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The date we bought and item and where we bought it are two of the 6 custom fields we created in WL so it prints out on any reports we want to include it in.
And the tech guys at WL just like JC and the guys at SixBit will also write code for you to include a field into your database, but that you will have to pay them for. The 6 custom fields work for us to capture what extra data we want about an item just fine without paying for it.
Hey Mark: Funny..”Mike would say just create a custom field and put there”. Well Yes and No. Under most circumstances yes. We use about 6 custom fields to enter and track things that the standrd dBase entry form doesn’t have a field [space] for. But in this case, WL and SixBit has a field for Avg. Unit Cost. We just enter our item cost into that built in field. Most of our items are only a quantity of 1 so that is where we put it. If we bought a box lot of 10 items for $10 we eneter the avg. per item box lot price in that field. [i.e. $1 each since we bought all 10 for $10]
WL will use this field in it’s Sale’s Report Tab on the report it generates to auto-calculate the COG by the item and also include it in the total Summary Report”. And of course those reports can be sorted by any age-date period you want.
On multi-quantity on the same item you are selling, use the single dollar amount for just 1 unit. Use the $1 cost and WL will calculate the total COG multiplied times the total quantity. In this case $1 ea. x 10 items in inventory = $10 COG
Now to reply to how long it will take to get caught up. Ok, true if you have thousands of items listed in your store and have never used that field, then yes you do have to back track and enter them but not earth shattering. If you click the “Active Listings” tab, then sort by that column then all listings will be presented that have no number entered. You can highlight each listing line by line and when you do use the Quick Entry pop out form on the right and just type in that cost for that item and hit “save”. Now don’t hit “Send to Ebay” yet, that will take too much time. But when you hit “Save”, then go to the next line and do the same. Continue to do this until you have done say, 100 listings. Now look at the “Edited Locally” tab that says “need to synch with Ebay”. Click that tab, highlight all that are in that folder and clcik “synch with Ebay”. This way you will be updating a hundred at a time. Do this 10 times over saw a week or so and you ahve a thousand updated.
After you eventually get all costs into WL then the individual cost is available from the internal reports WL offers. And of course from this point forward start inputting the individual unit cost for every item you buy.
The first thing we do when we come in from an estate sale or auction is take one of our pre-printed and pre-numbered small item tags, open WL and use the Quick Entry form to add a short quick title, the tag number as part of the SKU [but not all of the SKU-that comes later], the date we bought it and where. That gets the new item into WL within about 15 secs and starts the dBase trail of the items journey through our process. Of course we fill that form out more fully as the item progresses through our process. Susan and our helper enters there part into the form as they do there respective work on the item.
All I do at the end is review everything, do the prices and hit upload.On some weeks an item travels through our system in a few hours other times it could be weeks before we finish a listing for various reasons. But every item has a date, title, where and how much we paid on it from the get go.
In any case you probably already know all of this but thought I would throw it out for others who may not.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Yep.. But don’t forget you have a nice frame that has value just by itself even without a print inside.
It is an etching [I believe] the solid areas I belive is the same plate only inked on the high, flat spots instead of ink pushed dwon into the groves then the surfaces wiped clean. So same plate, just inked two different ways and run through the press again onced the flat, high areas were inked.
Still about $200 is a good price and the glass and frame. Be careful on shipping it. see some other posts in SL on print shipping, mine included.
Take care and TTFN …. Mike
Hi Sharyn.. Ok got some data / info for you.
First and shortest; The WP sold prices on the ones you had links for. One is $95 and the 2nd is $129.99, the third is a duplicate of the 2nd.
Ok, next some short comparison which may shed light on price diferentials> The first is an “AP” which is an “Artist’s Proof”. That means the final etching [details] or ink color, or inking and plate wipings final look has not been finalized. These can also be referred to a “staged” plates [prints] but usually when an artist gets to a point where they want to see a print done in color, on the correct paper and under the correct press pressure, they pull a “proof” to sort of see where they are at, and make a decision if they want to keep working on the print or not and things like that.
There can be many proofs pulled, and at times as many as that are in an edition. as a paid, professional Master Printer, I would always destroy most of the artists proofs, some being my own of the other artists work [artists paid me to print their artwork] so I could evaluate the press conditions, most of which the artist themselves could not evaluate. That being said unless the artist directly told me not to and I wrote that into the commission contract, I would destroy all the proofs in the presence of the artist and have them sign the contract stating they witnessed it.
But many artist will and do save their proofs. Some times they asked if I wanted them and of course I would say yes, many of those are much rarer because they are one of a kind. Other times I asked for 10 artists proofs to be given to me as a partial payment for the work I did. Those will be some of the prints we will be listing in the coming months.
Once the final proof is pulled and the artist agrees that is right where they want it, that then becomes the Bon a’ tirer meaning final and the standard. That Bon a’ tirer then becaomes what me and my staff were required to follow as we proceeded to print to complete run. My job as a master printer was to match that final proof as close as possible, without deviation if possible, throughout the whole run / edtion, usually 50 to 500 prints depending on the contract.
Can a proof be as valuable as a print from the run? usualy not because many artist won’t sign the proofs or they just initial them. I would sign, date and time it so I could keep track of the artists changes they were making. So much for the $95 print.
Now the next, it is a 26×25 print and is the 31st print out of 35. This is a very short edition. Makes then much rarer and more valuable depending on the artists reputation and market place value, regional, local or national, etc.
Couple of observations for yours. Your print is larger and if u use an industry rule of thumb that all work done by an artist within the same time frame [year or so], you can some times MAYBE apply the square inch rule, but hard to say when framed. But this print went for $.198 per square inch. That is low. Pricing prints is for another day and topic.
Your piece was definitely run through an etching styled, hand cranked press, thus the deep plate embedded / indentation into the paper. The fact, though I can’t see it in your photos, you say you can see the 3-d relief effect to the “line work”, if this is so, that indicates the plate was “inked in the intaglio” manner. [Ink pushed down into the etched lines] and then released by pressure onto the paper as it was cranked through the press. BUT.. I also think I see some solid, transparent areas that may be an indicator that on subsequent passes through the press, that some areas may have been inked by brayer, roller ohand applied to the flat upper areas of the plate,. This is called “relief” inking. But can’t be sure unless I can see the print first hand up close.
Some suggestions, Always use these terms in title and/or description if they are present. The method of inking, “Pencil” signed, Pencil numbered, and of course state the title, artist and dates if present. This validates it was a hand done print. If there are two signatures, one printed in the plate along with the image and then another signed in pencil in the margins outside the image area, start deducting in valu, as this is then just a photo mechanical reproduction of a work ususally done in another medium, photo copied and printed on high speed offset litho presses in large quantities. Meaning limited to everybody who wants one LOL :-). Think Danbury Mint Collectibles and the such, Thomas Kinkade, etc., etc. And no I am not going to fight over me mentioning Thomas Kinkade. Again another story for another time.
So hopefully this will help not only on these but add more info. to your fine art print database of knowledge.
Man, haven’t had the chance to do some artsy talk in a long while.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
That is great RTWV.. about as simplistic as it gets. And to create a custom version for Jay.. “Go that way, really fast and don’t turn unless someone or something can prove that taking a turn will do any better!” π just having some fun Jay.. no malice. π
Love it….
Played a short verbal game with my brother in law some years back while we sitting on his back porch having a beer..
We each took turns saying a one line phrase from a movie and we would see if the other could name the movie. After an hour of this we came to a conclusion that as baby boomers we had spent.. Waayyyy tooo much time watching TV!
That’s funny.
Applied to many Ebay: … “All Systems are Functioning” … most sellers answer: “What Systems?”
Yep.. need some “Jocularity”
07/11/2018 at 11:35 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45136There is one bit of control we haven’t mention and it is an absolute control factor. That is to pull any real old items, especially those you paid under a dollar for and take then to a local auction house. We have a real good one just 25 minutes down the road. Almost everything sells and usually $5 is the lowest price. If lower then can lot them up or tray lot them. Jay loves tray lots. At this point it doesn’t cost you anything, especially if you are going to this auction anyway. They do take a commision on the Sale, but that just substitutes for the Ebay fees.
At our favorite auction house they have several days a month just for dealers to dump off there items. This is where we get some of our items for our Ebay store occassional. But this is a “point of control”. Pull it, haul it in, sell it for what someone bids”. If it doesn’t sell leave until the next week and do it agagin. We sold a bunch of the big furniture pieces we had at the booths this way. Got close to $2,000 for a bunch too large for our new Ebay online venture.
Mike at MDC Galleries
07/11/2018 at 11:27 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45134Guess that sort of blows my deep discount sale comment out of the water, except for going even lower than 50%, maybe 75% or even 80% like some of the stores do, then throw in the “make an Offer” on top of that. If the items are at a level where they will be pulled and donated, then why not. Easier than having a yard sale in this heat or having to pull it all out of inventory, kill it in our software, load it all up and take to donation center.
07/11/2018 at 11:24 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45133I hear ‘ya man… and when you are 69.5 years old, I really don’t won’t to have to reach very far up for that fruit either. I will take the lowest of the lower now that I have the aches that I have. π π
mike at MDCGaFA
07/11/2018 at 11:21 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45131Troy. Funny that you mention this. we had just the opposite experience. You know we did the 30 day switch over starting a few months back Now not to fall into the “Jay Trap” that we don’t have any way to prove any of this.. And I can hear him saying.. “See I told you so” all the way down here in Atlanta, but after we went to the 30 day listings, which meant we had to kill every item that had been in our store for a long time, our sales tanked. We went from over $2,000 in sales monthly to less than $700 over the past sevral months.
It was after I did that, the team here, Lisa and Susan both said what about any organic traffic we had gained out the the Google-o-sphere, any watchers and follwers and those that just visited us occassonly without watching that saw all of our items disappear due to us canceling them. Sure they got relisted but with different ID numbers. Then one of them said that a friend told them that she copied items she was interested in aand pasted the stor eitem into a MSWord document and occasionally clicked on it as a link to go back to our store. Well that click produced a “this item no longer exits” statement. She said she went back to the store and re-found the items and rebooked marked them. So the questioned susan posed was, well what about the next month and won’t this happen again and when will fooling around with our store and items take a reverse tole on our sales?
There is also one thing I have thought about. Even though all the gyrations are quick, a few minutes, if I did enough looking, pokeing, anaylsis, sorting, filtering, how much time would all of that add up too. Susan said I needed to be down in the studio and creating and designing products, not poking keys on a computer and she also included my participation on SL in that comment. And she is correct. If you add up all of the time I have spent working with the SixBit and WonderLister teams, the old spread sheets, the old AuctionTracker, participation on this and several other forums, she said i could have created a bunch of art works and products that would be listed for hundreds and the resulting sales from those would out weigh all of the key punching on the keyboard. I did a rough calculation and it could be in the neighbor hood of several months of my time on things that may or may not have any affect at all on out stores success.
Interesting take on it. I guess. She and our helper seemed to be in agreement. But at least now going back to the GTC format it sort of puts my mind more at rest. Based on what I just said, I guess I should be down in the studio creating products, not talking about products, so to speak. Hhhmmm..
07/11/2018 at 10:27 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45121To those who use 3rd party dBases like WonderLister or SixBit or the slread sheet program AuctionTracker.. watch your listing carefully. This Ebay flip flop on the 14 day dwell time a new listing or a 30 day end and relisted item having to sit before a Sale can be applied vs. it’s reversal of that and saying that a GTC listing can roll over and not fall into that trap created a bucnh of confusion within our dBase.
We had about half or store on 30 day then end and then relist as a new listing duration and the other half still GTC. We had a Sale running for a week and when some on the listing came due for their renewal time in the middle of the sale, Ebay got some of the Sale prices confused again, just like they did last year, and some of our listing got relisted at the lower Sale price instaed of rolling back to their “pre-sale price”. Thank goodness WonderLister now has a maximum hitorical price column. We loo at this column which is side by side to the “Current” Ebay price it shows us which items did not revert back to their correct price.
We had 181 items that relisted at that lower Sale price. But thank goodnesss the WL tech guys got it straight for us. Once we all figured out that Ebay was having some issues handling this flip-flop on the 14 no sale allowed rule and then the reversal on that postion, we decided to bulk edit all of ourlistings, remove the 30 day duration-end-relist auto rule, and converted all of our listings back to GTC.
T-Satt if you guys have run a Sale within the last few weeks, you guys may want to double check and see if all your listing did relist back to their “pre-sale” price.
Also now that we have gone back to the GTC duration status that will help the Google searches and also start to shore up the new Shopify store organic traffic.
The WL tech team also said that now that the Ebay engineering team is starting to alter the Cassini search engine away from static keyword searches but go toward the analysis of their buyers behavoral searches and past historical archival search analysis the 30 day, relist and see us as a new listing will be a whole lot less important. And the end and relist every 30 days technique gets wonky with all of the Ebay changes as the listings get ended and relisted continueasly, Cassini is seeing those as now “redundent” listing they said, especially if no “major” changes is made to the scope and make up of the listing.
I told them, no way am I going to relist over a thousand items every 30 days AND THEN go and take each one of them and do a rework on it so it seems like a more relvant presentation of that item. That would be almost like re-creating the whole listing every month. No way. So, back to the GTC.
They agreed that in order to increase sales, the time would be more well spent listing on other platforms to “expand” our audience, thus increase traffic to the item, rather than worrying about trying to trick Cassini to build more views within Ebay itself. They said that traffic will be there and is there for all the reasons we won’t ever understand. So now take our same item, cross list it on Etsy and our own Shopify store and expose it to a whole new audience, some who don’t even go to Ebay or don’t think highly of Ebay.
Made sense to us, so back to GTC on everything for us.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine art
And then there are those who don’t care about fish, fishing, fishing equipment, bait, techniques or anything.
They go out to a pond, throw there line in the water, sit back and smoke a joint and never look to see if they have a fish on the line, much less if the bait is still on the hook!! π
Then get up and go back home and forget that they left their pole behind.. π π
mike at MDCG
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This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
T-Satt: I just thought of something. I mentioned in a post to Luftmentsh about getting his whole original premise and those of us using dBase inventory management, a quick sort, filter and double sort presents us with this type of data lickety split.
But you just said something. Jay and Ryannes inventory has been building a long time. If I am correct, most of it like the shoes were piled in big bins by color or something like that. You and I have a custom SKU number on each item in our inventory. That number then is “managed” by software that tracks, when we bought it, where we bought it, what we paid for it. contains notes on our research. We have a ton of “item specific data”, to search. sort and analyize in a split second.
But even though J&R have a new, fantastic storage building, the specific items may be lacking any data to analyize in the first place. Other than what Ebay provides , which is fairly weak and thin to what fire power we have at our disposal, along with strong spread sheet creation abilities, I think J&R is fairly hard to review tis type of data. And because of that I get Jay and Ryannes point.
If it can’t be proven, absolutely without question, that these types of manuevers really work, why should they do it. In other words, why should we go back and put all that time into looking over our inventory when it is not known when something was bought or what was paid for it. I have heard Ryanne say many times or ask Jay, when did we buy that, how much did we pay, have we had it long??? Will hard to do deep analisis along the lines being put forth if you don’t have the data in the first place.
We knew the importance of this type data and started a SKU number system and Inventory control Management spread sheet on our first items we ever bought to resell. We have just improved on the tools to analysis that data as we grew. BUT J&R took the approach, “let’s go, let’s grow, let’s make those sales, rinse and repeat”.
Tracking all of this has been a ton of work for us and I can completely understand why J&R would be hesitent, especially if doing so would require going back and putting in tracking data on 6,000+ items, to worrying about any of this stuff at all.
I think Ryanne said that they are now starting to use SKU’s and having their helpers participate. Well maybe a few years down the road that info. may have a value like what you guys are talking about. But I think it is more of a “tool” for them to help find the items in there storage more quickly, thus they can do more with their time, than to be present for a deep mathematical process formula.
Just an opinion of an old “artist-former operations guy” down in the deep south. That and $.50 will get you half a cup of coffee! LOL π
respectfully posted…
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art [for Google!! :-)]A huge amount of our inventory is glass, porcelain, pottery, ceramics and #1 – #9 really doesn’t affect it.
As for paper items,[i.e. stamps, first day covers, art prints, etc. We have a large library room with wall to wall shelves and keep most in there [in the house] which is climate controlled but could be affected by swings in some of the conditions, but good archival protection we use helps with that, especially the limited edition, signed art prints.
With regards to some of the items, we take a look at the items we know are art related but instead of lowering prices, we increase prices periodically to help raise the artistic value and collectibility of some items. Kovels.com and their newsletters letters and their annual catelogs help with the review of the valuation of collectibles. Many paper money, coins, mint stamps, and art prints do fluate in price swings, but just as the stock market has done since 1932 [great depression] it has done nothing but go up over time.
As I said early to your posts. I get it. You offered some tools. Those of us on WonderlIster and SixBit can do a good scan, filter and sort lickety split and see what you have outlined, which we do. All we do is either apply an increase in price or a reduction to the duds, and as you said, that is totally subjective “T” can be whatever we want.
So consider me and probably most others got it. Glad I stayed out of this one…trying to prove one or the other right or wrong and convince others as to why one is right or wrong. Been caught up in some of those before. Led me to not participate here for a fairly long period of time.
Jay also informed me that my posts were fairly log for the SL Forum and that they only have so much band with.
So to save J&R bandwidth glad I got your point fairly quickly and the follow up explanations. So will take the data to heart as we do our “periodic” reviews.
Now to quote a movie “War Games” [I believe] .. after realising that Thermonuclear War was a game that could never be won, the WOPR-Joshua computer asked his inventor..”Dr. Faulken, How about a nice game of chess?” LOL π
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
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