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I’m going to try posting more regularly, we will see how far I get.
Total Items in Store: 883
Items Sold: 52
Gross Sales: $1,825.71 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,130.21 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $120
Cost of helpers: $125
Highest Price Sold: $250 (n scale passenger car set)
Average Price Sold: $35.11
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $22
Number of items listed this week: 70May and June are supposed to be slow months for the model train business because winter is over and everybody is starting to think about doing things outdoors and not hiding in their basements building trains but I got a very nice life-line in the form of a massive collection purchase that should hold me over for the entire summer. I spent $1,550 on what has to be the biggest single buy I’ve ever done for ebay. Around 50 bankers boxes full of model trains, the entire contents of a train club that went bust, are now taking up a good portion of the front room of my office. The good news is there is probably several thousand items worth around $20K so I’m very happy. I managed to get a box of some of the nicer items listed and sold in short order and turned around what would have been a slow week. The icing on the cake, I did a private sale to a local collector today that I met in a model train Facebook group. I thought it was going to be a waste of time. I figured he would dig through my office, make a mess of the piles of boxes and then buy a few things. Turns out I was dead wrong, he bought $1,600 worth of trains in one swoop so now everything else I sell from that collection is profit!
@Lukastreasure
I actually got started by bidding on model train lots on shopgoodwill.com. It’s a bit tricky to get decent stuff at a low enough price (be very careful of the shipping fees) but persistence pays off. There is actually a lot of good stuff on there and while the prices are not always the lowest it’s a good way to source a large amount of one type of item and see if the category makes sense to base your resale business on it. Once I knew I had a winner, sales wise, I started exploring other ways to get the stuff. I tried national distributors, social media resale apps, flea markets, running advertising in local coupon booklets, talking to local train shops and going to swap meets for model trains. Honestly, getting out there and talking to people and making contacts was the best thing I did. I just called one of my favorite train show dealers yesterday, I told him I was getting low on train car inventory and asked if he had any to sell, not only is he going to hook me up with 100’s of items at a great price, he invited me out to appraise a private collection that he was contacted about and make an offer to buy it.
@Temudgin I honestly believe the future of reselling online is in finding a niche and cultivating dealer and customer relationships. For me, model trains made sense, I had an interest in the hobby and in Florida we have a lot of retirees with collections to sell and a lot of train shows where I can make connections with dealers and do bulk deals on inventory. Other parts of the country it may not make as much sense. I know there are other folks I see on YouTube that still make a decent living being an “everything” seller but for me in the Tampa/Sarasota area I really struggled with the item quality/price/sourcing time ratios. I’m also a firm believer in refining your processes to be as efficient as possible. Time is the one resource we all have the same amount of but cant ever get more of. Even within the model train niche I’m starting to drill down into certain categories that I can buy in the largest quantity at the lowest price and list/sell the fastest.
Hello fellow scavengers. It’s been quite a while since i’ve popped into this forum, hard to believe it’s been 1 year since I switched to selling just model trains. I’m still not making what I would consider to be a “comfortable” full-time income but I thought I’d share some numbers.
Total Items in Store: 896
Items Sold: 64
Gross Sales: $1,786.32 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,040.45 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $371.37
Cost of helpers: $125 (shipping helper paid flat $500 monthly)
Highest Price Sold: $228 (brand new train track sets drop-shipped from supplier)
Average Price Sold: $27.91
Returns: 2 (1 shipped 1 still waiting, maybe buyer will keep afterall)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 70Over the past year I’ve tried quite a few things, learned a lot and failed a bit. First, selling new model train merchandise on eBay is pretty much pointless. I went through the process of getting setup with one of the major model train distributors in the US and spent around $4,000 on new merchandise. The sell-through rate is super slow, even on items I researched the heck out of before I bought them and the margins are horrible, like sub 20%. I’ve still got around $1,o00 worth of items sitting on the shelf almost a year later. I just use the distributor for drop-shipping now, they will ship directly to the customer for a $4 fee and so far that has worked out fine but the sell-through rate is so low that I’m probably just going to delist the new stuff and stick to used.
As for used, the customer base on ebay is thriving and I’m selling almost as many items as I’m listing each week. I buy large lots and collections at train shows and I’m starting to make connections with local dealers in Florida that will sell to me privately at discounted rates. The margins are much better too, around 40%.
This past year I invested a lot of time into making my ebay store well organized with custom categories and banners, weekly newsletters and even use the new social media integration. I’m starting to reap the rewards from that in the form of repeat buyers and multiple item purchases. I’d say 20-30% of my business is repeat buyers now and every day I have several buyers buy multiple items. I do wish ebay made combined shipping easier though, right now I use a flat shipping price of $5 for >8oz, $7 for >16oz and $10 for 1-2lb. The multiple item purchases throw the shipping cost all out of whack and so I do a lot of custom invoices for combined shipping on multiple items. My buyers are super picky about shipping costs and many have unrealistic expectations on what it costs to ship things. I mostly stick to items under 1lb as a result.
Ok, enough brain-dump for one day. I wish I could be consistent posting numbers in here every week but between the ebay business and my IT business I’m always trying to do too many things at once.
I agree that the feedback system is mostly pointless. I turned on automatic feedback for buyers this year and am glad I don’t have to remember to leave the default positive feedback for every sale now. It also seems to be utilized more by older users. When I was selling lots of video games and electronics (young buyers) I would almost never get feedback. Now I sell model trains (lots of retirees) and almost 1 in 3 leave feedback. They do tend to leave those long paragraph feedback messages that Jay mentioned though.
Oh and regarding trying a different post office, that is possible but the post office is literally in the same business park as my office. It’s actually part of why I leased the office I have. Driving 10-15 min in traffic to get to a different post office when you have one across the street seems like such a waste.
When I worked out of my house I would pack at night after I got home from work and then schedule a pickup for the next day. The dilemma is you have to know how many first class and priority mail items you need picked up, it has to be exact. My mail carrier would actually leave packages if the count didn’t match the pickup request. That pretty much makes it impossible to schedule a pickup for my business because a good portion of items sell overnight and I don’t want to make those items wait another whole day just because they were not accounted for when I scheduled the pickup, not to mention the pain of going into the website and scheduling a pickup every single night. There has to be an easier way to do this, I can’t imagine bigger companies do it this way so how do they provide their packages to the post office? I feel like we are trapped in this middle-size purgatory, too big to do things like a retail customer but too small to be taken seriously as a big customer.
So the solution for now seems to be to ship using Pirate Ship on Mondays when we have 30+ packages. I brought them all the boxes and a manifest yesterday and the next PITA is that they refuse to answer the buzzer at the side door to give me a cart and want me to wait in the huge retail line every time just to ask for a cart to put my boxes and manifest in. I swear it’s almost like my Post Office is trying to make me switch to UPS.
Clarity,
Are you able to create that scan sheet even if you don’t use the bulk shipping wizard? I’m going play around with this a bit tomorrow but I thought you had to print all your labels at once in the bulk shipping wizard and that’s a no-go at the moment. We still pick, pack and weigh our packages one at a time. I’m starting to think I’m going to have to invest a bunch of mornings into rebuilding our shipping process.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they would get mad at us if we handed them an entire car-load of packages at the retail counter. This post office is not very friendly. I’ve thought about having the mail carrier just come pickup from us, not sure if there is a way to tell them to come every day without filling out the “schedule a pickup” form on the website every time. When I was working out of my house the local post office refused to show up unless I filled out that form every time, even though I had packages for them just about every day.
If we are talking bugs on the new listing tool I’d say my biggest complaint is that changing something as simple as the listing title or the store category will sometimes wipe out ALL your item specifics and you have to re-enter the same data all over again. I’ve also been having odd issues with drafts where the shipping policy and weight/dimensions get wiped out and it will not let me re-enter the data.
I’ve been using the “new” listing too for months, not sure how I got enrolled in it but we gritted our teeth and just dealt with it until now I don’t remember the old one. I’ve tried selling on iPhone in the past and it’s almost always a “limited” experience where I can’t get all the options I need. I use business policies, custom store categories, listing templates and item description templates so I have a lot going on in my listings though.
I have had a rash of no-pay buyers recently too. It’s frustrating since I hardly did any listing due to evacuating for the hurricane and sales are down as a result. I think the non paying buyers tend to fall into a couple of categories. I think a lot of them accept my offer because they get excited about the lower price, then realize they don’t have the money. Sometimes they send a message saying they will pay later in the week, sometimes they just say nothing. Then there are the ones who send low offers and then never pay when you accept the offer. These people I think are window shopping, they want to see if they can get something on a super deal but then change their mind when I actually agree to their price! Overall I do think ebay has cultivated a really bad situation by allowing this to go on so long, it’s kind of like lay-away but instead of there being 10 more of the same item on the shelf, buyers are tying up one-of-a-kind items so that you can’t sell it to the next guy until the process works itself out.
Wow, that is nuts. I used to resell video games that I bought at yard sales almost exclusively and never ever ever saw anything like that. I feel sorry for that poor lady having to deal with those idiots. There is a good reason I gave up that category, once I couldn’t walk up to a sale like a normal person and casually buy a box of games for $20-$40 any more I knew I had to branch out.
Your experience at the auction mirrored mine at yard sales on Saturday. Here in Florida yard sale season is just now starting to pick up and I have not been to hardly any since before the pandemic really. I’m finding more and more that people are pulling the best stuff to sell on the internet and just trying to dump their big furniture and worthless junk at yard sales. The best sale out of a dozen or so was one where the family was selling donated items to raise money for some sort of church mission. They had no emotional or monetary connection to the items so they were willing to sell for what used to be normal yard sale prices. Every other sale was either stuff priced with ebay prices or just total junk not worth buying.
