed.All this info. can be Goggled and most found on Wiki.
Many people collect old “advertising cuts”, which we have talked about before here on SL and you can search Scavengerlife for those. Many people collect old press parts and many old presses like the Kluge and Thompson are still in use. I have printed millions of sheets through both.
A plate that size would certainly be a nice piece to mount on the lobby wall of an older printing company still in business, a museum of printing items and history, or even a newer digital age printing or publishing company just showing history on its walls.So, the price you select would probably depend on if a collector wanted it bad enough, or an old employee of that insurance company and what they had in mind to do with it, if decor or what. In a lobby it would probably get framed up which would add to the buyer’s final cost.
Maybe even research and see if that insurance company or a newer, modern subsidiary or offshoot still existed and contact them, or the Chamber of Commerce of the town the Insurance was started in and see if they may be interested. Who knows?
We used to pay to have cutting dies with blades inserted at about $.93 per square inch. Now this is a printing plate that is etched, not a ruled die cutting plate. But based on just buying that in its day would be over a thousand dollars. It is approx. 1,728 square inches. but damaged.
Maybe work out a price from there, go high and take a few offers [if any] and adjust from there. Then the buyer or you guys figure out how you want to handle shipping, Free or Calculated which you can figure out with Flippertools.com by ScavengerLife member Josh.
Good luck with your venture and don’t rush and have some fun learning about the history of printing prior to the digital age.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in AtlantaThe content from Mr. Auction Professor is the reason why we are moving to diversify to other platforms and cross listing as quickly as we can and also re-set up our Shopify store.
The base premise is only his “opinion” based on Ebay’s 3rd quarter numbers and his own thoughts, he parallels my thinking fairly closely. I had already arrived at about his same point and with a 3rd party app like SixBit and a little manipulation of embedding a platform code into our SKU numbering system, we can maybe list on 5 or 6 platforms and still track it fairly easy and handle it.
This link goes to a recent YouTube he made and is only about a 13 to 14 minute listen.
Now staying focused just on the online reselling unique, one of a king items online, process, are any other SL members diversifying, within the e-commerce reselling platforms and if so what and how.
I don’t mean taking profits from selling online and then going and buying real estate, store fronts, Pizza franchises 🙂 LOL or the such. I mean what are you doing within the stay online and market items in online stores or your own domain to continue to be able to claim a full time income from online selling. Do know of and use SEO a lot, ads, have multiple cross listed platforms, know lot about tags and key words.
What is your plan to grow your online business, scale it up? Directly to Jay… if you and Ryanne did not know anything about video conferencing and did not do that at all for extra income and had never invested in your airBandB business model and you only had your 9,000 item inventory and your Ebay store, what would your game plan be to handle and over come the scenario
of only being on Ebay as your only income stream.Is your inventory producing the same income given than small as it may be, the consumer price index and cost of goods we all live on still go up a few percentage points each year, Ebay and PayPal are taking more. Would you just sit back and still feed the 9,000 item beast with new purchases, list them, sell what you can just from Ebay, ship them and then as you say “rinse and repeat”?
I am not bashing Ebay, but after listening the Professor Auction, and several others on the same topic, my confidence in Ebay to be my only main income source is waining. It still is #2 right behind Amazon, but shouldn’t sellers move into a more and newer world to expand and branch out into the more diverse and younger e-commerce world. In other words are we just “marking time and aging in place” when it comes to selling online?
I am 71 years old. Have thousands of items in inventory. In 15 years from now at 86 years old, am I going to be found dead one day, laying in the garage, on the floor with a “numbered Bin” and a “pile of broken Limoge dinner plates” on top of me because I had to climb a ladder to pull some old used ceramic plates off the top shelf?? 🙂 LMAO Or will I have built up a substantial online e-commerce business, have a few helpers and sell on 5 or 6 platforms and have a buzzing business which I can over see and direct.
So where do we all go next to expand and move forward.. maybe into “The twilight Zone”.
Boy that was a rabbit hole, but may be a few hidden topics for an up coming podcast hidden in there. 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries
Hey troy. been thinking of you guys. Hope all is well with you and Veronica. Susan not doing too well but Friday is her last radiation treatment then that 2nd operation and then last 13 weeks of final chemo rounds. Keep praying for her.
I thought that is what you were doing with the platforms that SixBit doesn’t handle automatically. Just adding a code onto the end of your SKU. I was trying to think it all through.
Yes SB handles Ebay, Etsy and Shopify. The Shopify is going to cost extra on top of the Duo. They used to call it the “Enterprise” level. And goes from $99.99 to $139 per month. BUT they have recently changed their terminology and where as the former Duo handles 2 platforms, now the wording says for the $139 level it handles quote “UNLIMITED” sites and handles a bunch of platforms. A little confusing, but wonder if they can handle 4 or 5 platforms or do they just mean multiple accounts on 4 platforms. They are now handling Ebay, Etsy, Shopify and Amazon.
I am going to call them tomorrow and see if I can get it straight what they do and do not cover and if they have any suggestions on the others.
BTW you are correct, Etsy is doing better now. About $5,776 Yr to date on Etsy on 95 items sold = $43.73 per sale and 216% up over last year [YoY] as compared to $12,395 in Ebay Sales with about $4k of some other stuff thrown in from a couple small side design-art work jigs. So Etsy is sneaking up to about half of what I sell on Ebay and only 650 listing instead of the 1,200 I have on Ebay. I wonder, when I get all items cross lsited, will that other 600 listings actually allow me to outsell my Ebay store over on Etsy? Hhhmm…
But Ebay and PayPal fees [including promoted listings have moved up to about 24% of our Ebay sales at $2,952. [no shipping-just fees and some ads]. So much for Jay’s 15% to 17% from days gone by. Then throw in Federal Taxes taxes on top of that [if you don’t expense it down to zero like we do] and like we have always said, if you want to make $50k in this business you probably need to sell closer to about $100k to end up at about $50k annually.
That is why I cringe when I read about newer people quitting their jobs so early in the start up of the reselling business. Jay tries to warn them all the time. Do this until you can generate enough NET after Taxes and Fees and Supplies to provide enough income to live off of.
This is the biggest reason I want to re-establish and re-vitalize our Shopify store, even though a slow grow, atleast we can keep so much more of our sales dollars.
What do you think about using the custom fields and create one titled “Auxillary Platforms” and just enter the -pm -me -rl in that one field. Then could filter on that one field for the correct code it sold on and do the rest that you do manually from there. That way it would keep the code out of the SKU field. Or do you think it is better in the SKU field and then do an “Advanced Search” for the SKU number and use the “contains” qualifier and enter -pm to get all the Posh Mark listings? Just wondering how to work it all out.
The Ebay Item Specific glitch has hit hard goods now in the Home Decor category. On relists or even batch changes from SB many bounce back with an error message that I can’t revise due to missing IS. We have all those IS but most are in our custom Item Specific fields. it is just the new fields Ebay is creating it has not been populated over and wonder if it even will. so far have 69 bounced listings that I tried to do a revision on. Just wanted to remove “best Offer” and nope, can’t until I enter all the IS in their “new” fields.
Between all of Ebay and Etsy both making a bunch of 4th quarter changes and failing to get it right from the get go, I am just getting tired of it.
Catch you later…
mike at MDC Galleries
Thanks.. That’s about $200 per month on average. That is OK. You won’t retire off of it but covers the the little time spent.
Still pondering.. but since they will import everything in [no work on my end], and if i code in SixBit like Troy I can track it with not much effort may be worth it just to have a 3rd and 4th back-up to Ebay.
mike at MDC Concepts, Inc. – MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Mark: kind of why I asked. i used to have everything listed on Truegether and also Bonanza. That was back when I was using WonderLister. Bonanza kept getting things way out of Synch with Ebay and not delteing solds and that in turn was throwing WL off base. I finally just got rid of Bonanza and went ahead and dumped TrueGather for no other reasons than no sales would come all year and also seemed like JandR and others here abandoned TrueGether themselves so ditched both.
Now with SixBit and the fact that it handles our Ebay, Etsy and soon to be revitalized Shopify store, I didn’t know if maybe just having all our items out on Bonanza and truegether would indeed provide just some more Google exposure to help with organic Google rankings for our domain name which is included in all of our item descriptions. Also all of our photos are named.
With all the issues Ebay is having and every guru out there talking about Ebay’s 3rd quarter results and on top of all of that all the Ebay glitches, everybody is saying it is prudent to be diversified, be on as many various platforms as you can handle, stay spread out and promote and social media along with internal proper SEO use for everything.
This is easily done for Ebay, Etsy and Shopify through SixBit. I just didn’t want our inventory to start to get all messed up and have things still listed on other platforms. If I accidentally sell something on Bonanza that is out of stock I don’t care, but don’t want that to happen on my main 3 platforms.
Our main three plus thinking about adding Mercari, Sattchi Art and maybe RubyLane then would Bonanza and TrueGether help or hurt in the Google organic traffic game.
I can handle the 3 main within SixBit and do like Troy and handle the Mercari like he does with poshmark by manually altering our sku code to include codes for it. Unsure about the Sattchi Art or RubyLane though.
So was just wondering if anybody still fooled with Bonanza and trueGether at all for any reasons, especially since so few Sales came from them.
mike at MDC Galleries
How many members here at SL still list on Bonanza and trueGether?
Just doing a little quick poll-survey.
mike at MDCGFA
I agree Julie: We use a lot of the Priority Mail boxes. Only used a Flat Rate a few times in years. With our discount regular Priority is always less costly so we keep a supply of about 12 various sizes in stock.
We have a one page shipping supply inventory sheet and have a minimum / maximum level set and when we get to the min. level then order more by either the 10 or 25 pack.
I also have not seen any where that Pirateship saves me anything either. PirateShip is only USPS and do not offer any FedEx services. So PS is good for us on items under 5 or 6 lbs, which is about half to 2/3rds of our shipments.
At about 6 lbs. FedEx is less costly and we have a full service FedEx office just a few miles up the road. We have a whole column of built in shipping prices into our SixBit program and have a custom field for cubic inches. When we hit 6 lbs. we drop in the FedEx prices. But guess what???? We pack in USPS boxes because FedEx takes packages in USPS boxes with thier label on it. Maybe because of the “last leg” arrangement FedEx has with the USPS. Maybe Lazybeatnik knows for sure.
Also by using flipper tools Dimensional weight calculator we have all of the fedEx and USPS oversize shipping rates built into SixBit and as soon as that cubic in. goes over 1,728 cubic inches, we apply the Surcharge rates. His calculator tells us which pound level to use to charge for the wieght and oversize package. But again the USPS boxes can be used.
So in short, the USPS boxes can be used for both USPS and FedEx, so yes we will use the boxes as long as they are available.
And yes, we also cut down the USPS reg. priority boxes to shave a little weight off the box but in most cases we do it to try to keep the size under the 1,728 cu. inches. Then when we have to go oversize, we also splice together two reg. priority boxes and create a larger size box. Again, any size, smaller or larger, will go by either USPS or FedEx and USPS boxes in any cut down or spliced together size will go via. both. And all of this seems fine by both companies.
So yes, we are hopeing that the USPS sticks with it’s program of free boxes for the priority program and for use with FedEx as long as they still have their partnership together.
As for the “3 to 4 month study”, well I think I can say, yes it is a cost to the USPS, but are they recouping the costs via any added shipping upgrade purchases by shippers, is what I guess they have to figure out. Bottom line is if they are bleeding money in that program, and adding to what they already may be loosing to competition they may have to stop offering the free boxes.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
