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01/24/2019 at 9:09 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 395: What Lifestyle Is eBay Supporting For You? #55741
Absolutely Mark:
These factors can throw a kink into any system. Any pulled item for any reason, if not shipped, needs to be replaced as soon as possible back to it’s original storage space.At times when we accept an offer we pull that item and begin the packing process in anticipation that payment will come through shortly. But in the case on unpaid items or cancellations the item does not get shipped and it may end up sitting for a while before we replace it into the system.
So now if we pull an item prior to payment when we pull the original inventory tag off the item and pre-pack, we then tape the inventory tag back onto the box, where the label will go and wait for payment. Also by using WonderLister, the item is still in the database as sold, but not paid. When we replace we just adjust the database.
If payment goes unpaid, we just place the box back into it’s original space. Yes, it is usually a larger item being in a box with packing inside, but we usually make room for it.
But little things like this, especially pulling the item out of it’s space for any reason can lead to errors in placement and finding in the future.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
01/21/2019 at 4:46 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 395: What Lifestyle Is eBay Supporting For You? #55537Yep IM239… This is our exact same procedure. Use the Parcel as the first choice and then always ship Priority. With our TRS+ discount it always comes out less costly for us to upgrade.
A tip on getting yourself an extra day and something we dislike about Ebay’s handling this.
We do not accept any offers after after a certain time that would not allow us to pull, pack and get the USPS.
We have Same Day / Next Day selected as ship time. Well when you accept an offer early usually Ebay will say ship today, but here is the BIG BUT, if you accept an offer any time after the post office closes for the day and EVEN UP UNTIL 11:59 PM at night, Ebay still sees that as the Same Day so we have to ship the next morning.
But when offers come in after say 3 pm in the afternoon, we don’t accept until the next morning when we open. That then gives us all day [that day] and the next day also.
We do have our store hours set in our Preferences, but Ebay still ignores those. So if we accept an offer at 10 o’clock at night, Ebay thinks that the remaining 2 hours is the first day and you now only have the next day to ship. But if you wait on that 9 PM offer and accept it only after mid-night, then you have the whole day when you get up and also the day after that for same day-next day.
So in order not to have to respond late at night, we just do the accepting or counter offering, etc. when we open each morning around 7:30 am to 8:00 am.
Makes me wonder about those that have Same Day handling and you accept an offer at 9 PM, does Ebay acctually think you are going to ship in the next 3 hours at night?
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
01/21/2019 at 11:31 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 395: What Lifestyle Is eBay Supporting For You? #55493Off topic here but just had to share an experience we had at Goodwill yesterday.
We only visit Goodwill stores about once a year. Not a real source for our type of inventory. But over a years time we do accumulate bins of items that we decide not to list for various reasons. After reading the more recent posts on places to donate, we should have listened to the adivce of the SL Members and gone to a place to donate our bounced inventory where it would have done some good.
Here is a short note I replied to Goodwill online when they asked for my comments. Reading my reply tells the whole story. And what a heart dropping moment when we heard that sound and could see the collector “Clifton” do what he did.
Dear Goodwill Upper Management team:
We are an online seller and donated about a hundred items we did not wish to list. Approx. 50 items were misc. clothing, many new with tags and approx. 50 items of glass, ceramic or pottery.All were very good items that were suitable to be placed on your shelves for sale. In fact some of these were items we originally bought at Goodwill.
We brought all of these in using our plastic tote bins which we asked to be returned. Well due to what we think was the need for speed, all of the items were quickly dumped into a larger rolling bin and we could hear that probably almost every item was destroyed and we could hear all the hard good items breaking in a loud crashing sound.
Guys, there was Stueben pieces, Waterford, Tiffany glass, Staffordshire, Royal Doulton, Andrea by Sadek, Murano, misc. jewelry, good water glasses, and crystal of all sorts in there.
We calculate well over a thousand dollars worth of items at your resale margins in there you could have resold if your collector would have taken them out by hand and placed on a cart.
They only had minor issues with them that made them undesirable for us to re-sell in our Ebay and Etsy stores.
Instead, it sounded like everything was broken as it was dumped in from that height into a rolling dump bin and hit the bottom with a loud and sustained crash as the collector continued to tip and empty our full plastic totes into that large collection bin.
We will never donate to you guys again. Everything in the future will go to a local church which holds periodic sales to raise money for the poor.
the management team at
MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine ArtThis experience just sucked rocks for me. Susan and I both discussed that we are going to seek out a local church charity that holds annual or semi-annual rummage sales and make sure our off casts are used to generate income for a charity that will put the money to good use.
What was a final joke, was when I filled out the online receipt, listed what items we donated, I got a small screen that informed us that the value of our donations would provide 13.2 hours of traning for some person in need of a job. What a joke. All of the hard goods were destroyed. They have nothing to resell and is going to provide squat for anyone.
BTW this Goodwill has posted new prices for the clothing racks at $6.99 to $9.99 per item. And as we left I checked out the men’s shoe rack and it was mostly single super large size shoes left. Very few pairs. I picked up one “left” shoe, a Johnson and Murphy all leather upper and half leather sole with some heel wear, made in Italy and that one, single shoe, size 9-B [not even a super large shoe] was priced at $24.95!!!! At our margins we would be listing that at $250 for the single shoe.
Goodwill’s have become a complete joke for us. No wonder we don’t go there any more.
Mike, Susan, Lisa, Christie the management team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Equipment Parts divs.That’s cool Christine. We have suggested others check with the high end auction houses in the past but never heard any replies or if the SL poster did inquire. That is cool news. And the valuation comes from a respectable source.
A little more homework. see if the artist was ever represented by a gallery somewhere and see if they may have an interest in it. Or another path would be any relatives that may have an interest, then latly maybe a library or small museum in the artist home town. Just other channels on a possible sale that may lead to more money than placing on Ebay or Etsy and without the fees.
Good luck and do keep us posted.. 🙂
mike at MDC Galleries
Sonia we do very much the same thing when we can but as TRS+ we do offer 30 day free returns.
But so tired of self centered buyers who like in other areas of life are just so focused on themselves and what they think they deserve and are entitled to in this world. But let’s not get into that can of worms.
But just think about a normal return for any reason, if you were making a return at any box store USA…
* You go shopping one day, buy a shirt for either yourself or as a gift for $10.
* It is 10 miles to the mall or store
* You get the item home and it either doesn’t fit, or color is wrong or even if you discover it is ripped in the middle and you decide to return it
* You drive 10 miles back to the store the next day with the shirt and your receipt
* You go to customer service and say, “I wish to return this shirt”
* They say ok, take the shirt and ask for your reciept and tell you they will credit your purchase of $10 back to you
* BUT NOW you say, “oh no, that won’t do. I want $15 back
* The clerk asks, “Why” and you answer, “Because I drive 10 miles here to shop last week, discovered a rip in the shirt and because of that I had to drive 5 miles back doen here, and 5 miles back home [a round trip], that was caused by your oversight of not seeing the internal rip
* So, you would like the big box store to REIMBURSE you for the wear and tear on your car at $.50 per mile.GUESS WHAT THE ANSWER IS GOING TO BE…. Sorry we can only refund the amount of the exact purchase, the rest is on you. And don’t talk to us about the cost of your time either, because that also won’t fly.
The trip to and from both to shop and for the return is the cost a buyer has to bear in order to get goods and services that otherwise they can’t get for their selves. That’s your “Buyer Sweat Equity” into your receipt of goods and services. And a chance you are willing to take based on research and reviews that the seller you are buying from can and will deliver quality goods and great service most of the time. You knowing full well that at times, the services or product may come up defective.
So, then why do online buyers expect us as sellers to re-emburse them for absolutely everything, lot, stock and barrel for everything.
We recently got a heavy arctic coat returned. The reason was “the arms are too long”. The return was accepted of course due to 30 day auto returns but that did not stop me from sending him a quick reply.
I said, the description and item specific areas state the sleeve length of 22″ from arm pit to end of cuff. Did you pre-measure your arms? We are of the opinion that your arms are just too short”. Everybody here at the office had a good laugh on that. But I digress.
Have a great weekend..
Mike at MDCGFA in ATL
Which is what we did years ago. Then in order to not clutter up our hard drive and also run the risk of ever again not having access, we back everything up to Ccarbonite [a paid back-up] and our Google Drive, our MS One drive AND also a 4 Tierra Byte external hard drive connected to our desk top. So we have everydocument, file, financial dta, business files, and photos for our online businesses all backed up in 5 places. Never trust just your hard drive, never trust just your lap top, or just an external or one cloud source.
We learned our lesson long ago about, lightining hits, hard drive faliures, operating system blue screens of death, Dos, to Vista, to Millinum [uggh], MS 7, 8, 9 and 10, failed renewal online payments, missed payments, etc., etc.
Back everything up numerous times. It is called dedundancy of safety. And yes WonderLister and Sixbit can save all your photos on your hard drive but then it’s up to you to make sure you have folders [we use monthly folders] for our photos, and those folders get auto backed up weekly.
On many platforms when you upload photos they place them on their own servers and they also then change to names of the photos to their own naming system. If your account goes down by cancellation, failed or late payment or whatever so goes your photos.
By the way, by copyright law your photos are yours and you maintain the copyright and use of your photos, art work, live performances, records, etc., etc., but isn’t it interesting that they change the titles of your photos, then harvest them to their servers, then place them into product catalogs without your permission or paying you. Then they in turn get Google, Bing, to crawl them and then they show up on Pinterest, Google image search, Facebook places and all over and we never get a check for the use of any of our photos. HHhhmmm.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Same with us RTWV: Wake up to several offers and just one sale today.
It is what it is!
mc at MDCGFA
01/14/2019 at 5:31 pm in reply to: Art experts, MDC Galleries or others, please advise me on Wyeth print #55134I certainly would but have had a time crunch all afternoon with subs on our house projects.
I have marked your post and will see what tomorrow afternoon brings. Have to meet the graders up at the lots at 7:30 am and unsure when I will get back. But I would like to post a few observations.
Those dot like marks are not repro halftone dots. That is the medium being deposited on the high surface of the canvas knuckles. The over under weave [weft and waf] of the fabric. Those may be deposited by use of a dry brush technique or a hard marking surface material such as charcoal or conte’ crayon [which is more likely on canvass] or it is the dry brush being pulled over the knuckles.
I will address the back and more tomorrow or the next day.
Too bad Jay, you are not close by, I have 7 or 8 large hard wood trees that were in the house box that had to come out. Good firewood. Maybe I can give it away on Craigslist or something.
mc at mdcgfa
DT Good to know. I use the Boery for our 50# brown kraft rolls which i wrap some items with or use for stiff dunnage-filler. I also buy our cut lighter weight newsprint from them. Yes the have very good prices but oddly enough I have not priced their boxes. I just did my first quarter shipping supply inventory. Before I do a fill in order from Staples, I will cross reference them.
Who knows, may some day we could start a thread on the Forum where we all just post sources and prices for items we all use. I know Ryann has a “resources” section here but maybe just a long list of sources and when ever we find a source that is ceaper than the one posted, the more expensive source gets replaced. Items on Sale would not count. Just long term, hard core, low ball prices from sources for everything, newsprint, bubble wrap, peanuts, reinforced tape, etc., etc.
But now that I think about it many sellers, as do I, like to single source for as much as I can so I don’t have to place a bunch of separate orders. Oh, well an idea.
But the Boxery is a very good source. And yes we too have a Costco Business Membership which has a section of supplies for business owners on their online website.
mike at MDCGFA
Good idea Inglewood. Being in the larger format printing business for years we bought a lot of boxes from a local converter, but they had some minimums and forget exactly what they were, but I will check around the area and see if their are any converters close by.
I also like to use nice, new, plain, generic boxes. Many found boxes in dumpster have been shipped in already and are scuffed up and in many cases the wall integrity has been compromised due to weight ebing stacked on top of them and mositure absorbtion. You being in the industry, know what I mean. The crush strength of a box is lessened when several heavier boxes have been riding across country in a truck. And the boxes from China, which dumpsters behind dept. stores are full of really suck and most have come over in cargo containers.
I also am not a big fan of the Ebay tape. I still say it makes boxes look like a “jack in the box” or circus box. Not very professional looking and is avery thin mil-gauge tape as compared to the Heavy Duty clear tape we box with. But free is free. But I only use the clear tape for our Etsy Sales.
mike at MDCGFA
I used to buy from Uline but then they started charging a min. of $30 for shipping or if you came down to pick them up. They are 6 miles up the road from us. The reason they said is they wanted to cut down on the local pick-up traffic coming into the truck loading area because it was a traffic congestion-safety hazard. Baloney.
But now I ask you, compare the Uline prices, even if you pick them up with Staples and see if you see what I saw or see. Think you may be surprised. Maybe not.
Worth a comparative look.
Mike at MDCGFA
Jay beat me too my reply. As long as the keywords are relevant and related to the object. On Etsy and Shopify there is a special section for “Tags” which are nothing more than keywords. In fact Etsy wants to to use at least 13 of them, and they can be more than one word. So 20 to 30 Tags – keywords are encouraged. At times we gat a message saying you should try using more tags – key words.
The frowned upon “black hat” tactics are stuffing with unrelated key words to trick someone looking for an item totally unrelated into landing on your site, typing those unrelated key words into a white font color so they can’t be seen or a very small 3 or 4 point size in light grey and tactics like that.
mc at mdcgfa in atl
Boy that’s a thought. My car has been in the shop since before Thanksgiving. Supposedly I will get it back today ?? Maybe and it will be about $1,000. It was super hard to find the cause of why the whole security system kept failing and then the cut off switch kicked in and shut the whole car off dead stride while driving. Then it locked the car up and it would not crank at all.
Makes one think, an electric car that also drives itself. Just Google your estate sales for the day, plug in the routes and off you go, silently cruising for inventory, letting the car drive itself, while doing research on your phone.
Hhhmmm.. mc
Geoff… One place to check out for boxes that you need to buy. Given that Ebay is down to only a couple of sizes and we use boxes that are not the same size as what Ebay offers and inbetween sizes the USPS offers, check out Staples.com
I know you would think an office supply store would not be an inexpensive place to buy, but when we compared the cost to the sizes that Ebay has dropped out of offering, we found Staples to be 50% or even less than what we got from the Ebay store, way less than Uline and the Lb. Test Burst Stregth is about the same. Large rolls of brown kraft paper is less also.
Check them out and compare. And they usually ship next day and if over a small dollar amount they ship free.
Mike at MDCGFA
Hey TTT: I hear you on doubling the store but I will saw a discussion Jay and I had some time back, maybe years ago, but worth mentioning again. You may already know this also..
That is, by doubling the quantity of items in a store does not necessarily equate to double the income. Back then Jay dicussed the many variables, like increased sold price per item, promoting, having sales, cleaning out old cheap stuff, etc., etc. But one thing most involved in the discussion did seem to agree on was that as a seller increased the quantity of items [inventory increase], that the amount of sales and dollar amount sold seemed to increase more on an alogrythmic curve rather than a linear curve. this discussion also led to Jay & Ryanne and a few others even going so far to open a second store to see if the velocity was quicker and steeper in the early stages of growth.
I had tyracked a years worth of each weeks posting by all the mebers of SL that posted weekly back in 2015 [I think] and the spread sheet I created seemed to support that as stores grew to a certain point the alogrythmic curve almost seemed to flatten out. The steepest accelration in Sales and thus dollars seemed to support Jay’s all time statement of seeing some consistency in [that is a key word there-consistency] at around 500 items. But a “steady stream” of sales started and continued into the 750 ++ mark, which 3 or 4 years later, adjusted for market conditions seems to be more like 1,000 to 1,250 items.
Back then we thought 1,250 would be a good number to see $500 a week “consistently”. After seeing competition kick in, higher fees, lowered discounts, Amazon and it’s impact and just everything that goes along with this online selling world, we have adjusted our target to 2,500 now. So, we would like to go from 1,116 items to as many items over 2,000 as we can get by June of this year. There we think we can see an overall average of $2,000 plus monthly income.
Now Troy has his spread sheet which actually can [somewhat predict] the future needs to equate to future income, but you have to get your numbers in order to input them to use his SS as a guide.
There is one very interesting observation I have seen on the few stores of SL members I track is that I keep seeing about a $1-$1.50 per month income for each item the posters here on SL make in there stores. Now no scientific proof of that by any means but on a monthly bases 1,000 item stores seem to post approx. +/- a thousand it gross monthly sales, 2,500 item stores seems to post about $2,500 per month, J and R store at about 8,500 posts about the same.. that $1.00 to $1.50 per item listed equating to about $8,500 to $12,750 dollars gross per month and as the stores get larger they seem to hover more closely to about the $1.00 per item range.
We thought it was just so strange that each time we did any type of projection on some SL members numbers we kept seeing this correlation to the number of items in their stores. Funny and puzzling. But again just a ton of variables to put a monkey wrench into that observation and nothing more than a statement to ponder. No supporting data to form any kind of an hypothesis on at all.
All and all we are going to put a good hard push on getting 2500 listings in, and these newer items being higher dollar items [we like the $50 mark] and see what happens next year.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
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