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Don’t know if this makes you feel better or worse but up and through the 18th of this month we did $568 dollars in Sales on Etsy. That is with 394 listings so far for Dec.. BUT the number of listing a month ago was far less but due to deciding to quit waiting on WL to get it’s act together, we have accllerated the manual cross listing on Etsy in the last 4 weeks.
So when we get over a thousand of our Ebay store cross listed, we are thinking maybe over a thousand to $1,200 per month as of current thinking, but no hard numbers to back that up yet.
Mark, We haven’t made the move into SixBit yet. We are still setting it up. But Troy said SixBit is now including more details in it’s automatic handling of the listing and their is only a couple of lines to have to fill in manually and Boom she is done.
Maybe Troy will chime in and tell us exactly what lines [data fields] Veronica has to fill in manually after SixBit has transferred the Ebay listing over to Sixbit.
mike at MDCGFA
Careful with the PVC. If too wide of a span left-right and there is much weight on that shelf it will deflect downwards. You might try making a test situation. Buy enough PVC to make the frame of one shelf. then set it on two concrete bricks or blocks, then start placing wieght on the rectangular frame and watch to what degree it starts to deflect [bend]. Even steel will deflect. Example, ever seem an empty-unloaded flat bed tractor trailor and it is bowed “upwards” in the center? That is called pre-deflection that the engineers pre-bow the bed so that when the calculated weight is placed on the trailor then it will begin it’s deflection downwards until it is either level, when loaded or downards, when over loaded. Steel will bend and or give way at a certain point.
The same will hold true of any shelf made out of steel, wood or plastic. Steel taking the most weight without deflection, wood being next and plastic bending the most. So all I am saying is build a test shelf to make sure.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Hey Mark: All the data was to say, big bins get heavy [30 to 40 lbs.] and are hard to handle, hard to get off the shelf when high up and dangerous on me.
My solution, I am slowly swapping out to bins that are half the size of my current 66 qt. [using 30 qt. or less] and then putting two of these smaller bins on the shelf in the same spot where I had 1 large heavy bins previously.
And just stating that a large inventory is very heavy on the shelves and can add up to tons of weight, so get heavy duty shelves. Jay had plastic shelves collapse on him a few years back.Now, WL over to Etsy using export to .csv and then importing. We don’t do that. Way too time consuming and will spare you the details as to why. The way we are doing it manually right now is one of our helpers opens our ebay store on one monitor and the Etsy listing form on the other. Then all she does is copy and paste directly from the Ebay live listing from our Ebay store and paste the data into the Etsy listing form and then saves it as an Etsy draft. I then open those up each morning, attach the photos since they are here at my office, add the box size and postal weight then publish.
We have about 400 out of our 1,100 Ebay listing already on Etsy. And are seeing some sales activity on Etsy as a result.
Heck, by the time I get SixBit downloaded, customized and set up on two computers with a shared in office network we my have almost everything in Etsy done manually. Our helper seems to be getting about 2 dozen Etsy listing done in an evening from her home. She says it takes her a couple of hours, so I am guessing about 10 to 12 per hour just copying nad pasting from Ebay live listing into each new Etsy draft.
But once I have made the transition over to SixBit and then cut the cord with WL and from there atleast SixBit will take over and finish up the job for us real quick. Once we have everything we want from Ebay uploaded to Etsy, then SixBit will handle everything going forward automatically. Upload to both platforms if we so choose, then also track all the sales done on each platform and manage the deletion from the platform that it did not sell on. Auto synchrinization which is what WonderLister is hung up on. Also WonderLister did not even get it’s Shopify interface working correctly as of yet, so we just had to give up on thinking WL was going to get anything together fast enough for our plans. We missed this whole fourth quarter because WL did not get anything done on an Etsy interface that we know of and they cut us out of the information loop on where they stand on getting themselves working smoothly.
The export and import process is very clumsy because once you export to an Excel spread sheet then you have to go and format that spread sheet. Time consuming. Then you have to get each data field “mapped” to the correct “Etsy” field. Well, that may require [unsure] knowing which fields would need the spread sheet data, how Etsy has those fields named, and unsure if it could be done without making a mess of the process. Troy, may be able to add to this, but we just figured rather than trying to deal with the export-import into Etsy, just get SixBit set up here at the office as quickly as we can, then let SB handle it for us automatically.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Mark, I guess you are aware that the 18 gal. bins, which translate into 66 Qt. for the Sterilite Company, is a lot of internal space. We have had industrial shelving designed for stacking pallets for decades.
The specs are 6 ft. wide x 7 ft. high with 5 shelves. The top shelf is at the very top so items sit “Up Top” or “UT” in our sku code, and the bottom shelf is 1″ off the ground. They are spaced so our 66 qt. bins with latch handles and lids fit 4 across and just slide into the top and bottom. The middle shelves are spaced so we can get one large tub-bin in a space and 2 smaller shoe box size bins on top. That gives us 32 plastic bins of 2 different sizes per 5 shelf unit.
We have 8 of those units arranged back to back like library shelves for a total of 256 bins.
Now for the members newer to all of this, there is a cost to all of this and a consideration to packing a whole lot into a small space.
First for you Mark, watch the size of those big bins. We took our large shipping scale out a couple of summers ago just for fun and giggles. we took use a strudy 3 step folding ladder, one with a thigh high rail at the top to lean against. Here’s the warning. Some of our bins are close to 45 to 50 lbs due to the fact we sell mostly hard goods. Sets of dishes, cast iron skillets, book ends wieigh a bunch. My wife can’t get bins down. Up on a 3 foot ladder pulling a 50 lb. box off a shelf, securely grabbing both the front and back handles, then backing down the 3 steps is precarious to say the least. So we are now downsizing to bins half that size and we will just have 2 bins in the space we currently have one large one.
Secondly, watch the total weigh at an average [just ball parking here], of 30 to 35 lbs per bin x 32 bins per unit is a lot of lbs. per unit and times 8 units equals “tons” of inventory. If you do this inside of a house, in a room on top of 2″ x 10″ floor joist spread the weight out or your floor will start to bow downwards. Garages are perfect because they are mostly 4″ slab, reinforced concrete.
For the newer guys thinking of this.. Our larger pallet shelves which we got 30 or more years ago were over $150 per unit, today, they are even more because of their size. But let’s use your $130 per unit x 8 units for us is $1,040 in shelving. Now to the cost of 256 bins. We got ours at a damaged goods outlet, so some are missing a handle or have a broken corner of the bin or lid but we paid $3 aeach for these distressed ones or $768 total over the years. So that plus the shelves is approx. $1,808. Now also consider that at a local Walmart and even on Sale, 66 qt. and larger bins are way more than $3 ea, try maybe double that. So think about a budget of $2,000 to $2,500 to fill a 20′ x 20′ garage or storage shed with large, heavy duty shelving and all spaces filled with bins.
Item capacity of 256 bins for us, using a softball size average [so larger, some smaller], we figure we can do 2,500 to 3,000 items if we lean toward the smaller baseball [ashtray] sized item, give or take of course.
We are going to the half size bins just for the fact I am tired of carefully sliding aheavy bin off a shelf whereby I am reaching up for it or having to use a 6′ taller ladder. I would rather pull off the front “A” box and set it down to reach the 2nd “B” box just to be more careful. I hit my 70th birthday Monday and FYI, I don’t bounce anymore like when I was 20, I now break. So I don’t need a busted hip, knee, angle, arm or leg. 🙂
Just some thoughts to ponder on building / setting up large storage area.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Ryanne, do you still review drafts the helpers create? We do, and I find a lot that I have to edit. Also we know certain keywords that are pertinent to certain things that the helpers jsut don’t know.
And pricing. I usually do that. So, helpers take our “quick entry drafts” from the “Warehouse Folder” and finish out the listing, Item Specifics, description area, weight, box size, and attach the photos from our external drive and then save in their personal WonderLister folder I created for each of them. From There I review edit and revise as needed then publish.
Much faster for sure, but they miss some things that are what I feel are great keywords. Certain material terms, mold made glass as opposed to pipe-mouth blown, thus us artisan handmade key word, or has a pontil mark on the bottom, use of moriage, leaded stained glass with beveled edge, things that collectors do search for.
I have noticed over the last few years you and Jay’s gravitation away from a SL mantra from years back, and that was “Photograph like there is no description and Describe like you don’t have any photographs”. That mantra was to keep the INADs at bay and help boost sales for those who only look at photos and buy or those who read descriptions and dont see where to go to item specifics, or use Item specifics and dont look at the description area a lot of cell phone users].
But now, I see only a couple of words in your descriptions, something, “A heavy coat” and that’s it. or “Women’s High Heel Shoes” and a size, which is OK but the title covers most of the basics, the condition area handles the flaws that are noted and the Item specifics covers most else including the size.
So now that I look through a lot of your listings, is there any real reason to put anything thing in the description area and just a few basics in the IS area and let it post.
I guess I could get a whole lot more listed with that approach. Just rely on the title, price and photos to do the majority of the selling and just deal with what returns and feedback is generated as or if you come to that bridge. In one listing, you only have your short sku number and that’s it and 3 item specifics that is comprised of 5 words total and only 5 photos, and the title.
If that is now the way to go and possibily the new SL mantra, I think we could double or more our daily listings.
Is it now the sheare volume of listings, the title and photos that will produce larger amounts of sales vs. always using all 12 photos [when feasible], describing verbally the types of flaws, phrases in the description that contain multiple key words, and measurements in the IS areas that cover a multitude of measurements, colors, materials.
Just wondering what you guys and everyone else thinks about a full, rounded out IS, Condition, Description area vs. just 6 or 8 words a title and a few photos and letting the chips fall where they may?
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Christine: I agree, really do we get any response after taking the time to answer questions. So as I have mentioned before, we use a series of SOP [standard operating procedures] and some of those include auto responses to questions we know are already answered.
This one pasted below covers a lot of questions about sizes, materials, colors, etc. especially since we take the time to fill in all the item specific fields as Ebay allows. 25 field usually. Those are Google searchable also.
One thing to remember answering all email messages that are inquires are a trackable action and from what I remember as TRS Plus maintaing that status is required to answer most inquires and that process gets tracked by Ebay. But Ebay doesn’t dictate what you have to say in a reply. So for that reason alone we have the following on out desktop and for almost all question we just cut and paste the following:
“Thank you for your inquiry.
For informational purposes, for several years, Ebay has required sellers to list a wide assortment of product details, in the “Item Specifics” area but doesn’t make that area obvious to cell phone users.
On desktop computers just scroll down below the “Condition Area” and on cell phones swipe or click the “blue arrows” or click “blue see more info.” [Blue is usually a link to another area of data] to see or navigate to that Ebay area.
We invite you to visit the “Item Specifics” and “Condition” areas where you will most likely find the answers to your question(s) along with other details and information which may help in making your buying decision.
Once an item is listed, it is placed in our inventory storage area and we do not have immediate access to the object. If you cannot find the answers to your question(s) or have other questions not covered, please let us know and we will retrieve the item and try to provide an answer.
We look forward to hopefully seeing an order forth coming. It is a very nice item.
Thank you for Supporting American Small Business”
Kindest Regards,
the management team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine ArtNow by doing this, we fulfill Ebays requirement [if it still is one] to answer all inquires, two, it forces the customer to help them selves, keeps us from having to go get the object and waste our time, keeps us from setting a tone that we are willing to engage.
We also try to talk in third person,and use our official corporate identity. If a potential customer gets the impression you are a small time, sell out of the closet, none corporate entity, then they will engage you on a personal level and that opens up a can of worms.As you can see we are a mangement team, this portrays we have employees and at times I will do a side step if a nasty email comes through and reply simply, I will run your inquiry past our owner or our legal dept.
In most cases, this is the end of it. Either do what we say and learn how to use your phone, learn how to navigate Ebat, help yourself-we have already invested the time to provide the information, we are professional sellers not enablers, so just go do it. Then all I am interested in is quoting Tom Cruise “Show me the money”. Simple.
If we get a second follow up with a serious question that is not covered in the listing, then of course we will pull the item, and reply accordingly with an answer. And yes at times, we too will use the make an offer box on a reply, but not often. It is what it is.
Using this method also eliminates the lonely hearts club of buyer types who just want to talk, chat, have an on going dialogue and tell you their life story, how this is for their grand ma, sons birthday, or go down the rabbit hole of telling you how much they know about a category, topic or type of item
Our reply says, it’s already there, go find it yourself and if you do place an order and if not, then don’t and if truely interested and what to know something not listed, then we are here for you.
Short, sweet, simple, SOP.
Ahh, good to get a daily blurb-rant, if you can call it that, out for today! 🙂
SOP furnished by the management team of MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment Parts divs.Yep.. A drowning man will grab onto a floating pine cone! So grab any help you can in order to build your store up to a level of good steady income. Then you can do what every company in America does, lay off the help and run on maximum – Kaizen and LEAN principles and do more with less because you have built up, streamlined, LEANed down, go to coast-maintain level, sell – buy – replace – rinse – repeat and then smile all the way to the bank! 🙂
Mike at MDCGFA
Well that is like me using TeamViewer. Whenever Susan and I used to go to Florida to visit our daughter, I would turn on TeamViwer and leave it running. Then I would take the laptop with me and log in to TeamViewer and remotely navigate WonderLister. Guess you are doing the same only having then tie into your laptop from thier own rig, then the office laptop is tied into your local area wireless network which accesses SB.
Guess I could just do the same with our two helpers, only I like for them to have the object in hand to look at the object as a second set of eyes, look for crazing and flaws we may have missed. But guess I could just be more deligent on the front in and not be such a quick entry and then they could do the research and such. But still nothing like having the object in your hand. And it would be harder work to transport plastic bins of heavy 3-d objects around. Some of our bins can hit 30 lbs. ++.
Hey caught your last sentence. SixBit is still an SQL database and will reside on your main home office computer. Our assistant does connect to our WL SQL but that is because they are with a 30 foot range of the in office wireless network we set-up. SixBit works the same way, so how can an assistant tap into the SixBit SQL Dbase remotely from that far away. It would have to be “Cloud Based” and WL and SB are not UNLESS YOU CAN GIVE ME SOME WONDERFUL NEWS!!!
Please tell me that SB does have that capability now and at no extra cost. Please, please !! LOL 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries
Here is a simplified way to look at cash flow, the life blood of any business, unless you are an OPM [other peoples money] person whereby you borrow other peoles money to invest into your business based on the premise you can make enough to pay that loan back, with interest, and still have profit of any kind left over.
I will use a simple lemonade stand.
You want to set up and sell lemonade on the corner. You have your parents buy everything you need to build a stand, buy materials to make lemonade, serve it and put it on their credit card [i.e. a business loan=OPM] and very quickly you are in business.
Now comes the basic 3 steps to cash flow:
#1 – Every cup you sell you put the money in your left pocket and you do this for 30 days.
#2 – on day 29 you pay your expenses
* Pay your parents back: = You now owe them for lumber for the stand, nails to put it together, paint or magic marker for your sign, a vendors license to peddle on the corner, interest to your parents, repay for the lemons, sugar, cups, advertising fees [Ebay reference], Paypal, a glass pitcher to hold the lemondae, auto expenses for your parents to go to and from the grocery store, state sales tax [unless tax exempt on the state level], pay your parents for their time [sub-contractor costs] unless they volunteer for free [but a phptographer, helper lister [will not work for free],
* Report what was in your left pocket to IRS on one line of your return, [then subtract everything that was in #2, including things I just didn’t think of] and arrive at your taxable income, then pay the government their share.
#3 put what money you have left into your right pocket.
* Next look at your right pocket total and then split that in half because your “Company” your “Business” is a living, breathing entity that you have to feed for it to live and grow, so this is the “Plow Back” that is a requirement of every new start-up. This first half goes to your business first before you.
* Now after that final 50/50 split look at what is left in your right pocket, pull it out, that is now yours, take it home and see if you can pay all of your monthly living expenses, if not you will have to live off of another income stream.Don’t quit your full time day job until you can live off of half of your right pocket.
Simple Simon says, starting abusiness is easy and can be done in 30 minutes on line. Building a business that can sustain you is another story and you as the owner, are standing at the back of the line.
LOL, 🙂 🙂
I know, completely understated and over simplified, but in simplicity true.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
BINGO! That is why we have made “Zero” for the last few years. All plowed back into the business.
For those who want to quit their regular day job, start the Ebay business on the side, create a Savings account at your bank, and yes you should have a business account. It is not good to “co-mingle” your business ins and outs with your personal money. Then at the end of each month, move any money left over into that savings account and almost zero out the business account, or do the same with your PayPal account. Leave just enough to run the business only. Then if after a few months, do some quick math, look at how much is in the savings account, subtract the month’s beginning balance and look hard at the amount [difference]. That amount MAY be able to be your monthly pay. If you have $300 left and you worked 27 hours per week x 4 weeks = 108 hours then divide 108 hours into the $300 then you are making $2.77 per hour. We have made as little as $.10 per hour in our early years.
You will be surprised at how long it is going to really take to have enough in the real Net column that will be left for you to live on, even if you live extremely cheaply. Just another way to look at the “Cash Flow” concept T-Satt speaks about.
mike at MDC Galleries
AND a decision to accelerate the growth of the company inventory. Either buying more in a newer year either quanitity our increased unit costs.
Until one is at a level that is as large as you ever want to get, item wise, the reinvestment back into the business, called plow back, continues.
I cringe when people use some of the SL weekly numbers to calculate that they will make “X” number of dollars and then plan to quick their full time job. That thinking some times seems to be based on the logic that they have a full storage area already packed with a complete inventory.
We operated in the red, meaning no money for us, for years while we kept plowing back money we made from sales, into more inventory. $.10 an hour is not uncommon for someone in growth mode, for several years. The SCORE network says that 5 years is about average before a business owner can make any money.
I have posted several times before, if you don’t have $10,000 cash righ now to invest in your inventory, then you will have to “earn”- make $10,000 to have that amount invested in your “stash” of sellable items. Now take all the expenses that have been mentioned and subtract those from your GROSS SALES, and forget paying yourself, how long will it take a new seller to build up an inventory asset of $10,000.
We have about 1,200 items in our inventory. We buy higher cost items along with box lots of cheaper item. Our Profit & Loss statement shows we have approx. $8,000 tied up in inventory. or about $6,66 per item. It took us years to grow that inventory.
Jay and Ryanne have approx. 8,000 items in their inventory, that represents a large amount of cash tied up, just sitting in their storage area. Multiply that 8,000 items by whatever dollar value you want to use as a COG and you get $16k, $24k, $32k dollars they have sitting in that storage unit. All of that had to come out of their NET SALES. They sold a certain dollar amount, they paid all their fees, then they lived off a portion [and lived very close to the vest as they always remind us] and then and only THEN did they have cash [NET CASH] left over to put into their OCRA account and used that to plow back into their business to grow.
BUT NOW they have leveled off. I see it in their weekly numbers. I remember when they had 2,000 items, then 3,000 then 4,000. That represented GROWTH and came only out of bottom line NET profits yet they still were living, frugualy be it, but living. Old car-truck, used clothes, selling honey, scavengeing everything that was not nailed down, burning wood, etc., etc.
BUT GUES WHAT, they have leveled off now. Go back and see how long they have hung around the 8,000 item mark? Came close to 9,00 for a short while, but dropped back down. So where is there 9,000 items, 10,000, 11k, 13k inventory? You won’t see that for a while if ever. Now that they know their cash flow, what the 8,000 item $25,000 investment is returning to them, now instead of growing, they just replace what they sell and float at the 8,000 ++ range. BUT that is not the whole picture. They now “PULL” that net profit, OWNER’S DRAW, and re-direct that bottom line net cash, into a diversification plan. That is real estate investment. Viola’.
They still have Ebay store expenses, fees, a living salary and then use that operating capital reserve account amount of money to continue to build their business, but it’s not Ebay hard goods inventory that is the sole focus any longer, but real estate “inventory”
I can see Jay’s long range plans, next will come a coucncil member, then Mayor of Lauray, the Virginia Governer, then on to Washington. LOL :-), The man who built an empire by selling old, used, shoes, yeah right. Smart like a Fox. LOL, LOL, 🙂 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Spot on about everything you have posted. BUT Don’t forget, understanding all of these principles before going full time helps one to build a proper COA and that in turn is where a business owner drives his ship! A full, complete COA is where all expenses of any type is properly classified and expensed against the proper journals and General Ledger.
Left over money for the business is called OCRA [Operating Capital Reserve Account]. After gross profit is determined from those hard costs associated with the GP number, then comes, Owners Draw [owner salary], executive salaries, bonuses, taxes to Uncle same, etc., etc. You will be lucky if you have 5%-7% left over for your OCRA account.
We are a Sub-S corporation, so any company profit is passed through to us as the principle owners, taken and shown as owners draws on the books. Once passed through, then for tax purposes we would pay taxes on that amount at our own, personal tax rate instead of at the “C” Corp rate. Which many people don’t realize that corporate profits tax can be as high as 50% of what’s left. That is why large corp. make huge donations at the end of the year, contribuit to symphonies, art museums, etc. That is how Mobile Oil and Exxon got away with paying zero tax on millions and millions of profit, put into their OCRA account, bonus all the execs, then DONATE Huge amounts to non-profit entities.
I know you and I run our businesses on a tight line and reflects a bottom line that shows our mehtodologies.
Put another way, as something to think about, a business can make a lot of money, have a nice gross profit, pay a good salary to all employees, give bonuses, pay high executive salaries and then end up running in the red and paying no taxes.
Borrowing an Arsenio Hall Phrase .. “Hhmmmm”
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Troy: Sorry I missed this post, been busy with the details of the 4 start up homes were are building. So glad to hear everything went well for Veronica. Hope the healing process goes well and quickly. Tell her Susan is thinking of her also. Keep us updated.
Your brother from another mother,
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
