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@ Troy:
Hey buddy good to hear that you are getting a handle on the ranch stuff for your mom.
Just FYI.. Based on the above video by CraigsList Hunter I came across a question for the SB Tech Team and have an open ticket / question to them on the needed allocation plan to accomplish the list / end / relist and how it impacts the 90 Etsy cycle.
I am waiting for the reply from either Steve or Dustin and will shoot that on along to you so you can see what they say.
Catch you later after you get your feet back on the ground
P.S. you running a computer that doesn’t have Windows 10 on it? Doesn’t that slow down SixBit for you also? Just curious.
mike at MDCGFA
Played the pod-cast this morning and Susan was listening and she say’s thanks for the Shout Out and appreciates your thoughts. She even got up for a few minutes after the pod cast and asked what all was backed up in the office. Think you guys got her mind off the pain and thinking about something else.
On another note: Jay you talked about Sales being low and that it happens. Well if you remember you had a longer thread going last year about the 30 day / end the listing / and relist for another 30 days in order to have Ebay-Cassini see each relisting as a brand new listing to keep the stores fresh and not being seen as going stale or having stale listings with low views and no sales.
Well interesting that now that Ebay has converted over to all GTC and eliminated the short listing options, according to Craigslist Hunter, he says he and other larger stores have been talking about there Sales sliding drastically since this Ebay change.
Since you like data, experiments to prove the cause and effects and the results of those experiments, take a look at this. He did an experiment using his two stores and talks about the results. Then the other large stores did the same thing and got the same results and there sales have bounced back.
To also set the stage for this video he did, he talked about sales starting to slump a few videos earlier and said then that he would contact an experiment to find out what was happening after years of stable, consistent sales, why suddenly Sales tanked.He said earlier that it would take him a few months to run the experiment in both stores and gather the data then he would produce a follow up video.
Well this is the video of the results. It is about 10 minutes, but very interesting and seems, in my opinion, to support the list, end and relist process. I am not going to call this process a “theory” any longer after someone actually doing what you have always wanted someone to do to verify their actions. Well this convinces me.
The good thing is it can be done automatically within SixBit. I am currently working with SB tech support to see about what it means to keep ending Ebay listings and then auto creating a new listing and uploading and how that may interfere with Etsy which is on a $.20 fee for 90 day listing. Troy and i both use the SB Enterprise edition which we use to cross post to Etsy so that could be a problem by causing Etsy to end early and relisting and getting charged triple $.20 charges. But sure we will work that out.
BUT.. as to your questioning last year of the value to list / end / relist every 30 days, well these guys think that the Ebay GTC change is the culprit of causing older listings to be seen as stale and thus the work around to it is to use the 30 day list / end /relist to over come it and has seems to run enough of a test to seem to prove it.
Check it out and see if this could actually be some of the culprit to low sales on top of the seasonal slow down we all see. interested in what some of the follow up opinions are on the list / end / relist at 30 to 60 day cycles now.
TTFN ..
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment PartsSusan says thanks for all the best wishes. She said she will try to be back in the office and working on listings in a week or so depending on the pain levels. But she seems to be doing very well and is getting up and moving around a little more each day.
@Troy.. So sorry to hear of the loss of your dad. As we aged we lost both Susan’s and my parents along the journey and it is not easy.I figured you were very involved when we were not hearing as much from you. God Bless you, your family and am sure your mom appreciates you and your brother giving the help to running the Ranch.
Take care and we all will catch back up after you are back home and back into business stuff.
Take Care..
Mike in AtlantaHi all:
Susan came out of surgery just fine Thursday. Doctor said it went smooth with no complications or any unexpected hurdles or results. Everything sent off to pathology labs and she will get the results at her next appointment June 27th.The Dr. said he was still in the 97 percent range of expecting that the surgery got everything in one fell swoop and that no chemo or radiation would be expected, but that still leaves a 3% window and we will see what the lab results are on that. If we get a bad report back then further treatment would be decided at that time.
Yesterday she was sitting up and fairly attentive. Today most of the internal IV pain killer meds have left the system and she is pretty sore and painful to move, but she has some pain meds. Thay gave her 5 Oxycodine to take every for hours [20 hours worth], she looked up at the doctor and said “Are you kidding me!”. We all burst into laughter. Dr. are too scared these days.
So she went home 3 hours after the surgery,[complete hysterectomy, fallopian tubes, ovaries and some local lymph nodes]. They said to get home, then get up and start walking and moving and call if any problems.
Guess this day and time it is, “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am and here’s your bill, how are you going to pay for this, now go home?” culture LOL 🙂
They say 6 weeks recovery, but I think she will be back buying and picking with me by first of the month and back doing the store photography. Hope so.
Keep on truckin guys..
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
How is everyone wording the messages in the text box. Ebay allows 250 characters for the seller to say something to the “potential Buyer”.
We were curious to just what everyone here is saying in that message box area when they send out the offers.
Also interested in what the average amounts everyone is using in percentages. The offer amount is in dollars, so is everyone just taking a random percentage off of the listed price and entering that amount in the “Offer Amount” box?
I did one last night for an item that is listed at $398 [I think], calculated a 25% discount and sent the offer out at $298. But didn’t say much in the message box except we are offering a special discount to our watchers or something like that.
Any other thoughts of something enticing to say in that 250 character box or are you guys just shooting out a number without commenting.
Just curious..
Thanks,
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine ArtYeah.. I know Troy has mentioned it several times. He is ahead of me with the “hands on time” he has spent with SixBit. I dabbled with SixBit on and off over several years while I was still using WonderLister. Just didn’t want to loose the time it was going to take to make the transition. But I finally bit the bullitt, knowing full well it was going to take us a while to get our feet on solid footing, so it took six weeks.
Also during this time Susan got diagnosed with Endometrial Cancer of the Uterus. So, we have had some doctors visits and testing along with the time spent on the SixBit transition.
Her surgery is scheduled for this Thursday at 5:45 AM. She will be out by about 10am they say and will go home the same day. Then 6 weeks of recovery of which the first two weeks will be not doing much of anything except getting up and walking around and downing as much water as she can.
Over the next few days we have to sterilize the bedroom and bathroom completely. Everything in the rooms sterilized, linenes, furniture and then she has to body prep for the last day and a half.
I am going to have to do the cooking and shopping for the first few weeks, so good luck with that. LOL 🙂 Plus she will only be able to eat soft stuff.
Anyway.. a video would not be in the cards for the near future and troy is getting ready for his long hike and has been visiting family and friends out west. So maybe in the fall.
Also with SB now I am going back and re-doing so much and still trying to go forward with new listings, I get spread fairly thin. One reason I haven’t had the time to post much on SL. Plus Jay is not a big fan of my “Wall’s of Text”, Ha-Ha 🙂
Also two of the houses we are building are about finished and hoping for a CO this week and closing in about two weeks on both of them. Then next my partner and I have to decide what we want to do with the other two lots we have. These will be both 2 story, walk out basements, so that will be a bunch of planning if we decide to move on them quickly.
Well that’s enough for this rambling for now..
Mike at MDCGFA in Atlanta
But I will keep plugging away.
Ryann:
If you jump back to the shipping forum and catch the last posts I did toward the bottom, I address the iisue of size agagin in cubic inch terms. You and Jay keep mentioning 12x12x12. Well that is just USPS way of saying, 1,728 cubic inches. You can use any box, any splice together process, make your own or buy a brown box and ship it USPS Priority as long as it is under 150 lbs. and doesn’t multiply out to over 1,728 cubic inches and is under 108″ long.Now I know your painting will be bigger than this, but 50″ long is not a problem if it would fit in a box 50″ x 8″ x 4″ [I know it won’t]. This equals 1,600 cubic inches.
I invite you to go to http://www.flippertools.com [developed by one of the Scavengerlife members] and scroll down to the shipping area. He has two shipping tools that are great. Just put in any 3 dimensions and the weight and Bingo, it will tell you how to ship it and how much it will cost. You can even change it to show retail over the counter costs or to show your Top Rated Seller rates with your discount applied.
It is just the easiest way to determine how to ship we have found. It also will compare USPS and FedEX so you can select which way you want to ship.
As I mentioned in the Shipping Post at the end, I have shipped several 96″ (8 ft.) long x 4″ x 4″ engineering tripods before and it only ran $17 to $19 dollars.
When u use the Flipper tool “Fitshipper” put in this zip code for guestimates on costs scenarios: 67547. That is the zip for Kinsley, KS. Wkipedia says that is the center of the US and good for estimating costs on a package.
One of the Flippertools also has an estimator that compares several zip codes with varying distances from your zip.
USPS Parcel will handle packages the same way, by cubic inches, BUT allow up to 175 LBS [I think] and up to 130: in length.
So I would drop the 12 x 12 x 12 part of the conversation and just say as long as the L x W x D is under 1,728 cubic inches you are good to go, and NO you don’t have to use a USPS box to ship Priority. Any brown box will do as long as you buy and pay for the Priority postage.
There are a few other details but they are minor.
Simply put LxWXD = 1,728 or less and you are good to go with any box you have in the whole universe!! LOL 🙂
mike at MDCGFA
Good point Mark. And if we can think we are doing something pro-actively to help boost sales and don’t have to pay Ebay “extra” for it, that makes me feel even “‘mo better”. 🙂
Our Sales are way down, but one reason could be the transition from WonderLister over to SixBit and it has taken awhile and we didn’t do much listing at all for 6 to 8 weeks. We were doing a lot of trial and error things within SixBit getting the hang of it, but we are on solid footing now.
But our monthly Sales avg. has dropped from $2,000 to $2,200 monthly down to $1,300 to $1,500. Overall about a $500 to $700 dollar decrease give or take.
So, now that I have some time on my hands, going to give the “Make an Offer” to as many as I can and see if Sales start to “pop Back” a little bit.
Also using SixBit to identify all the old listings that have gone very stale and ending those listings a few at a time and modernizing them to our newly created template, wrapper and allocation plan within SixBit and relisting them as new listings. That may help some. But I will try the offer’s first to see if any will sell so I won’t have to bother updating and modernizing those listings. For every one that sells, that is one less I will have to revise.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
We’ll see.
We take the object-item, grab a tape measure and extend it about 2″ out from the hight, width and depth and thats what we put in the dimensions. so a 8″ x 5″ x 6″ metal box will get a 12″ x 9″ x 10″ dimension put into the size.
We don’t care what size box we have in stock, at 2″ all around that gives us room for our 6-7 layer “cocoon” packing technique and plenty of room around inside of a box for either dunnage or in case we have to do a box in a box. Easy peezy.
I can tell how large a package is going to be even before we buy something. Pull out my pocket tape and hold it up beside the item then type into my phone 9″x12″4″ [the object plus 4 inches added to the actual object size- 4″ because that will allow 2″ on each side of the box. Anything over 1,728 cubic inches will be oversized.
Now about over size and the cost per pound and the distance. Our take is, .. “wait for it”!! “We don’t care!”.
Shipping is what it is. A cost of doing business, the supplies are an expense and the cost to ship is “calculated shipping” and the customer pays it.
If the USPS decided to go up to $20 per pound on all packages regardless we wouldn’t care. It is what it is and everybody will be paying the same. Think of shipping pounds like gasoline. Gas was $.17 per gallon in my youth, then it has hit over $5.00 per gallon. And it fluctuates whenever anyone sneezes. We still buy it and it is what it is.
We put box sizes and shipping weights into every listing we create. We use SixBit now so we have a field for “Scale Weight” and a field for “Ship Weight”.
We have worked out a method whereby we know the shipping weight based on the scale weight and the cubic inch box size we will use. We pre-figured all of that years ago and have it as part of our taped down table charts.
By the way every one of the standard box sizes on our charts also has a column for the cubic inches per box right beside it. A USPS Shoe Box is 480 cubic inches. The secret was years ago taking every box size we had, both USPS, FedEx, and custom bought and taping them up and filling them up with crumpled dunnage. Then we average all of those boxes out and arrived at a “CUBIC INCH” of weight. So we know that if we take the object scale weight and add it to the box’s cubic inch of dunnage weight and subtract the actual size for the objects, “Space displacement”, that we have the correct “TOTAL WEIGHT” for shipping.
We have not been under on our shiiping wieghts on any package for years since we did this nor have we been much more than a dollar over estimated either. But it did take some time to work out the weight for each “cubic Inch” of negative space, but finally tweaked it down.
It is really part of the “Kaizen – LEAN Mfg. Approach”. Getting “True Costs” on everything in your business. I mean everything, down to the cost of every running inch of tape you use. But easily doable and it is a one time investment of time up front.
Our “Income from over priced shipping last year was around $600 of estimating high, our loss from underestimating was about $200 +/-. So at years end we in the black / plus side of about $400 +/-.
I just did a mini time study of an object sitting on one of our scales. It took 17 seconds to arrive at the box size, get the shipping wieght and type those numbers into a SixBit listing.
Just sharing a side bar with everyone.
mike at MDCGFA
We hit on this topic a few years back. Anything under 1,728 cubic inches is not going to hit the DIM-WEIGHT pricing, anything over will.
a 12x12x12 box equals = 1,728 cubic in. So, a 96″ long x4x4 inch box is only 1,536 cubic inches and will not hit DIM-WEIGHT prices either. I have shipped long surveying tri-pods, long fly fishing poles, golf clubs, rolled up paintings, etc. and as long as the length x width x depth is under 1,728 I have never had any calculated shipping charges come out any higher than a 12 x 12 x 12 box.
I splice / tape together the USPS Shoe boxes all the time, 2, 3 or 4 and use them to create a longer 5 x 7 x ?? whatever I need as long as all 3 measurements multiplied together comes out less than 1,728 cubic inches.
This is one reason the USPS stopped making thier large “C” boxes that Ryann and I had stock piled a few years back. The 15 x 12 x 12 was over 1,728 cubic inches. But there is also a length plus girth dimension to think about. length plus girth has to be under 108″ and Parcel is 130″.
So my 96″ x 4″ x 4″ example above is looked at like this 96″ + 4+4+4+4 = 112 Length+Girth inches so it won’t ship Priority but it will ship Parcel without the DIM-WEIGHT pricing. But shorten it to 90″ long x 4 wide x 4″ deep and it comes out to 106 ” L+G and it will even ship Priority, thus my 5 to 6 USPS Shoe boxes slide together and taped will go anyway I want to ship it.
Where one has to watch the comparison of costs is when it also comes to weight. A Large box that starts to get “very heavy” for it’s size may be better off going FedEx for cost reasons, but that is due to the fact FedEx is more competitive after a certain weight limit.
A good place and I think the BEST PLACE [I use this site all the time, but have most memorized by now] to figure all of this out is with one of the SL members web sites and that is FlipperTools.com”. It has a section called FitShipper and will tell you which box to use or you can make your own custom box, which we do all the time for both Priority and Parcel.
I Can’t recall the SL members name, but Jay, you have mentioned him before and think you may even have interviewed him but can’t be sure on that. But he has a site that will nail down the box sizes needed, tell you what it will cost to ship to any zip code from your office and will also compare USPS, FedEx, UPS and others I think. He also has an option to buy postage and labels through his site now.
Using his site will just make this whole thing easier and I would even say, a one stop shop to decide on what size to ship to where at what cost. Here at MDCGFA we will have wall and table charts available to us, taped to our work stations but as long as I can make a box under 1,728 cubic inches in any shape, form or fashion by using regular boxes as they are mfg. or me separating them apart, cutting them down, re-sizing or up sizing it doesn’t matter and watch the 108″ and 130″ Length / girth dim.
I even buy flat sheets or corrugated card board and keep it around to make my own boxes at times. I can do it fairly quickly using the box resizer to score the crease folds. I use a hot glue gun for the edge seam and tape reinforce. Takes me just a few minutes.
Just some information from the past conversations here on SL. And as I always recommend, just do a search on the SL Blog and Forum both with key words and with over 400 hours on dialogue and possibly over 20,000 to 25,000 posts through the years you are bound to find threads on topics of interest. There is a lot of information about shipping in general to be found.
I wonder how many “words” has been written and or spoken within the ScavengerLife environment. I wonder if there are over a million words or even more?? HHhhmmm.
TTFN ..
The team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Susan, Lisa, Christie, Kim and MichaelHey troy: Welcome back. Thought you had been pretty quite. See now it was because of being out with the parents.
Sharyn: Pretty much the way we do it. We have used the term “cocoon” for our whole process for years and we have a ton of feed backs that mention our packing process. We add a layer of stretch wrap and 60# brown craft paper along with the corrugated cardboard and 2 layers of bubble wrap. We use 6 to 7 layers in total.
We also slide thin pieces of blank newsprint in between the handles, negative spaces of complex ceramic configurations.
On plates we use thin bubble and styrofoam picnic plates as spacers between them. Each bundle gets cardboard wrapped and cocooned. These cocoons go into a larger box. The key in placing in a larger box is to have at least an 1inch space all around. If you pack the exterior box slam full out to the bottom, edges and top, then you don’t leave any room for the outer box to “deflect” inward when heavier boxes are placed on top. As the outer box bends inwards from the weight [the deflection] that pressure isn’t absorded by any negative space or loose filling and that pressure gets transferred downward onto the cocoons and the objects inside them “burst” from pressure of the weight of the weight stacked on top.
Since 2002 we have had only 5 or six items broken and those looked like it got stuck in a machine or something ran over them and in those cases no amount of packing would save them.
Just wanted to throw in a few other comments on the subject.
Mike at MDC Galleries and fine Art
Most people do not need QuickBooks for online selling. It is primarily for business that need to do a lot of invoicing to your own customers. Contractors that create estimates for customers, then are hired to do the work, then invoice the customer for their work. It is more for an accrual approach to using a General Ledger and then journals.Best if you have outstanding invoices at the end of the year that are for jobs in progress but are as of the last day of the year unfinished and unbilled.
Quickbooks is better suited if you have buying accounts with vendors where you create Purchase Orders [PO’s], send to your vendor as an order, then track your materials recieved, reconcile to your PO, then close out and pay your invoices from your vendors from within QuickBooks.
Way more and much more costly than what most online sellers need.
For the simple straight forward approach Quicken for Home and Business is better suited and also has a Landlord section included in the business section, which Jay and Ryanne would be a candidate for.
In any case, we used to use QuickBooks when we had a remodeling company and also a spray foam insulation business. After we closed and or sold those businesses, we went with Quicken which stream lines the process and is a simpler form of business accounting.
It does a lot more so I suggest going to their web site for info. on wht all it does. Even call them and ask a rep to explain the difference between QuickBooks and Quicken.
We set up our COA “Chart of Accounts [categories] just like we did in QuickBooks and based on how you log your income and expenses Quicken will keep an accurate profit and loss statment and a company balnce sheet. it will also track your business assets and larger equipment purchases. Also acts as your bank register, connects with all of your credit card companies and bank accounts and pulls all of thos in automatically. We balance our personal and business accounts all within Quicken.
As far as apps for the phone goes their is a version but I prefer to do all the accounting on the office rig.
Hope this sheds some light.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Quicken will be about $99 for the software and QuickBooks closer to $400.
Bonanza just could not stay in synch at all. Ebay sold items would get picked up and relisted. Duplicates created at times. Sales were very slow such as 4,5 or 6 over 2 to 3 years.
JandR closed there Bonanza account several years ago and we followed suit a few months later. If I recal when were all discussing this topic before [you can research the blog and forum with your question], you will see numerous people gave up on it and then also Truegether shortly there after.
We prefer to stick with the platforms with the largest audience / market base.
P.S. There is a whole lot to SixBit. BUT, using Jay’s phrase, it is “MORE ROBUST” and with all those features comes a level of “sophisticated” use that is expected from an advanced user. Yes, SB can be learned, but one needs to be ready to go to school on using it, it’s features and how to trouble shoot on your own.
Then it will do some things only by using custom features to create your own work around. Very nice it allows that, but still the user needs to know what you want to accomplish and create the “work around” process.
Try [ aka T-Satt] on this forum, cross lists on several other platforms in addition to the Ebay and Etsy platforms. He has created a work around by using a custom SKU coding just as we do, and using “Custom fields”.
The nice thing about SixBit is that the “Custom Fields” you create are searchable and can be sorted on. The down side is those customized platforms will not be handled automatically by SB and he has to do it manually within SB. And, I am fairly certain that the finacial reports are skewed because of lacking those other platforms data downloads.
BUt maybe Troy will chime in an comment if he is capturing his Poshmark and Mercari Sales numbers within SixBit or relying on Quicken or Quickbooks for those numbers.
For newbies to online selling, I would not recommend WonderLister or sixbit to them but steer them to EAT [Easy Auction Tracker], which we discussed yesterday for a few posts.Just thought I would throw that in.
mike at MDCGFA
