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And as much as it hurts me to say this, Scavenger Life also takes time. Reading the Daily firehose or going to specific topics. Clicking on links to go to members Imgur photos to try to help them identify items, replying to a lot of SL posts or as in my case posting a longer detailed reply hoping to fully explain a topic or question for future reference [as Jay says wall of text] or for those who post numbers weekly and compiling those, and if “watching” the Wed. what sold videos that is time consuming.
Sorry Jay and Ryanne. :-(.
Makes me wonder why many members who used to post very regularly never post any more? I had a list I compiled a few years back of the weekly numbers and looking back over that list which had hundreds of posts, almost all of those posters have dropped off and no longer post. Was it a time factor and took too much time or did they just loose interest. We will probably never know, but if you are a frequent reader, [listening while working doesn’t count], poster, advice seeker, how long does that participation on ScavengerLife really take up? Hours, days perhaps???? Just a curiosity thing since we are talking about anything that takes up time during the week.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Amatino: Same one[s] we have. We have two. One is over between the photography station and where I load up my storage bins for transport to the storage area. The other one is of course in the packing-shipping area. I modified the packing area one. I alread had metal, single dispenser for a single 2″ roll. So I just duck taped the single one onto the right hand side of the one you have. By doing this I have two rolls of 2″ packing tape. One is colored-opaque and the second roll is 2″ wide clear to go over labels. The 1/2″ scotch tape roll is in the middle bewteen the two. Of course a marker, matt knife and scissors in the caddy.
The nice thing about having the second single dispenser strapped on the side is the added weight. It is so heavy with both togther I can use just one hand to pull off a long piece of opque or clear tape using one hand and the whole thing doesn’t move and slide around like it did before I added the weight of the second one.
mike at mdc galleries and fine art
Hey Libby:
Was just reading your post and this sentence caught my eye. ” I am working toward liquidating some of our lower priced inventory, and increasing the average price of item sold.”
Just curious, what is your preferred method, process and or most effective way of “liquidating some of our lower priced Inventory ..”?
mike at MDCGFA in Atl.
Jay and Ryanne:
Here is what I think is one of the greatest free site and organization for the small business start up. I used them decades ago and their site has a ton of free information. Also if you put in your zip code you may even find that one of their 500+ locations is close enough to you so you can visit them. They have tons of seminars, all free [in most cases] on start-up financing, writing business planes, free guidance and advice on how to do almost anything you want in a business. It is staffed by over 10,000 retired exceutives and cover all aspects and fields of how to start a business. Lawyers, accountants, operations, administrative, wholesaling, retailing, storage, you name it they cover it in some form or another.Hope this link is of some help to you.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Just for fun:
These are not based on “solds”, but are the ranges in the store currently. Out of 1,117 we have:
< $24.99 = 356 – approx. 32% of our items
$25 – $49.99 = 438 – approx. 39% or our items Cumulative = 71% +/- are under $49.99
$50 – $99.99 = 241 – approx. 22% … cum. = 93% of inventory’s selling price is under $99.99
$100 ++ = 51 items = approx. 4.5% +/-If everything sold tomorrow, all at the same time, for the current listing price [no sale or offers], the sale would be approx. $61,000. Boy don’t I wish.
Getting ready to start the houses on the lots we purchased a few weeks back. Been waiting on all the financials to square up. The decision now is to do one at a time or stretch it and try to do 2 or all 4 at the same time. I will report in the Topic area Jay created for this after a few more decisions are made and I actually pull the permit[s depending]
TTFN..
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine ArtBrian B. May I suggest a better way to contact the buyer and safe guards you.
On your seller dashboard click on items sold. You will see the item that was bought but unpaid for. There is a small box at the beginning of the listings. Hclick it and select edit. One of the choices on the drop down box is “Contact the Buyer”. Click on that and Ebay will open up a message box for you to type in your message. Has a 2,000 character limit. but this is the Ebay communication center and by doing it this way, there is a record of the conversation. If you use your personal email to contact a buyer directly to his email address there will not be a documented record of the dialogue.If you have a long reply [more than 2,000 characters], I have even sent multiple messages. I state 1 or 2 or 1 of 3 and then even name the 2nd and 3rd page until I get to 3 of 3. I have had to use as many as 6,000 characters before. [JAY.. Bet you are not surprised at that, coming from me LOL :-)].
But in any case there are several places to use the contact the buyer. Then just in case they may not see it like Ryanne says, I will use direct email, but all that will say is I sent you an email via Ebay messages, please review your Ebay folder.
I ave gotten replies most of the time, and it stays within the Ebay searchable databases.
Mike at MDC Galleries.
Hi.. This process is very similar to a place we consign our oopsies, mistakes, not worth much and discards to. We have an account with them and they take the items we periodically bring over. They like for us to brings whole tubs, not one or two items at a time. They take the items and list them to sell and also have some retail space they display at.
They decide what they will take or not. If they refuse any items we just take them right back. For the items they take-keep, the deal is they set the price, list or display at the highest price they set. If an item sells in the first 30 days at full price it is a 50/50 even split. The n at the 30 day mark they disocunt the item at 25% off, then if not sold at the 60 day mark they discount the item to 50% off again the 50/50 split still applies.
The at the 60 day mark, they drop the item to 60% for just a week to 10 days. Then if the item is not sold, they notify us and we have one week to come claim all unsolf items that are at the 70 day mark.
If we don’t want the stuff back, then they keep the items after the 77 day mark we have forfeited the items and they will either deep discount them at 75% to 80% off to just dump them but they own them at this point and 100% of the sale is there’s. If we don’t do our pick up during the 1 week grace period we have to pick up then in essence, we have abandoned the items and all deals are off, and they are then the owners.
this is much like the way a dry cleaners works and pawn shops. If after a certain period you don’t claim your stuff, it is considered abandoned and in turn they gain it by defult.
At this point if they don’t even want to sell it, they donate to several local causes, clothing to battered women’s sehlters or disaster relief, books to children’s hospital or elderly homes, then the balance goes into there dumpster.So I guess this must be a common practice or type of procedure across the baord, give or take.
Mike at MDC Galleries
Hi… I did find several references but mostly as scientific terms but there was two business associated with the letters n D.
Norsk Data, a defunct Norwegian computer manufacturer
NetDocuments, a document management company
then of course the state of North dakota but don’t think that would be a state logo.So see if the above 2 companies may have a connection and it is a corporate logo hat.
Good luck,
Mike at MDC GalleriesGood deal and it may help if you have to prove something to an Ebay rep. Show the before and after. The photos also have time-dates to them and it can be noticed when the photos were taken. We just keep those photos in the folders we use to store listing photos just in case.
That is why 3rd party software [i.e. EAT-Easy Auction Tracker, SixBit, WonderLister, and hopefully InkFrog for J&R] have extra valuable features over and above their other functions. Even GoDaddy and Quicken should have most of these numbers IF U HAVE BEEN using them long enough. If not, then Ebay numbers will have to do.
mike at MDCGFA
Yep I agree. It seems those with high feedback are buying on Ebay as a source for reselling, stocking their booths or stores and seem to be the ones we also have that try to create a scene after the fact to see if we are a “scared seller and easily intimidated” and can scare us out of our own fear into giving them a partial refund.
We don’t do partial very much at all. You don’t like it, we want everybody to be the happiest buyer we have ever had, so just send it back. This is how you request a return, do it and we will give you a free return label. Almost every person that tries this now, we never hear from again.
Some comments we get after that is never mind I’ll keep it, too much trouble to re-pack and re-ship to return. what ever, we don’t care. Like it and love it and keep it, or if unhappy, don’t like, or what ever agagin, we don’t care, just send it back, do it this way and here’s your free return label. So some send back some don’t, again just a cost or doing business and one of our standard operating protocols. It has served us well.
And most of the thanks for developing SOP’s is Jay’s calm approach to doing daily business. Just adopt a ” It is what it is approach” and you will be just fine.
Mike at MDCGFA in Atl
Yep as Jay says.
But staed a little differently:
I once asked here on SL about a pile of clothes our daughter gave us to sell, but they were all size 2 adults. When I asked if they were really worth selling, Linda Sheilds replied, everybody is a size 2 at some point in their life. That coupled with an old “Jay-ism” “Everbody, has to start somewhere”. We too once had zero feedback the first week we signed up”. Well if Ebay has thousands of people signing up per day, then all of them have zero feedback.
If every one of those thousands of daily new comers to Ebay were to buy a one dollar item from you, in their first 30 days, you would have thousands of dollars of sales in that month. You certainly wouldn’t say no to all those sales by canceling them. If this person you speak of had paid full price and you heard, double cha’ chings, bought and then paid for, you would not cancel the sale just because they had zero feedback.
You even had zero feedback the first week you signed up for Ebay.
Now about getting a return and the item being substituted out for a fake or a lesser quality item, especially in stamps, coins, autographs, while it can and does happen, as Jay has said many times, it is a very small percentage, and Ebay has done much better than decades ago to curb this sort of thing. But a trick we use, is on higher priced, unique items we always ask for a return of any and every item, even if we do pay for the return postage. We tell the buyer we need to inspect the item BEFORE we will issue a refund. And inform them we have ceratin hidden chareteristics on the item that we need to see to verify and then we will issue the return.
And we do. Sometimes on metal objects I use a small awl to scratch a very small dot or two dots hidden in the scroll work. Other times on stamps or sports cards, since I can grade cards, we shoot several additional photos that we never post in the listing that shows a frayed edge, the centering of the image or we shoot through a magnifying glass and get a few extreme close ups of a specific detail, a serial number or even a flaw on the item. Then when something comes back we look at those photos to determine if the return is the exact item. But we only go to these lengths on items over $100 or more.
Just a thought to help in this case and also going forward.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art in Atlanta
We only have had about 2 or 3 sales per year with Bonanza. And the printing of their labels at times messes with our printer and we have to change settings, then change back for Ebay-Etsy.
Also Bonanza messed with some of the WonderLister settings some how. Never understood what the tech guys were saying exactly.
And Bonanza gave us all sorts of badges but were always sending emails on how we could buy “Boost” programs to get more exposure, extra sales tools, buy a website store from them, on and on.
I just got rid of the bother of having to deal with it.
mike at mdcgfa
We dropped our promoted listings down to the 1% rate and impressions, clicks, dropped by 27% for that month and sales dropped by about $500 or so per month.
I have now gone back and put the promoted listings back and I can see on the chart from Ebay how the numbers of clicks are going back up.I don’t use the trending rates, I import all our listings into a spread sheet then run a very quick formula to average the whole trending column, which comes out at 6.02%. Then I set all of our listings to that amount. I selected to run the promo. until right before Christmas and will see what the graph – chart looks like and how Sales go.
We build extra into our pricing to allow for running a Sale and also to make up for offers. So as far as I see it, the 6.02% for promoted listings is nothing more than a 6% off Sale. And we have way more than that built in. We can dump off 30% or more and still have a number we can live with if we run a 15% Off Sale and take another 15% off that comes from an offer. So, agagin that 6% promo fee is already built in.
mike at mdc galleries and fine art
