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Also go to the right hand side of the SL forum and scroll down and you will see two search boxes. Just type in how to ship a hat or cap on both the forum and the older blog and you will see many, many replies and suggestions to this question.
The search boxes of SL are great tools to find the answers to former or frequently asked questions that have appeared here over the years.
Follows the old saying that give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.Jay… that is now going to become a mantra.. “We are just Crabs in the Ecology of Commerce”. GREAT LINE! LOL
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Stone lithography is a fairly dying art except in art schools and fine art ateliers. The techniques are old, very labor intensive, require lots of floor space in an art school. The stones are very limited now and hard to acquire. They have to be quarried out of limestone pits. They weight ton and need lift jacks or fork lifts to move around.
Due to these restrictions and the fact most students are now producing work digitally and the print method of fine art choice is a large format ink jet printer and making Giclee print on demand prints, I think the market would be pretty limited. Maybe a collector of old letter press type of stuff or old etching stuff maybe. The art schools will buy fresh ink from vendor-suppliers and stock it in their school art supply stores.
So, I don’t see these being much in use and someone needing a “fill in color” to add to an existing set. I would try listing as a lot and see what happens. Also that creates just one listing for you.
I had a set of grumbacker pastel about two years ago and Listings the complete set and it sold within a few months for $125, I think, I recall. Also you are unsure of the condition of the inks down inside the tube to know if it is even usuable as a functioning color.
Good luck with it.
Mike at MDCG in Atl.
Here you go.. follow this link and the info. it provides.
http://www.graphicchemical.com/lithography07.pdf
I have done stone lithography before, mostly in under gradute school, and printmaking is my major and career specialty.
The inks are used just like litho crayons to draw on the prepared stone surface. But unlike the litho crayons which are stiffer and in a pencil like format, these are looser, more fluid in there consistency and used to cover broader areas faster and are “brushable”. There are also other competitive brands out there. Some litho “inks” are what are actually used to “ink” the stone once the image has been gum and acid etched into the metal plate or stone surface.
May I suggest you do a little research on hand done stone lithography to get an idea of the process and you will also discover the other brands of litho inks and that in turn will help you get an idea on pricing.
BTW.. learning how to recognize “real” hand done litho’s and silk screen prints will help you in your selections of what to purchase as fine art prints when out in the field buying. It is a world of difference between real hand done, stone lithography and commercial offset lithography done on photo plates and printing done on high speed presses. both in quality and in prices.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
T-Satt: Think I saw that in one of their explanations of “Buyer Benefits”. That in giving the Buyer “Options”, the option would be use PayPal or [and I am guessing to the jargon] “Ayden”, which means the payment of their choice, which would be their choice of credit cards, etc. But all is just speculation at this point and we all are on a “wait to see” basis.
Guess for now, we are all on the “business as usual” mode.
But they said they will do a phase in and I think somewhere it said starting it do some phase ins starting end of 2018. So, as AdventureE states above, we know how well Ebay handles transitions [i.e. Linda Shields issues, our issue of Ebay using our previous Sale Price as the the newly listed price, 5 reps giving 5 different answers to the same question and tons of others].
So Jay since coding is going to be involved I would think we could start to see them “tinkering” with it by the end of this year and then phased in over the next few years. Which in my opinion means issues over the next few years.
Oh well, as we all do, “adapt” as we go.
That is a Chinese character used in many Chinese decorative pieces and on some furniture doors, table and head boards. It has a Korean variation also.
It is “Shou” [pronounced “shoe”]. It means / signifies Longevity. It can be found on many home decor items.
Hope this helps…
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
Galleries and Fine Art in AtlantaHey Jay.. I would like to maybe revisit the topic of Make an Offer vs. Not and at what elevel.
I know you have mentioned through the last few years that you began to raise the price point at which point you would take offers. I think it used to be only take offers over $19.95, then you raised it to $29.95 then again higher still. The discussion at that time was to try to circumvent getting offers of $10 on a $20 item, because it took up so much time to answer them, accept or counter for only $10.
As we have grown in store size we too have experienced this and feel that fielding “offers” takes a lot of time, especially if we counter, and as you say “drags out the process” also. I find that I need to focus that time in other areas. Even though we do get a lot of accepted counters we make, it still takes time to “close the deal”.
Currently we have our store set to not take offers on anything less than $32.00 but find when we run periodic Sales, 2 or 3 times a month that when we use a 15% or 20% Off Sale Store Wide, that drops the BIN Price down to $25.60 and thus we still get offers around $17.92 [a 30% off offer]. I think that the buyers don’t see or recognize that the item is already at a 20% off Sale and that their 30% OFFER puts the price at 50% off the actual original listing price.
So we are thinking of moving our price point up to $50 or higher with MO and without MO on all items lower than $49.99. Since we run Sales about 20 days out of each month that makes a $50 item discounted to $39.99 with the 20% Sale applied and then if the buyer offers a number at what they think is 30% off the Sale price, then at least at $28 dollars it may be worth the time to deal with a counter.
So, wondering your thoughts on the price point you guys are currently using?
I think you said long ago to list high and put Make Offer on most things. But I don’t know if you know it, but on your #1 larger store, that out of 5,963 items you guys only have 986 with Make Offer on them, which is 16.5% of your store and 84% [5,008] don’t have make an offer on them. And, out of the 986 that have MO on them that 495 are under $50 and 95 of those are under $29.95.
So I am wondering if you have altered your approach on the issue of placing MO on all items over a certain price point? Or, is it because I see you guys are placing a “Store Wide Sale” on your store and due to the reduced price by the Sale Percentage, that you take the MO off of all the items while they are on Sale?
Just wondering while I am seeing a scenario that seems contrary to the original discussions a couple of years ago. Mainly interested because of thinking about taking the MO off about half our store, items under $50.
thanks for any update in your thinking on this topic.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Hey BethGreen:
Check out this post from a few minutes ago….
It is located over in the “Sloooow” section of the forum.
Then think about the “number of cha-chings” making one feel good. Would you rather have 1,000 cha’ chings for a $1 each or one cha’ ching for a $1,000 sale. While I understand what you mean, hearing the constant cha’ chings elicites a feeling of excitment, after years of hearing those and knowing many are low ball offers on already low priced items, one can tired of hearing them.
I wish Ebay would make a different sound for different scenarios. A different sound for an offer, a different sound for a sale, and again a different sound for a high dollar sale or offer. better still allow the sellers to set different sounds for the different types of communication from Ebay.
But as I mentioned in the link above, I rather it be quite as much as possible so I can concentrate on marketing on other platforms or be in the art studio and get only a few cha’ chaings for higher dollar amount items, thus equaling less shipping for the same dollar amount.
The equation = Use my brain instead of my back”
Just my opinion though.. that and $.50 will get you a half a cup of coffee!
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
SmartParts Home decorGood morning:
guess this fits the bill about something Jay said a year or two ago. Selling higher dollar items equals less work. Taken to the far fetched, sell one $5,000 item per month times 12 mos. = $60,000 per year and you only have to ship 12 items per year. SO.. HOW SLOW IS SLOOOOW!!! Seems like that term is relative doesn’t it.Certainly satisfies my concept, of use my mind and not my back.
We took Jay’s comment to heart as we pulled all our inventory out of those 6 antique booths two years ago. We pulled about 3,000 items. At about that same time Jay mentioned not working so hard on selling very low cost items. So we took a long hard look at 600 sq. feet of piled up inventory and started weeding out. We donated almost a thousand items that were all priced at the booths less than $10, we then sent about 1,000 to a local auction house everything that was too large to store, box and ship [furniture type things], then we took the last thousand all over $10 and up and we started to list.
Proud to say as of the end of 2017 all death piles are gone, only about a dozen items left from the booths to list. Currently, we have 921 items in our store, have sold 475 items for approx. $15,000 during 2017 = an avg. Selling price of $31.00 per item. This avg. to approx. $1,250 per month with an avg. of approx. 40 items sold per month or approx. 10 per week.
Much easier to look at the overall period this way. Smooths out the highs and lows. By using WonderLister and Quicken for business we do pull a P&L [profit and loss] statement every month quaretly, year to date and year end. This way we can keep tabs on everything but not every week like others here on SL.
Doing weekly numbers to me is like investing in the stock market then watching the Dow Jones and Ticket Tape every day. Then why not every hour. That can drive you bonkers. Yes we all have slow thing, but pulling a P&L monthly and quarterly smooths those wild swings out, as well as the anxiety it causes by watching the financials “too” closely.
So, back to my opening statement. Buy low as you can, sell high as you can, make those the highest items you can find and sell to target that goal of a targeted number. In other words, use your brain and not your back. AND REALLY HOW SLOW IS SLOOOWWW! It depends on the time frame. If you compare minute by minute, or weekly. Short time frames are going to produce wide spikes and deep valleys. But, look at your financials quarterly and things will look a little rosier. If you see growth quarterly and then certainly yearly, then you are on an upswing overall. Now just get that upwards trend, moving at a sharper upwards incline. That is one of our longer, annual goals.
Our next goal is to open up all the art portfolios we have and start to list all of the signed, fine art prints we have. We have hundreds of them and most are all over $50 and up each and we have multiples of some that I was commissioned to do for other artists.
Then, on to listing the original paintings we have and most of those will all list for over $100 each.
At auctions, we are doing early preview of each item we are targeting to buy, researching while we go to lunch prior to auction and targeting only those items that we think we can list for over $50 and creating a “we will pay up to this much” list for each item. We use that as a cut off point of when to drop out of the bidding. The goal again, buy less for more money that will sell for more, then in turn we will sell less quantity of items for higher dollar amounts.
Then of course cross list all of this on 4 or 5 various platforms all managed by WonderLister as our main centralized listing, tracking and managing software program.
Final Goal…. Use our brains and not our backs. Sell less for more to make more.
Just our approach. It can change.Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
SmartParts Home DecorI apologize Jay. Didn’t think about the “promoting products” scenario. It was coming to my mind as a chance to get tax information that is specifically geared toward re-sellers which may help many of the SL newbies and keep you and Ryann from having to answer all of the same old questions about inventory and COGS and COA among other things.. That focus was meant to provide help not promote.
What you may want to do if you decide to revisit with Mark is to compile a long list of questions from here on the forum and forward them to him ahead of time and then he can be more prepared to provide clearer answers.
You are like Yul Brenner in the King and I, where he says to Anna the school teacher.. “Ha, I make better question than school teacher has answer!” … Dah, dah, dump tea dump dump [musical theme starts from The King and I at this point]. 🙂 LOL
Mike at MDC Galleries
I believe he does and also addressed that when the interview was done. You might try to search for his interview and listen to it and read some of the following weeks of Q&A in the forums.
Oh .. Think I forgot the Discount code in my first post: The code for the $2 discount is RESELLER20 Type this in to the coupon area and don’t forget to click the button “Apply” then the amount you owe will drop by $2 down to $10.99
mike at MDCG in Atlanta
DT: That is correct. If you click on a number of items and look at the shipping tab you can see that the countries that are included vs. excluded will vary by category and type of item. Some even will vary on the terminology used in the title or description. We had a case where we could not list a crystal handled letter opener to Greenland because it fell into the “knife-weapons” area but yet it would go to many others. We then tried an experiment and added “nice shiny knife blade opener” to the title and checked and then almost all countries were excluded. Then when we removed the word knife blade back out of it, viola’ many countires allowed a letter opener except Greenland, of all places.
this is also applied to art. We list certain paintings using certain key words and no go to certain countries, but use the words acrlic wall decor and then a bunch of countries open up again.So I think you hit the nail right on the head. try this out on some of your listings and see what happens and if you see the countries expand or contract.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Hey Linda, I will share with you some details about this issue that came from the tech team members over at WonderLister which we use to list, but this issue with Ebay and their Selling Manager is an old one.
I think you know we use WonderLister as a third party app that does all our listing and managing our cross platform selling functions. I have spoken with their Tech team about two years ago as well as the tech team at SixBit which T-Satt uses. They are both very familiar with this issue with Ebay and Ebay knows about it also.
The bottom line is that these app receive the information about Sales, discounts, which items and start and stop times directly from Ebay and updates the software accordingly. The WL tech team told me that they have tried to work with Ebay for years to straighten out the issue about Ebay’s handling of items and categories going on and off sale.
What happens they said, is that when a Sale starts, Ebay makes the changes, reports it back to third party apps, then if some items are on GTC or ends in 30 days, the code Ebay sends back starts to get scrambled. In our case we did a 20% off Sale on about half our store. The sale ran fo a week. When the Sale started, everything was fine and those items were marked down in WonderLister. WL has 2 columns that show side by side. One is the original price, the second is the newest [current price] which is the sale price. Then at the end of the week when the sale had ended, we noticed that those items that were on Sale got relisted without a sale price being active at the Lowered [old sale price]. So, a $10 item that was on Sale for 20% off for $8.00 now was showing as an $8.00 original price [which it was no longer on Sale]. Then about a week later we ran another Sale at 20% off but now Ebay. showed the $8.00 item as the original price, had a red mark down line through it and it was showing at $6.40.
We caught this by observing the two columns side by side. We then stayed in contact with our friends over at WonderLister. They stated that Ebay has known about this for years and they had told WL that the situation was so out of control and scrambled that the only way to fix all of it was to re-write all the code and completely re-do the Sales and Promoted Listing section. Thus we all now see that recently we got the New Sections about sales and Promotions offered to us in the updates.
well guess what, I think from your explanantion, they still have some of those old hidden issues.
we never could find all of our affected listings and still to this day, make sales on items and then upon closer examination see where they sold for 20%, 40%, 35% less than we had listed them for a long time ago. We have lost a bunch of money on this at times.
This whole situation has happened to us three times over the past two years and in some cases some items that got put on Sale for all 3 of those Sales got actually relisted at 3 times the previous discounted showing as the original non-sale price.
we went through all of our listing numerous times trying to find and edit those that were showing at a much lower price than when we first listed them and have had to manually edit those.
The WonderLister tech team assured us it is definetly an Ebay thing, has been for years, WL techs have called and talked with Ebay numerous times and the WL group says that Ebay is just “lost in their coding” with regards to this issue and just redoing the whole thing is their answer.
As a future safe guard I suggested that the WL tech team add a new column to their software called “Historical High Price”. When we list a new item in WL the original starting dollar amount shows in this column. Then when any item gets reported back from WL at a lower price it shows up in a report. Then those items can be easily found and manually edited back to the same price. If we re-list an item and use a higher than start price, the amount goes up in that column. It will only go up, never down. This way we always know at a quick glance when Ebay screws up and re-lists an item at a lower than starting price.
So, I am sorry to report that you may have been hit by that bug and that this may point to the situation that this issue is present and hidden in the newest Ebay update to the New Sales and Promotion Managers.
I am going to report some of your comments to the WL team and see what they say. I also suggest that maybe T-Satt report in to SixBit about this and maybe for them to add the Max. High List price column into their software. I did report it to SixBit myself way back but their answer was that Ebay was coming out with a new version of Sales Manager and they were going to wait to see if this issue gets fixed. Well, I think it hasn’t and maybe SixbIt needs to know that also.
Sorry for all the details and hope it doesn’t add stress on top of what you already have experienced.
Mike at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries and Fine Art in AtlantaHere ‘ya go:
Quick summary:
* Double bag into a zip lock plastic bags
* Super pad around it
* Double box it
* Mark on the label side with a black marker as per the instruction below.P.S. As an artist I buy tube paints, solvents and spray paints from art supply houses and they follow the above directions.
Details .. From Ebay and USPS Publication.
Mail it USPS. Aerosol cans are allowed to be shipped in the Domestic mail but not International mail. You must mail them surface mail only which is Standard Post. . You should ship it alone and not with other items that may cause it to react. You have to put the can in a zip lock bag surrounded with absorbent material in case anything should leak out and DOUBLE BOX. On the address side of the package write (with a permanent marker)” Consumer Commodity ORM-D Surface Mail Only” and identify what you are shipping. “Aerosol.”
3.5 Aerosols
Aerosols (containers under pressure) are hazardous materials and must be constructed to prevent accidental discharge of the contents during postal handling. Mailable aerosol containers must be packaged under Publication 52, (PUB 52) part 342.
http://pe.usps.gov/cpim/ftp/pubs/PUB52/pub52.pdf
Mailable Flammable and Combustible Liquids The following are mailable: a. Paint or a related item (UN1263) classified as a flammable or combustible liquid is generally acceptable for mailing provided the material can qualify as a consumer commodity material, or ORM-D (for surface only), and is sent within the quantity limitations and packaging requirements stated in 343.21 or 343.22, as applicable. Also see 343.26. Mailpieces must be prepared following Packaging Instruction 3A or 3B in Appendix C, as applicable.
Good luck …
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
