Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I got your point with your very first post. We used a similar technique / criteria when deciding what to keep out of 3,000 plus antique booth items.
Here is something we decided to use as a screening criteria: When we saw the piles of stuff we were not going to keep or list on our new online venues, we had a conversation with our CPA. We talked about just dumping old, broken, chipped, and dirty items but he said no donate them. And the intersting thing was, he told us why. He said that many places publish a valuation guide to aide in deciding the value of donated items. He said a few of his other clients print out those lists and use it as a guide to place a value on the donated items for the tax year. He went on to say the Salvation Army list was very generous, much more so than Goodwill. Well he was right.
As we reviewed the list we saw many items, especially on the very detailed ones, were showing a donated price much higher than the prices we had on some items at the booths. We still keep those lists as guides right here on our desks. The SA list shows both a low and a high range on their whole list. He said to use a number in the middle. Boy were we surprised. So we created a spread sheet, transferred everything we didn’t think would be suitable to loist and discovered that over a thousand items had an overall average og approx. $5 to $12 per item. We racked up over $8,000 in deductions.
Now this isn’t free money and it is only applied to lowering your adjusted gross income but that still adds up to lowering your income tax bill. In J&R case or any other SL members hitting the $80,000 annualy or more this would be a big help.
The other interesting thing is that once you have that much of a tax deductible donation if you lower your tax bill to zero, which we have now for several years, the unused portion is still active and carries over and can be applied to the next years taxes.
Now given that I see some SL members offering ties, shirts, blouses for $5 to $15 dollars, you may be surprised that the tax deduction on shirts is $2.50 to $12.00 so we used $7.25 per shirt, shoes is $3.50 to $25 a pair so we used $14.25. This was more than we would be selling them for. They had more value to donate them than to go through the long process of listings them and on top of that to let them sit for 5 years to get less than what we could claim as a donation.
Some categories are crazy. Lamps range from $5 to $75 so a mid range was $40 for us. We dumped evey lamp we had at the booths at $40 each.
Now to the final point..Take J&R large inventory, if sorted by age first [anything over 5 years old], then secondary sort price [anything under say $12.50 or maybe $15], then cross reference that and see what the donated value would be.
>>> The hypotheical example… if they found a thousand [1,000 items] and the mid point donation value is $8 then that is an $8,000 donated value. At their income level that would make a dent in their adjusted gross income and hopefully lower their taxes by a good amount.I asked our CPA would having a huge donation all at one time run up a red flag and he said not in this range and besides you have a printed inventory list with a descrion and an allowed prive value that is already approved by the IRS. And you have photos to boot. He said the red flag donations are much higher that the few thousand here.
So that is a thought when deciding to screen older items and cull out old inventory. Does it have a higher value just donating it than keeping it for years and waiting for the sale. The decution becomes it’s own instant Sale redeemable come jan. first 2019.
Just another view point guys…
Mike at MDCG in Atlanta
I just love this… BUT FIRST an Announcement.. We just hit the one thousand mark of items listed in our Store!!! :-). After almost a year and a half after shutting down six antique booths we have arrived at the end of the culling phase. After selling many items as we listed and making donations of tons of items we call “Ooppsies”, [items we should have never bought for various reasons, we have reached the end of the culling – sorting process. No more antique booth left overs.
Now we can move on to things that we currently buy and list almost as soon as we acquire them, and we now can start to go into our art print portfolios and a large stamp collection and also focus on art pieces we will be making ourselves.
Now to your formulas. This is great. When we first started using the database inventory management, control and auto listing program WonderLister, I knew I would need, sooner or later some data to use just for the purposes you outline. We created custom fields in the database for date we purchased, where we purchased and a few other criteria.
Now that all of our old inventory from the booths is listed, we have to begin to go back and take a look at the PA/T formula you outline. Using the custom field we created, we see that we do have some items that were acquired as far back as the summer of 2013 and those got transferred over to our current Ebay store. Now granted, even though these items are approx. 5 years old, they spent 3 of those 5 years floating in those antique booths, never selling. But we also have the date originally created in the Ebay store also.
So, now that all of that older inventory is accounted for I think it is time to maybe apply your PA/T formula. Storage is not a factor, so the PA/T will be the focus.
Now some of that 5 year old inventory may only have made it into our online venues more recently, we may have to use the “length of time” based on when it got listed online, not when we bought it and placed in one of those booths. But still this will be an interesting look into the age of our inventory vs. the potential profit reward. Some of that 5 year old invetory may be new to the online store but if it is only a $10 or $12 item, we may still wish to do some culling in those areas if it has been listed for say a year. That is where your “T” comes in. What is our threshold for wanting to give more time to sell it.
What will we do with most of that old inventory. We will most likely move it into our “Clearance” store category and then throw some 50% to 75%, or maybe even more Sales on that category and see if we can move / clear most of it out. If after a given time it is still staring back at us, then probably time to pull and donate it just as we did hundreds and hundreds of older, damaged old booth items. This will also pull us back off from the Premium store limit of 1,000 items which we just hit and leave room for some of the higher dollar items we still have in the art portfolios and the items we will be making in our studios.
So thanks for the formulas, insight and explanation. We should be able to do this very easy within WonderLister.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
Yep.. one of the strongest geometric configuration known to man. Not tough to understand why most bridges are built with triangular structures and supports!!! 🙂
USPS also has two sizes / lemgths. We sometimes telescope them together for longer rolled canvass paintings.
Yes as you mention Ryanne if it is a smaller print this is suitable also. But I would like to maybe offer a little tip to improve on the flat sheet method.
That is to use 4 pcs. The reason is that corrugated cardboard is made up of what is called “flutes”. Sort of small parralel channels running with the grain. That is why corrugated cardboard is easy to roll and make coffee cup sleeves out of. But if you use 2 pcs on each side and cut the cardboard to size so that the flutes are not parralel to each other but tangent to each other [otherwise noted as cross grain], that strengthens the “sandwich” a whole lot.
As far as the interior goes for flat shipping posters / art prints, leave an inch or so all around the print when sizing the sheets. Take the print and sandwich it between two pices of newsprint paper or kraft paper first or if small enough put into an envelope. Then lay this paper “envelope” with the print inside centered on a sheet of cardboard and tape it down. This is why we use a paper envelope so we can tape it in place between the cardboard and the tape won’t touch the surface of the print. It also protects the print from scuffing. When this envelope is taped to the interior of the cardboard sandwich and an inch or two left around it, that prevents the print from sliding around inside of the sandwich and possibly dinging the edge or tape from coming into contact with the edge.
Now for the exterior, to make the cardbaord sandwich waterproof, if small enough slide into a bubble envelope. If too large of a print sandwich, we just wrap the cardboard sandwich in 8 mil black poly construction plastic we keep in stock from HD. We wrap a few things in this black plastic.
But in any case… bottom line, “criss-cross” the flutes [grain] of corrugated to make it more resistant to bending.
Just a tip…
Steven S: Oh I do hope for you that your $800 poster makes it. Even insured sometimes they will try to say it was not packaged properly.
But on a positive note, for any of our prints we double box anything over $100. Ether a tube in a tri-angle method, or first a tri-angle box then into a long square box. We keep plenty of flat sheets of cardboard around and many times will just make our long box for the triangle to go into and as I said abaove, we also use thin walled PVC [plumbing] pipe both as an inner box or an exterior box depending on the size of the print.
mike at MDCG
We send fine art prints, some pretty expensive and have a few suggestions that we use.
One technique we use is first we slip sheet the poster and then roll it up. The slip sheet protects the print from scuffing and also we then tape the rolled print and the tape only touches the slip sheet. We make sure the diameter of the rolled print is smaller than the diameter of the tube and the tube is longer by a couple of inches. Thus leaving space all around the print inside the tube.
Then we put this tube into one of the free tri-angle boxes that USPS offers.
Now you have a round object inside a tri-angle structure. This is failry good protection.But the catch here is those boxes are Priority so no First Class light weight postage. When we have to go longer we splice two USPS tri-angle boxes together.
Another method we have also used, we place in a cardboard tube as stated above, then slide that tube inside of a thin walled, white PVC tube that we get at Home Depot. [the tube within a tube method]. This works fairly well also. We keep a few 8 ft. pieces of PVC in the workshop and just cut to length as we need. We do quickly run sandpaper up and down the PVC to sand off the printing specs on the tube.
Of course we use dunnage at both ends and tape them off to keep both the print in the inner tube and the paper tube from sliding back and forth. Usually the USPS tri-angle boxes is OK but we also ship higher costing art prints and priority which is just a couple bucks more is fine by us.
Also there are some very good UTube videos if you Google / search on “how to ship fine art prints, how to ship rolled art work, then just apply some of those techniques to the less costly “posters” category.
And of course there are numerous videos on how to ship it flat. We use several methods of this type also. We incorporate either masonite, foam boards or both inside of those sandwiches, but agagin some of our limited edition prints can run higher in price than most lithograph posters.
Hope this helps a little.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
Amen.. and some of us see partial refunds as basically a bribe against him leaving a negative feedback. Run your business smart, run it secure in mind and spirit. You do something wrong and are guilty, then fess up and pay up for your error, but not a bribe. If you did nothing wrong, then stand pat, stand strong. We are American Small Business that employ over 75% of the work force of this great country.
Too many scammers are out there, so have your SOP’s and stick to them. Offer help when a buyers asks, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If Ebay is moving into the 21st Century with modern best practices to compete then so should we.
Some here at SL have been talking about books lately, my suggestion is a Paperback book called “Ninety Days to an MBA”. Great Reading on all the things we think, in our opinion, a business owner should have at least some awareness of, in my opinion.
Since it is the 4th of July .. may I offer a slogan addendum .. instead of only using “Made In America” lets change it to “Made, Sold and Resold in America” 🙂
Yes what Ryanne is saying is the simple straight forward J&R method. But in my longer reply I wanted you to see the reasoning behind the benefit of developing SOP for most situations and sticking to them. It is a business sensibilty and process that leads to amethodical improvement in a business infrastructure.
Just my opinion.. but if we had used my SOP on his, it states “we want all of our customers to be 100% staisfied”, not we want you to be half baked, sort of happy. No, send it back.
Think of it like this, you buy a shirt at a store and get home and notice a few buttons missing that you didn’t see, or a small rip under the arm pit. You go back to the store and approach the customer service desk. Now what do you think there SOP is? In most cases, probably it will be, OK we will take this as a return, sorry about the issue you found, take the shirt from you and issue you either a refund or if been too long, give you a store credit.
Never been to a store in my experience that says, sorry, here is your money back, and here is some extra money to cover for your gas and wear and tear on your car for having to drive back down here and Oh, By the Way, you can keep the shirt also. Now put this into your mind for second, and just picture yourself working for that dept. store in the CS Dept. and this guy comes up to you with this strap. He said when he opend up what he thought was a new in box strap, he found small cut marks on it. Well I think you would follow the store’s Standard Procedure [SOP], as outlined above.. Sory for the inconvience, we had no way of knowing we will gladly take it back and refund you. Note the take it back, part. and note that you could not allow him to keep it either brcause of the stores policy. If you did you would hear from management the next day.
So same here. Your policy is we want you to be 100% satisfied, if not we refund 100%. Otherwise he is telling you how to run your business, he is calling the shots and is hoping yopu are not a smart business person and willing to emotionally cave and let him keep the item and give him money back. Nope. You are saying you are unhappy and we don’t want you to be. Givee me the starp and i’ll give you your money. And you can tell him, what he is asking is not your store policy period.
As a side note, there is no way you can tell if what he is showing you is your strap or an extra one he had laying around. Your word agaginst his. Time for us as sellers to stick to the way we run business. Customer service with a smile, please our customers within the guidelines of how we run our business, follow our own procedures.
Heck we are a coporation. Susan is Secrtary and I am Pres. but our customers don’t know who is who. That is why we use the “we” in all our correspondence. This guy thinks you are a one person show and is going to try to capitalize on that. I would say you just work for this store as a helper and your employer has policies and you are just follwoing the rules. Either keep it or send it back.
this is one reason I am willing to eat the return shipping on some items because I can stand my ground. You may say, he may never return to my store agagin, my reply “good”.
But again this is just our business model. I have heard before, from amember here at SL, “I don’t treat my customers like that”. This is not a bad thing, it is a good, thing, total restitution to make your customer 100% whole and 100% HAPPY, no questions asked, just give me the item back and here’s your money and an apology about him being unhappy, just not at making me loose double the money.
Again..no malice here, just explaining a way to make dealing with these issues, staright out, standardized procedures. As Jay says, arguing gets you no where and saying too much could give some buyers ammunition.
What he is saying is just his opinion. One thought, is that due to what they are pointing out is why you did not have it priced even higher, but you don’t want to admit to anything.
I really think that some buyers think that all sellers on Ebay are just mom and pop people selling out of their bedroom and have now real business sense about them. How many in the news try to get free meals but just being louder than everybody else.
If he keeps it, you don’t have to refund and he leaves a negative. Then there is your battle. Call Ebay, state your case, show your hptos, they will see what he is up to, and [hopefully] ask Ryanne on this, you will probably get it removed.
Keep us posted.
Mike at MDC Galleries.
We use two email addy’s for our business and Shopify store but the Shopify store is still under construction and not actually very operable but few things can be seen. Currently we are heavily experimenting with our Shopify Store and also our Etsy Store.
Unsure if Jay wants us to post public contact info., but if I shouldn’t he will pull this off. If not… then we use mdcgalleries@outlook.com and mdcgalleries@gmail.com for now until we get our private ones setup on our new online domain store.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
You bet.. Be careful what you ask for.. you may just get it! LOL
Just sent you my whole folder of both Standard and Custom Specific Customer Responses. Some Treasures – some junk but you may be able to edit some for a more generic SOP approach.
Check your “spam folder”.
Mike
We are team relist also. Especially since we use WonderLister and everything is done automatically. We only create and list an item once and everything else is handled just like it was a GTC listing only it is not, and gets refreshed every 30 days.
And why not since the Ebay Employee Engineer that was part of the development team of the Cassini Search stated at the Australia Open I believe, was the one who brought up stale listing, and 60 to 90 days as being stale in Cassini eyes and they built Cassini to look for phrases, titles and keywords that had been lingering around for a while and giving preference to newer listings. Or something along those lines. I believed him and still do.
So why not do 30 relist when it is handled by WonderLister just the same as a GTC in the sense that once we create the listing and upload it, all of the ending and relisting is done automatically by the software. We get the benfit of doing it, if there really is any and not having to do any more work. List it and forget it BUT get a benefit if it is true. With GTC, same amount of work but no chance at all if what the Engineer said was or is true.
I also think that SB and WL both may also do scheduled sales events where we can plan out Sales dates in advance and schedule them to run at those times automatically. Will have to check into that.
TTFN .. Mike at MDCG 🙂
You betcha’. Just trying to help. We are all in this online game togther. 🙂
Hey we got a bunch. If you want I can send them to you in a PM to your email addy. They are all MSWord docs. You can edit and save them as you wish.
Let me know if you want them. I just got tired of writing [typing} out the same old responses over and over and customizing them when they were all pretty much revolving around the same type of questions or issues. With the SOP approach, it is more corporate, cut and dry and makes most of the replies just as they are “Standard Operating Procedures”.
mike at MDCG
This is what we do and is offered just as a suggestion. We create and utilize SOP’s [standard operating procedures]. For every situation that has come up through the years we create a best practices SOP in writing and save it as a word document. We have about 2 dozen of them that covers a fairly broad spectrum of topics and issues that have cropped up since we started this business.
The use of written SOP’s makes it very easy to respond to any buyer who has similar issues as previous customers and using a SOP removes the emotional aspect out of your response. We never use our names, always use our corporate company name and note we are Inc. which we are. We also write in 3rd person plural so the reader sees us as a united company and all part of a management team.
In many cases the buyer is “phishing” for a refund or is “bluffing” about the return to ilicite a response for you to see if you will run scared. We use the Hassel Free Program along with our SOP.
Now we have not had many returns or damaged goods claims through the years, but who knows, maybe this communication keeps them from doing so, if they are just phishing. If a legitimate claim, then as we say please return it for a full refund.
But as soon as we get a message about wanting to return something, we copy and paste this and fire it right back. Then wait for them to make a claim. If they have filed a claim, we still do this. And remember Ebay advises to NOT REFUND until you have received the item back.
They only have a few days to return it, and if they don’t, the day the return period ends, call ebay and close the case. If they choose to return it, then once you get it inspect it, photo it, and then do the return within the 5 or 6 days you have. In the Hassle Free Returns you have to give the refund, but that is part of doing business. Now after the refund, call Ebay and fight your battle(s). You may or may not win, but they will see everything you have done, followed Hassle Free Returns Policies and now you are throwing the situation back at Ebay for a reimbursement fr what you feel is a “phony return claim”.
Here is the Copy and Paste SOP we use. Seems that many buyers just don’t want to go through the trouble. And if there reason(s) are baloney [full of it], you won’t win by arguing with the buyer anyway. Don’t plead with them and especially don’t admit to anything. Just say your Sorry to Hear About This and throw the ball into their court to take action. Jay has said this many times also. Just take it to Ebay when all is said and done. But in our case we have had numerous requests but only a few actual returns after we send this. We think the buyer just gives up when they see we are not just falling over dead and throwing a full refund back at them immediately. This makes them have to do something to earn that refund back. A call to action on their part and many just don’t go through with it. In those cases the SOP has done it’s job. If truly a return is desired, then do your part and when we get it, we will do ours. Simple and easy business procedure. If a monetary loss on our part so be it, that is just doing business.
We have received your Communication informing us of an issue regarding the item you recently purchased.
First, we are sorry to hear of your concern and appreciate you bringing it to our attention.
Secondly, we never want any of our customers to be unhappy about a purchase and that is one reason we participate in the “Ebay Hassle Free Returns Program.”
As members of the “Ebay Hassle Free Returns Program”, the returns process is an easy one.
We request that you follow this simple process and request for a return through your “My Ebay Buyer” account. Non compliance may result in an unfavorable decision on the refund process.
• Log into your Ebay account. Go to your “My Ebay” at the top of the screen and click on “Purchase History”.
• Find the item you wish to return and then look to the right of it and click on “more Actions” and select “Return This Item” in the drop-down menu.
• From the drop-down menu select the reason for the return and then click the “Return” button.
• Ebay will send you an automatic return authorization and a Shipping Label for you to print out and use on the return package.
• Please repackage and protect the item as you received it. Utilize all of the same materials, boxes, size and weights for consistency and so it stays protected on the return trip.
• Attach the return label and cover it with a clear protective tape to prevent it from damage and ship back to us within Ebay’s allotted time frame.This link will take you to the Ebay “Returning an Item” page for detailed instructions.. https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/member-behavior-policies/condition-returned-items-policy?id=4763#full%20policy
Despite the rather detailed verbal explanation, it is a fairly simple process.
After we receive the item and it has been inspected for the issues stated we will proceed with the refund process according to the “Hassel Free Return Program Standard Protocols”.
We await the return …..
Kindest Regards,
the management team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and SmartParts Equipment divs.Hope this may give some peace of mind to some. But it is just how we handle business as usual issues. We did the same thing when we were are large mfg. company. so par for the course for us.
Good luck and maybe many other suggestions from other members may prove to be a better way of dealing with these issues.
the management team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art
SmartParts Small Equipment divs. LOL 🙂
