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05/16/2018 at 6:21 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #40117
Yep.. dead on as to how I do it. PayPal.. is just a commission/fee just like a bank fee. Actually it is a credit card merchant processing fee, but a fee is a fee.
Pull same type of reports from WonderLister.
All expenses run through the business credit card and I just pull them down into Quicken and they are by now all memorized by Quicken and just fall into the correct categories. I prefer the Quicken P&L rather than any type of report from Ebay. I also use the percentage column so I can what percentage of our income each category is representing. That way if I wish to lower a category then it shows up easily by doing it this way.
Also I know you know, but there are national averages by percentage that represent different industries. I could easily see in mfg. certain categories that were 2 or 3 percentage points higher then national averages and also our historical averages. I call the president of the company and all he wnated to know were what were the flags I saw. I would report our Advertising has moved from 6% of our gross Sales up to 9% of our gross and that is 2% over average for companies of our size in our industry. We ran 18 million dollars per year by watching those averages. If payroll went up by 8 to 12%, then who hired who and at how much? Then I would have to reun the numbers to see what impact those hires had on our productivity and if they carried, then they were good to go. If not someone was going to be let go. But all done by categories and percentages.Man we are so closely aligned it is spooky sometimes when you post.
Mike in Atl.
05/16/2018 at 3:48 pm in reply to: Pretty sure the item didn't look like this when I shipped it… #40104Here is something to digest first. Then my answer:
The average inventory shrink rate has increased to 1.44 percent in the retail business
Inventory shrinkage definition includes:
1. Shoplifting/external (including ORC) = 36.5 percent
2. Employee theft/internal = 30 percent
3. Administrative and paperwork error = 21.3 percent
4. Vendor fraud or error = 5.4 percent
5. Unknown loss = 6.8 percentBased on these numbers-averages is why we just went with Hassle Free Returns a few months back. First think of the overall national average.. it is only 1.44% TOTAL that includes all of #1-#5. I assume we aren’t any different.
So we grossed about $25,000 last year x 1.44% = $360 dollars total. So if we fall into the about average category, to us mind you, $360 isn’t worth me writing any emails to agrue the point. Only when it is going to get us a negative or impact our rating or status.So, 1 and 2. Our stores do not have to deal with internal employees but our online buyers replace this nemesis. Some buyers will and do try to “beat us out of something” in so many ways. We just tired of sorting through it all. Answering false claims, weird questions, or inspecting returns with swapped out merchandise. Call it what you want, it is going to be a part of your business.
3. This is on us and if we make a mistake in listing, shipping or packing. Just accept it quickly [like in 30 seconds] and move on. Even if you know that the items was described perfectly, just tell them to send it back. And as Jay has mentioned and has been our experience, this weeds out those just fishing for a discount. Nope. Many people believe what the good lord says, “You have not because you ask not”. So many try to get a seller to discount after the fact. But our standard is just like Jay says, Nope. We shoot a short quick email through Ebay messaging that says, “We want all of our customers to be 100% satisfied and am soory to hear that you are not”. Please request a shipping label through the Hassle Free Program and once we receive the item back we will at that time issue you a refund”. That is it. We have only had 3 or 4 returns in years.
#4.. Doesn’t apply because we only buy used items, [mostly]. But occassionaly auction houses will pass something off on us that we didn’t see and end up discovering it right before photography and we just throw it in our to donate pile-bin. Again, easy peasy and we will watch more closely when we preview auction items we will be bidding on later.
#5. We let anything we break, drop or misplace fall into this category.So all in all, we think of it as a cost of dpoing business. I consider my administrative time valued at $40 per hour. That is $.66 per minute. When you think of that, you won’t spend much time on dealing with any issues like returns, or customers fishing on you or trying to scam you out. Just don’t worry about it, tell them you are soory to hear of an issue and please, by all means send it back. In your case, if it was damaged, how many times does that happen at every retail store in the world. Accept it and move on.
Now that $40 bucks an hour I value my time at, wonder what my cost has been over the years, reading and responding to things here on SL. I think I may be at hundreds od replies. Think that time may add up to months, think how much I could have gotten listed or the value added of those replies.
So see, don’t get caught in the weeds. If you are going to run a business, then remember that businesses have a category for all of this, it is called “shrinkage” and it is just a matter of fact. Make sure you have your profit margins set high enough to cover this Chart of Account expense category.
So dump that stuff in the donate pile, and go list 5 more items. It is refreshing to remove the fears of running a business off your shoulders.
Also don’t get me wrong, ask any of us here on SL your questions. You will get a lot of varieties of answers all aimed at helping those who have helped us. I had to ask a question just the other day. That is the community J&R have shaped here at SL.
Good luck on your part time endeavor and hopefully one day you will announce to all of us that you quit your job and are going full time. ๐
Kindest Regards,
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta05/15/2018 at 6:20 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #40025That was just a short response to T-Satt talking about detailing the COGS. One could crawl deep into the weeds if one wanted too and track the “real actual cost of an item” by being so darned detailed that you could take your “procurement costs” and even figure out what part of the procurement costs went into the cost of an item. But that is way too deep. So the easiest way is just track mileage for ALL buisness trips and use the standard IRS of $.56 per mile. That was all I was saying, in reply to T-Satt topic of being detailed and tracking COGS in Great, Great detail. I was mentioning it as to show how crazy and OCD [as T-Satt calls himself at times] can get if one wants to split hairs into a thousand pieces. Then mentioned the mileage allowance at the standard rate as a comparison and that it is much easier to do it that way and just expense mileage on your COA as an over all expense. That was all I was trying to say.
Please don’t do it that way, use the standard mileage deduction.
For those who don’t track mileage, get yourself an app like MileIQ or others and by allmeans track your mileage. it is a large part of our expenses each year and reduces your taxable groos profits, thus lowers your taxes. It is a great deduction along with your home office deductions. square footage and the share of utiilties divided into that office square footage]. it all adds up.
And as we all here at SL will tell anyone asking about these issues and are desireable of running an online business full time, here it comes Jay… Please seek out the help of an accountant or CPA. Not a tax form filler, but a person who has a degree in accounting and stays up on the tax laws. Ask them everything your heart can think of, and then some more. Ask how do I,… Why do I have to…, when do I have to …, how should I organize, do i need a license, why get a license. If you can ask it, do so. A CPA will be your full time business best friend.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art.
05/15/2018 at 5:38 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #40015Yep. Spot on. And also include the procurement cost divided by the number of items per procurement trip. [the $.56 IRS per mile divided by how many items that trip] or use the procurement as expenses.
all expenses [expensed categories], are determined by setting up a COA [Chart of Accounts], and using GAAP standard line item numbers, a seller then uses these catgories to deduct against the gross profits. I am more interested in what my Corporation Makes than what I personally make. A corporation is an entity unto itself and one needs to run their business so their “business / corporation” makes money, then pay yourself as an employee of that corporation or take Owner Distributions”. Then expense any thing you can lay your hands on. Toothpaste is a great polish, toilet paper is good to wrap items in for storage, toothbrushes are good to scrub stuff, all allowable as an expnese under the IRS rules and categorized under your COA as Cleaning Supplies or Janitorial supplies.
By having a very detailed COA, which we set up in Quicken and then when we down load all of our numbers from all of our banks, paypal and all credit cards, they get automatically placed into the Chart of Accounts [COA] that we have assigned them to. Then from that we pull a P&L [Profit and loss Statement], every week end.
This way we know if our company is doing well and where we stand. In some years we want to make sure our company is actually running in the red, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t make money or that we didn’t get paid. And we can track if we need to pay quarterly taxes or by running in the red, we have had some years where we didn’t pay any taxes at all. And that was by design and under our control. Using a fully detailed COA and a P&L statement we can tell when it is time to maybe buy that $900 piece of equipment.
There is just no substitute for utilizing a full accounting approach to running ones business, expensing everything that you can and the COGS is just a part of it.
In my opinion. But that is what we do here, share opinions.
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This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
05/14/2018 at 5:55 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39900Just got an email back from the support team.. Ebay and PayPal ties into WonderLister and anything shipped gets pulled from those sources and should be showing in the Sales Report tab under the Shipping Column. Anything taken to FedEx or UPS and the label is printed through your UPS or FedEx account and you either scheduled a pick-up or took it in own your own and dropped off then those charges need to be added into the shipping charges column manually.
But if you printed the labels through Ebay / PayPal and it was a fedEx label then it is included in the “Total Amount”.Now not sure of the exact numbers you are seeing, but now armed with this feedback, I suggest you contact them and make sure WL is capturing everything correctly.
Oh and I am assuming you are on a paid level subscription and not the “Trial Version”.
good luck, take care..
Mike at MDCG in ATL
05/14/2018 at 5:34 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39898Mark: That is strange. So couple of comments. My version is showing “total shipping Costs” by the item and in “Sales reports” by the state, region, etc. And I see the “Total” shipping costs for the whole month [all items sold] and none are broken down by the carrier. These have to be my USPS charges because I hardly ever use FedEx and never UPS.
Next to go to the Tools Tab, clcik “options”, then scroll dwn to “Shipping”. Make sure WonderLister has captured all of your Shipping Profiles that you are currently using. If not, then do a complete refresh using the Refresh from Ebay Tab to make sure WL pulls in all of the current shipping policies you have on Ebay. In other words get them in synch.
Next make sure you have the latest version. They are making changes fairly quickly and you won’t also get an email update request. So go to their web site and download the newest version. Even if it is the same version, they sometimes make some small quick changes and leave the version number the same. remeber though the CHAT with us tab ties directly to the team in California, so they are on PST time zone. and are more closely tied to normal 9 to 5 type of hours and is sort of hit or miss. Also just shoot them an email directly. But I will ask when I am done here, because I usually get answered very quickly. Like yesterday I reported the Make an Offer Button went out and it was done before I got off the phone.
As a safety vale: The NEW.. “Chat with us” tab should be showing in the lower left corner of your screen Use this for a direct chat link to the tech support team and ask the question.
05/14/2018 at 5:15 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39895Short answer [unusual for me]. No it doesn’t. But it does pick up the fact that the listing has ended and moves it automatically to the Unsold Folder. If and when I see items there, I move it to a folder I and the engineers create called Sold Off Ebay. Was using that for some testing. But is a work around for now. I have so few sales on Bonanza, that later on; I may even kill the listings off of Bonanza.
But I just use the Sold Off Ebay folder for now. In up coming releases [revisions], there will be system folders created for the Shopify and Etsy stores with full tracking.-
This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
05/14/2018 at 2:36 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39884Yep, Yep, Yep.. Now that you bring it up, I do remember that long, long transfer being done on the free version. Also when I talked to JC at SB it was before they made that change. i bet you dollars to donuts, JC and the rest of the team talked it over and then inserted the toggle to keep the hpotos out of the datbase and you are correct agagin on the SQL limitations but once all those hptos are out of the database, it is a non-issue. Unless at some point..but wonder how many listings and photos that would be??
I know WL has told me about a couple of sports memorabilia clients that have 100’s of thousands of listings but if they are trading cards that would only be 2 or 3 photos per card. Still half a million photos attached to 100k of listings would be humongous.
Does SB allow you to put your photos up on a Cloud drive and let you drag and drop the photos from there. I had mentioned that to SB, so wonder if they broke the photo storage out of the database, but still only let’s them reside on the main rig that the SB program is installed on. Hhhmm.
05/14/2018 at 2:18 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39882The only drawback to SixBit vs. WonderLister is that SB does keep all those photos connected directly to the database and that is why the SB Db is much larger than WL. What the team did at WonderLister is creat a direct connection to DropBox, Google Drive, and MS OneDrive. Then we keep our photos there arranged by year and month within our free terra byte of space. Then when we create a listing, WL sets the “path” which points to the hpoto on any of these 3 drives that you choose to store your photos. This techniques makes the WL database 10 times smaller in size than SixBits. But everything is still all linked.
I talked with JC at SixBit twice about this technique and he said they were aware of this process but was overly inthusiasitic during the conversation. Then I hit the “magic” question / topic with him. SixBit only allows [unless they have changed], a datbase of a ceratin size. Then low and behold you will get a message saying your allotted size of the SB database is about reached and would YOU LIKE TO BUY MORE SPACE. So I hit JC with that, Hey JC guess if you guys did something that would make the SB datbase smaller and more compact, you would loose those sales for extra space, and boy was it dead silence for a long period, then a low, mumbled, yeah I guess so.
I send my database the WL all the time because they study it for research and it takes about a minute for backup and send. Well I sent my SB database one time and two hours later it finially finished. That is because SB has all the photos saved “inside and with the actual text data” in its database. So I sent my whole Ebay store from with WL to our new Shopify store and it took a couple hours. do that with SB, holy cow, who knows how long to transfer all the data.
Thought I would share some techy stuff to consider when comparing the two.
05/14/2018 at 2:00 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39880One of the reasons we are building our own store with our own domain and will SEO our own site. Google’s bots and spiders will find it and crawl it. Then rank it and then when thoe keywords we used are typed into google our site will be among the selection a searcher will see and possibly come visit us.
Ebay, nope, The Panda and Penguin releases of the Google algoruthm hit Ebay hard. Ebay was using a whole bunch of “black Hat-bad dirty tricks” to get themselves and sellers items searched by Google. Back link farms, key word stuffing, spamming, etc., etc. A lot of that was coming from within the sellers description areas and about me pages. A ton of Chinese [whoevers], had opened Ebay accounts and filled there description areas with “links”, “back-links” and tons being bought and sold on link farms. So when Google rewrote there algorythm to omit those types of links, Ebay went dead in the water just like all the Russian, Chinese and other black hat guys.
So that is one reason Ebay has pushed all the sellers to clean up the description area, starting policing the sellers, created “Item Specifics” in hopes of pulling Google bots and spiders back. But also Ebay doesn’t want to allow a “clean link” either. A clean link “click here” or embedded link [those blue words] that take you to other pages, well Ebay wants nothing to do with a good, clean link that is going to take a viewer to a sellers own store. god forbid.
Like in our case, I would love to have a clean link in my Ebay description that says, for more “Asian Ginger Jars-Click Here” and when you do, it takes you to MY PERSONAL STORE on the internet, outside of Ebay. Ebay is not going to let Google get hold of those types of links and they are not going to let us Sellers include them in our description area. try and see what happens.
So very little comes from Google. Ebay just buys Google Ads and pays for the clicks to the Evay Categories. Once a searcher clicks on those Ebay Google links, then you will go to that category and you will see every seller under the Sun who has one for Sale.
Right now if you search our store name, you can see that item from our store, but search for the “item” and you get a Goggle Paid Ad that takes you to the Ebay category and again you will see yours and all of your competition. If you have a stale listings, not using promoted listings [basically a kick back umm paid fee] to Ebay, you may not even show up at all.
So, Ebay relies haevily as Jay has said before on it’s branding, it’s reputation as a shopiing place for deals, and then once the potential buyers type in Ebay.com, then that is when “Cassini” Ebay’s internal search engine takes over.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
05/14/2018 at 12:55 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 360: Is Diversification a Myth or Reality? #39870Yep.. and they are getting closer. I had a very surprising phone call yesterday. When I answered the person introduced himself and I recognized the name right away. It was the Senior-Head Design Engineer from WonderLister.
We talked about 45 minutes and I also fired up TeamViwer and let him dance around my rig on WonderLister for awhile.
The main purpose was to explore some changes to they have been working on for the Shopify Interface. He also did an update to my WL that is not even in Beta Testing yet. He wanted me to have first crack at doing an Automatic Transfer of my whole store over to our own private domain store at http://www.mdcgalleries.com. We have been using our Shopify store for testing for about 6 months.
So, while I had him on the phone I asked where they stood with the Etsy interface. He said they had a large amount of the coding and design work done. But everytime they needed an answer to an engineering question and had to contact Etsy, that Etsy would take days to get back to them and his team would have to just park Etsy and wait. But he said that end of July was still going to be a target. I told him it would be nice to have it ready for the 4th quarter. But he said ready for us, the Beta testers, probably not for general public release.
He also said it was the feedback from the Beta Tester that provided the data for the places that they needed to fix-patch.
So with regards to Shopify.. here is what took place this morning. I had a doctors appoinment to be at at 9:45. So, I was in WL. I went to my Ebay Active folder and higlighted all of our 936 listing we have in our Ebay store. I then right clicked for a drop down menu that contained several commands. I high lighted “Send to Shopify” [I also see the send to Etsy selection, but that is none functioning on my beta version as of yet]. and hit enter. A message popped up and said sending 936 entries to Shopify.
I got back from the doctor at 11:30 am. Guess what? All 936 items had been trasbfeered over to our Shopify store. And because of the Beta Tester feedback, the way WL is doing this is that in the Shopify description it is copying and placing in the description area not only our Ebay description, but then skipping one line and then adding the “Condition” area from ebay, then one line under that, WL is adding every single one of the item specifics appended to the bottom of the description. Then every photo we have posted on Ebay is also placed into Shopify.
Now currently I have only clicked on “make public”, just a few of my listings in Shopify because we are still testing things, making sure everything is moving over correctly. I already see a few HTML glitches in the first bullit point of each listing and have found that Shopify does not like MSOffice HTML codes. So a copy and paste from MSWord did create a one line small glitch which we talked about yesterday. It is a Shopify thing not a WL thing. But I am going to maybe just for testing go ahead and make public all 936 items just to see what they will look like.
The headers and collections will still have to be built and reported back to WL to automate but we will get it all looking pretty, pretty, once we have the guts worked out.
The the final stage is for the Shopify to hook to and post everything WL sends to it on to Facebook, Instagram and Tweeter. tweeter is already coded and working perfectly. Every listing I submit to Ebay gets automatically sent to Tweeter. Have a bunch of people who follow those tweets. Can’t recall how many, but it all happens “automatically”. No extra work involved. That is the beauty of a relational database built on SQL {Searchable Queary Language].
So everything you can think of for having a one master central control system built into one piece of software is what the beta testers are trying to feedback to SixBit, WonderLister and others. And it seems to be working slowly, bit by bit. Eventually whatever 3rd party app you are using for cross-milti platform listing will be your “Ground Control-This is Houston” calling all platforms station dealing with all listings, ending listings, selling notices and ending on the “related” platforms, messaging, shipping, running sales promotions, all from the one piece of software. The thing of it is, a lot of this is already available. Just looking around the edges and looking at reviews is not going to cut it. You have to buy into it, purchase it, commit to it, learn to navigate it, learn how to use all of the powerful tools on an advanced level.
So just like what Ebay does by sending everything over to Bonanza automatically. Now WL is doing the same to our Shopify store and it will also do the same thing come early fall to our Etsy store. And SixBit is already doing it.
Now for the future. just like selling something on Bonanza, what do you do. All you do is print the label from Bonanza and ship it. So, same will apply here to Shopify and Etsy. When something sells on any of the platforms that is under the MASTER CONTROL of WL, WL sends a message to that platform, kills the listing on the other platforms, tells Ebay and Etsy the item is no longer available and then duplicates the Sales data from the platform it sold on into WL. So I now have a system folder called Sold on Shopify, Sold on Etsy and when all is out of Beta Testing and working smoothly and they go Public, the goal is that we do not have do do one thing at all on any platform other than print a label and ship. We will get separate reports, separate sales status, separate tax info. and tons of built in reports all from one MASTER CONTROL CENTRAL.
But all of this said by just this one user and is only my opinion. Trying to inform what these apps do and will be able to do. Will they do it for you, I would maybe think no. Why… How many people do you know has a spread sheet program so they open a spread sheet sent to them. But now ask the average guy to open up a blank excel or Mac spread sheet program and ask him to build, code and format the things that Quicken or Go Daddy does and they wouldn’t even know where to start. Or give a free Photoshop program to the avg. guy, then ask him to break a photograph down into 4 layers CMYK and do the color separartions to make that photo press ready to be printed by and litho printer. Nope unless you are in the trade.
So I am thinking, my opinion only, that these types of apps are not for the entry level, Ebay newbie, and more for the moderate level sellers that are willing to invest the time into making these types of programs become their own private master command central.
I have been working with WL and Sixbit over the last 3 years and still consider myself only moderatly capable. Compared to some here on SL I feel like I am a babe in the woods. But I do understand what these apps are capable of just like a Space Shuttle Pilot, I just need to learn how to fly it at an advanced level.
Boy that is a mouthful that will probably get me crucified.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Here is a link to a good supply source we have used occasionally when we had our antique booths.
https://www.antiquelampsupply.com/
You may think about getting one and adding it to your brass base then do a good mark up on the whole thing selling your base and the new shade. A neighbor antique dealer who specialized in turn of the century / victorian oil-kerosene lamps turned us on to this place when we had some missing the shades on a few two tier-[double decker] ones. We have also gotten some table lamp finials to go with a couple of Asian Ginger Jar lamps that we need the Asian symbol on.
We liked them also because they were close by in TN. and they knew Steve our contact person at the antique mall. We could do phone orders.
In any case .. a good source for glass gee-gaws! ๐
mike
Yes.. it holds what is called the “glass flue” or “glass wind screen”. You pinch them together and slip a glass chimney [flue] over them and sit it down inside the brass ring. These two metal pieces spring back out “inside” the glass flue, pressing against the sides of the glass flue and the tension holds the flue-chimney in place allowing you to walk around and not have the wind from the movement snuff out-blow out the candle flame.
Same concept as Jay says only instead of on an oil lamp or lantern, the glass flue is to protect a candle from the wind.
Hope this helps….
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
here is a link to Lee Roberson and Cades Cove but unfortunately not your image. But maybe you can find some information about the artist within some of the descriptions.
Maybe yours is a rarer, harder to find image.
https://www.worthpoint.com/inventory/refineSearch?offset=0&max=100&query=lee+roberson+cades+cove
Good luck …
Mike at MDCGSorry about that. had house guests arriving about the same time I was trying to leave the reply.
Here is the link that shows a few.
https://www.worthpoint.com/inventory/search?query=harley+davidson+ceramic+business+card+holdermike at MDCG
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This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by
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