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Sure, Here ‘ya go.
In order from top to bottom:
$24.99 in 2016 / $75 in 2012 / $98.00 in 2013 / and $39.99 in 2014.Hope that helps to some degree.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Yep.. Have several heat guns in the art sturdio and you are spot on, without a heat control reostat [temp. control knob], it will melt down most plastics, even hair dryers will do that, or make the plastic start to bubble slightly.
In some cases, heat will make shiny surface plastics “blush” or “Fog”. The heat forces the plastic to out gas residuals within it’s molecular structure, especially polygermers and resins in PVC types of plastic, then that outgasing either burns or fogs the plastic surface. Now on ceramics, pottery and such, you are good to go.
mike at MDCGFA
Hey RTWV if you do buy something with that tag on them, then this is where the lighter fluid comes in. Soak that paper label with lighter fluid, couple of drops is all that is needed. Let is soak into the paper. The porosity of the paper label allows the fuild to penetrate through the paper and start to attack the adhesive. Keep putting a drop or two on the label to keep it “wet”. Then start lifting the label at the corner. The secret is to pull the label up “slowly”. Even place a drop of fluid at the crease under the label as you pull it up. The label should peel right up cleanly with no residue left behind. Note.. SLOWLY Lift.
In my day we printed on a ton of plastics and many of the pieces were acrylic plexiglass. Plex is pre-masked on both sides with a paer protective layer at 100% surface coverage. We used gallons of Benzine to flood over the surface of the paper and then the side peeled up easily and nicely. We even had to do 4′ x 8′ full sheets of it for large signs. AND YES, our employees did wear respirators and we had fans blowing across the area. That much fluid poured out at once on a surface does off gas fumes. A small can of Lighter Fluid used drop by drop or small puddles offers no harm / risk to the uses no more than filling an old Zippo lighter.
Give it a try sometimes. We have several cans of lighter fluid sitting at our clean up – photography station right now. It is sold in most pharmacy’s and grocery stores up where the tobacco products are or the check out kiosks.
We use Ronson, one of the older companies but there are several brands. ALSO to note, lighter fluid does not attack, melt or blemish most plastic surfaces, but it would be advisable to check a small area first, but I can’t remember ever seeing any effect on any plastics I have tested.
Mike at MDCGFA
Yeah, sure stretch wrap doesn’t adhere. That’s why is is good for wrapping the products themselves, i.e. the sugessted method for Goodwill to use to bundle items.
For boxes, sure, you are correct. No adhesion to the paper of the boxes. Just thinking outloud.
But for boxes when we shipped thousand of boxes to WalMart, Home depot, General electric, Stanley Hardware, etc., etc. we found reinforced 3″ wide paper tape that has a water based adhesive the best. It is the kind Amazon uses also, that black tape with the embedded fibers in it.
We had dozens of tape machines in the shipping dept on the kit packing tables loaded with 12″ dia. rolls of the stuff. The machines worked by using a punch pad just like a touch phone. You would just punch 6 and a 6″ piece of tape would be dispensed and automatically cut to length and the adhesive wet. Great tape and fast.
mike at MDCGFA
Lighter Fluid [Benzine] is a great adhesive remover. Unlike Toulene, Lacquer Thinner, Acetone [nail polish remove], which all will attack the adhesive, Lighter Fluid will not attack and dissolve most inks that are printed on the packaging. Benzine also has a very high flash point, so apply it with a Q-Tip, rub and dissolve, then blow on it and it instantly flashes off and is dry.
Many times, if we pull a tag off of the outside or inside of a ceramic piece and adhesive gets left behind, we then will squirt a puddle of lighter fluid into the bottom or in the cavity of the piece, use a Q-tip to swirl it around and start loosening and dissolving the adhesive, then wipe it up.
The Goo-Gone and Goof Off products are all oily and not as highly refined and leave oily, smeary residue behind in themselves. If you use these products first, OK, but then squirt a little lighter fluid on a paper towel or swab and then wipe off the surface and you will get an oil, residue free, squaeky clean surface.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Amen MyCottage: We buy 5″ wide stretch wrap 12 rolls at a time. Way cheaper than 2″ wide tape, and if the Stores would start using it, they would actually save money. For the same $2.75 roll instead of 55 yards [165 linear feet], they will get 1,000 feet of stretch wrap.
Several wraps going in all directions will actually totally encapsulate the product and you can’t tear that type of plastic. The more you pull on it the stronger it gets.
We use it all the time after we bubble wrap our delicate items. The stretch wrap is part of our 6 layer special cocoon packing process. I think everybody should have a few rolls of stretch wrap in their packing materials.
The 24″ wide rolls are great for wrapping furniture, around table legs, and “cocooning” larger items with odd appendages.
Also another good thing about stretch wrap is that it spans wide “negative” voids and spaces and adds a layer of protection across wide voids.
I haven’t tried actually stretch wrapping the complete outside shipping box, but wonder if it would be cheaper than taping a box closed, even though it would take more material. Think that may be an experiment I may try. Cheaper, faster, stronger..Sounds good to me.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
RTWV: I sympathize with you completely. Organized as we are, has happened to us a couple of times. The last one was for a MAC Truck Bulldog hood ornament and no substitute was acceptable, so told the buyer, if I did find it, we would send it to him at no cost. We refunded 100% and 3 months later, we came across it. We sent free like we said we would. But he had already giving us a negative, first we have ever had since 2002 and is still sitting in our ratings.
We did the same as you, cross referenced multiple ways and nothing. All I can think is I just transposed a number somehow, but I looked in all the possible combinations or mixed up numbers, but nope. So who knows.
Let’s just both hope this type of thing is extremely few and far between.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
To a very slight degree. Yes, more likes and favorites coming in, but that is not sales dollars. Some slight sales. But I am looking at it in the light of your view point on a new start up on Ebay. The old, [years ago] low down on SL is that you should have a store at about the 250 items to start seeing some sales. Now that number seems to be about 500 +/-. At the present time we only have 239 items out of 1,134 on Ebay, cross posted on Etsy. But several sales did happen last week on Etsy.
So reflecting on those start-up numbers we are just in the infancy period of the Etsy store. And we are still doing it manually one at a time while we are waiting for the WonderLister team to get it all together. Which by the way they have started being more active on and are beta testing some of our items right now on Etsy. If they can come to the table with a viable solution, then that will be a different story. Troy, Veronica, Susan and I have been talking about how SixBit and WL should be interfacing to make it automatic and I seriously have SixBit in the back of my mind, BUT if WL can get it together quickly and correctly, then maybe I’ll “float” in place for awhile.
If WL surprises me with an interface, and it works well, then the complete transfer of all 1,134 items would happen within hours, not months. Then I will be able to do a more apples to apples comparison of the Ebay vs. Etsy situation.
But for now there are just too few items to get a real feel for.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
$5.50 each.. WOW! I’ll come list for you! 🙂 just kidding. Very generous.
We have two listers. One for Tues. Wed. and one for Fri.-Sat. Both doing the complete listing including researching each item on several paid databases. They both complete drafts and save in a Readt for Review folder I created in WonderLister. There I review and have to do very little to complete them.
They both, depending on the complexity of the research, do 4 to 6 per hour. We pay one $10 per hour and the other $8 per hour. So, at 4 per hr that is $2 per and $2.50 per but they almost always get 5 or 6 per hour so at the 6 per hour each that comes out to $1.33 per and $1.66 ea.
One makes about $250 per month the other about $320 per month. About $550 to $600 per month and after the first of the year we plan on cutting back to just one assistant but letting her maybe do a few more hours, cutting back to about $350 a month for just the one.
Just run the math and at $5.50 per item that would mean a very substantial monthly increase.
One assistant also does our Etsy listings but that is mostly a cut and past job from our Shopify Store over to Etsy and that is piece work at $1.50 each and she does that at home during the evenings on an “as time permits”.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Ryanne.. At first I thought it might be connected to using InkFrog, because some time back SixBit and WonderLister was inputing some code into listings at the very end to embed it’s logo and a touch of advetising with a back link back to there web sites. But both have since fixed that and stripped it out. Both even tried charging $5 per month to not embed it but that also fell by the wayside.
So I first thought maybe InkFrog was link tagging something at the bottom.
But after reading through the code seems to be no sign of that and mentions “passwords” so think you are on it with LastPass.
mike at mdcgfa
Sharyn: LastPass is a password “vault”. I use RoboForm. These apps will create a unique, very long and complex passsword for any site that you go to and register with that wants you to create a password. Then stores that password in the “vault”. All a user has to do it create one Master Password that opens the vault. Then when you login to a site all you do is click on the sites name inside of the vault, and the app takes you to the desired site, opens the sign in window, fills in the site’s / your ID name and enters the password for you, all blanked out then automatically opens the sie for you. Viola’
RoboForms allows for notes about the site, you can create many folders for other information you wish to save. It is like a digital version of a bank safety deposit box for documents, passwords, notes, details, etc.
Each morning I fire up my rig, I open my browser then next I open RoboForm with my master password. It resides as a small icon in the upper right side of any browser window. Then when I want to go to any particular site that I have isited before all I do is click on the RoboForm icon, down drops an alphbetical listing of all of my previous sites, [I personally have over 250 sites I have used and created passwords for] and then RoboForm does the rest. I have my PayPal, banking, investment sites, Facebook, intagram, social security, GA state tax comm., DMV, you name it, it is there in the vault all double password protected and it is a one stop shop to sign in anywhere.
When you go to a new site for the first time, RoboForm pops up and tells you this is a new site and do you want it to create a new password for you, or you can use your own. It will then ask you if you want it to save it and that’s it. From that point on, Robo will be your gateway to that new site.
Clark Howard of Radio fame highly stresses the use of password vaults to keep all your passwords in one place.
Thought I would chime in with a few details..
Good coffee this morning..
mike at mdc galleries and fine art
Late to the party this week. About 25 posts behind. But holy Cow! T-Satt. What a monster project. Those kind of tough projects I left behind at retirment and glad not to be involved anylonger.
We did a little remodeling after the mfg. job and boy, subs are just problematic. You can’t force them into your time schedule because they are not your employees so as independent business people [i.e. 1099’s] they can just cut there own trail. Mostly late, many times call to sluff off to another day, late agagin, start then have to leave because they are doing 3 jobs at once, the take 3 days to do what should have been a 6 to 7 hour job. Then throw in their phone time to take requests for estimates.
You sure had to have the patience of Jobe on this one. Congratulatons for getting through it, and if you could charge $180 per hour to do multiple hours of talking them through what seems to be people who have no idea of what “Project Management” software is, then where do you send your $2,5000 invoice to??? LOL 🙂
I guess you learn from this, ‘ya think!!
Mike at MDCGFA
It is so hard to tell. But here is my current Promoted Listings stats.
This is campaign no. 7 and was started on Aug. first and is still active [10 weeks +/-] and it is set at 1% over the category average. This resulted in 249,910 promoted impressions, those extra exposures resulted in 3,024 clicks to items as a direct result of clicking on the promoted impressions view, which resulted in 18 Sales for a Total of $495.97. The Promoted listings fee has been $40.75 total which equals an avg. of $2.26 per item sold. The avg. Sales price [$495.97/18] = $27.55 per item.So, would we have sold these 18 items for $495.97 if we did not receive those extra 249,910 impressions which resulted in the 3,024 clicks??? Who knows. So it equals out to be about 10% of the total Sale went to Ebay on top of their regular FVF, and PayPal stuff all at about 17%-20% +/-.
If I turned it off now, and it being 4th quarter would it result in less sales, or would it not matter because 4th quarter sales are up traditionally anyway??? Again, who knows.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
That is very interesting. I have used PL for a good while. In the beginning I selected a flat amount of approx. 5% to 6% which was about where most of my categories were and also ran it just for 30 days and then manually renewed agagin if desired. Then i went to just using the average per each catgory and letting it run contionously, but have noticed a good increase in the promoted listings fee line item.
Think I may try your approach and use 1% across the board but still leave it running on a GTC type time frame and see how it goes.
So hard to tell about any of the does it work type of questions because so hard to set up test groups with one of a kind items.
But interesting all the same.
The other insane thought is the rate. It was over a year ago this topic popped up here at SL and I think someone back then attached a link that took a reader to the Chinese data that showed what the “Chinese First Class Packet” cost was. It was something like for a padded bubble, manailla mailer weighing less than 6 ozs. the Chinese shipper paid $.25. We have to pay about $2.66 for the same size and weight.
My neighbor gets stuff all the time from China through Alibaba and he says they pay pennies to our dollars for shipping stuff in and as Jay has always said.. “Cheap junk from China flooding our market”. To add insult to injury China still has a ton of extremely low income, almost slave houses where by workers are paid pennies per hour and US citizens buying this stuff is contributing to that.
I agree the plug should have been pulled long ago. I look forward to the day, that two identical items sit side by side on a shelf, the prices are the same or close and the only choice I have to make is buy the item from China or the one made in the USA. Wouldn’t that be nice. Probably never happen but at least making the postal rates universal would help to level the playing field somewhat I am thinking.
mike at MDCGFA
