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Paul,
It’s obvious you are very dedicated and able to work a flexible schedule. I’d love to hear more about your finds at estate sales. As you’ve pointed out the nice stuff at estate sales seems to be too pricey for my taste but I never though about the box lots of stuff they deem “junk”Welcome Paul!
I’m curious how you manage the kids plus list. Maybe it gets better as the kids get older? I have a 5 month old son and when he is sick and has to stay home from daycare with me my productivity drops to almost zero. I’d love to get rid of that $700 a month daycare bill though!Those sound like some pretty awesome thrift stores. I seem to be both blessed with a huge abundance of thrift stores in my area and cursed with an alarming trend of stores individually researching and pricing every single item.
I’m currently really into sourcing shoes so I did a little bit of research last week. I went to ALL the thrift stores within about a 10-15 mile radius of my house and each time I visited one I marked it on my Google maps app on my phone and made some notes about shoe prices. This project took 2 days and when I was done I had about 20 stores marked and only maybe 3-4 that actually had shoe prices I could stomach. The rest of the stores individually priced ALL their shoes or had super high flat prices. Many stores seem to have a system where all the junk shoes are a flat $4-$5 but then anything decent is priced as high as $30! Ironically Goodwill which is definitely in my “Hell no hole” category was actually kind of in the middle as far as shoe prices go. On one of their special 1/2 off sales it might actually be worth buying shoes there. The worst offenders were “charity” chain stores such as St. Vincent De Paul and a number of reseller shops that seem to cater/prey on bored snowbirds that have never heard of this thing called eBay. The “Honey Hole” stores were several church stores that operate in a spare room at one of the local churches. These often had flat $3-$5 prices on shoes but they are so small that visiting them more than once every few weeks would be a total waste.
I’d love to hear the types of thrift stores that are “honey holes” in your area. Here in Florida it seems the big stores all have to charge high prices to pay their rent while the church stores get free rent and just want to make a few extra bucks for the church so the prices are much lower but so is the volume.
I also use a spreadsheet. If you don’t already own Excel you can also use something free like Google Sheets. In fact I’m pretty sure people have pre-made templates available for free on Google Sheets for calculating eBay profits.
Regarding “how low can you go” I know my profit margins after COGS and fees tend to be around 50-60% and I keep that in mind when picking stuff up. I know I don’t like selling items for less than $20 because like you said I feel $10 is about my minimum ROI on an item. Still, if I have an item that I can’t seem to sell after several years I’ll gladly take whatever I can get to clear it out so long as I’m at least covering my shipping costs and fees. If I can’t even do that then sometimes I just de-list an item and get rid of it.
I’ve sold several revere ware pans with uneven bottoms but they are quite a bit harder to sell. Also, it seems the market for the traditional copper clad pans has really taken a dive recently. Pans that I used to sell for $30+ now I struggle to sell for $15. I’ve actually stopped sourcing them due to this.
RevivalWares, how are you progressing? Had a chance to flip anything yet? I have to say I’m really impressed that I’ve already sold a few of the items I picked up out of the trash! I’m going to work on finishing a video tonight to post tomorrow. Next week I’ll hopefully have a synopsis of what sold and I already have plans to go to a church rummage sale this Saturday to spend my earned cash on new items to flip and also to do sourcing for my normal eBay business. I plan to use my iPhone and selfie stick to get more footage at the rummage.
To get a “custom” email address you need two main components. The first One is a “domain” basically the http://www.whateveryouwant.com address. Registering a domain usually requires an annual fee to a registrar like godaddy or hostgator. I pay about $20 a year to godaddy for my domain. Then once you have a domain you need your email “hosted” someplace. Most registrars will do this too for an additional monthly fee. I pay google $5 a month for a business google drive account and that includes hosting one email address as well as things like 30gb of storage for all my eBay photos and business docs.
Quick update, Friday is one of two trash pickup days in my neighborhood so I went out this morning and found some interesting stuff. The camera glasses kept shutting off when I tried to record, but iPhone + selfie stick saved the day and I got a little bit of footage. I hope to edit together an intro to go with the footage and get a video up on YouTube for next Wednesday. I’m also going to list the items on a local Facebook yard sale group and hopefully I’ll have a little bit of cash in my pocket to do some more sourcing with next week!
Wow, I’ve sold thousands of video game items and never encountered anybody that offensive. I’d report his account to eBay and hope he gets banned, no seller should have to deal with that level of stupidity.
RevivalWares, I’ve actually been contemplating something like this for about a year now but focused only on video games. I even picked up a pair of special sunglasses with a mini camera in them with the intention of filming some of my thrift store and yard sale sourcing for this. Unfortunately my video game finds have been a lot less frequent in the last year so I never went forward with the idea. I’d love to do this challenge with you and focus on anything I can flip, maybe I’ll even get motivated enough to post video footage of my finds.
If you are selling items that have lots of competition on eBay then the flat rate boxes could be causing your items to be more expensive when you factor in shipping. I personally don’t find very many chances to use the flat rate boxes these days. Most stuff either does not fit in the box or is cheaper to ship another method such as regular Priority Mail or First Class.
Erik,
The insoles don’t seem to come out on the ones I picked up but I used a flexible tape measure and think I got a fairly accurate measurement. You are 100% correct about SAS shoes and old people, here in Florida every thrift store seems to have at least one pair and I do love selling them. I’m finding a lot of Sperrys and Florsheim oxfords/wingtips too. I think it’s interesting how different demographics produce different items. For instance I pretty much never find Red Wing Boots or just boots in general, hiking stuff is hard to come by too which is sad because I love selling hiking shoes.Jay,
I’ve looked up a few shoe charts and unfortunately a lot of them are pretty worthless because they often do not indicate what is being measured (insole, foot, outside of shoe) nor does it indicate whether its for mens or womens sizes which is pretty annoying. Best I’ve found is this one here https://www.tukshoes.com/pages/size-chart-1 Which leads me to believe its a womens size 7 based on an insole measurement of about 9 inches.Terri,
The style is “Bounce” and the insole looks to be about 9″ although its a little hard to measure since they are not the removable type.Honestly, if it’s good quality stuff $40 would be worth it even if it does not sell until next year. All the thrift stores in my area have all their Christmas stuff 50%-70% off this week and I’m making out like a bandit. High end stuff like Gorham, Mikasa, Lenox and vintage glass ornaments.
