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My son is 6, I do intend to use it as a way to teach him the value of things and how to make money but he is still young enough that it can be a challenge. I took him to a train show a few weeks ago and he decided to announce to the dealer of the table that we wanted to buy his stuff to sell on ebay, lol!
I actually just started a 2nd store but maybe for a little different reason. My wife and son want to go on a cruise and I told them if we could flip stuff on ebay to pay for it then sure! Since my main store is now focused on model trains I figured it made more sense to open a separate store for this little side, side hustle.
To make it a bit of a learning experiment I decided to put some constraints on the store. We are limiting the storage space to a single plastic bin. Everything listed in the store must fit into this one bin. Once the bin is full, older stuff needs to get donated and unlisted. This will hopefully force us to discover small, fast selling items to list. We also are not allowed to spend any of our own money. We each “donated” old personal items that we wanted to get rid of and all future inventory will be purchased using the profits from the sale of these items. I’m also limiting the amount of time spent on the store to 5-6 hours a week, mostly on nights and weekends. I scheduled the first batch of items to go up this week, one a day, we will see if we get the necessary $2,000-$3,000 we need for the cruise by fall of 2023.
I hit the motherload at a local train show. Old guy had 3 tables full of assembled model train buildings with a sign that said “inventory reduction sale buy one get one.” I started picking out some of the ones I liked. Most of them were priced $4-$12 and after about a dozen I asked the guy how badly he wanted to get rid of the stuff. He said he had more bins of it at home that he didn’t even bring and said he’d sell me all the buildings for $1 each if I took them all home today. I said sure! We counted them all up and there was 298 of them, so $300 and a quick trip to walmart for some plastic bins and I’ve got inventory for the next month at least. Most of the buildings are HO scale and I usually sell them for $10-$30 depending on the size, condition and detail of the building.
I gave the guy my phone number and he gave me his. I told him I’d buy all the ones he has at home too as well as any other stuff he wanted to get rid of, we will see what becomes of that. I’ve started telling people at the train shows that I’m an online reseller and they don’t seem to mind, most of them thank me for buying such large quantities.
I sold a pair of these custom train locomotive kits for decent money.
HO Scale SD-24 Diesel Locomotive Hybrid Kit Custom Undecorated | eBay
The interesting part was that the owner of the company, Hobbytown of Boston, contacted me. I had mistakenly labeled the whole locomotive as being made by Hobbytown of Boston but they came out of a lot where the guy was a very skilled modeler and was “kit bashing” parts from multiple brands into one unit. The owner of Hobbytown offered to review some additional photos I sent him and he told me which parts of the locomotive kit were his and which were not. He is a very small niche dealer within a niche hobby but I’m going to attempt to see if he is willing to let me sell some of his items “NEW” as opposed to just when I get them in used lots.
@Jay For many many years I was a sporadic lister. I’d find the time to power through a chunk of items and get them all listed, then slack off and not list for a while. When I was just doing this more as a hobby that was fine. When I quit my day job to start my IT business I kept the ebay sales going and would get one good batch of items listed per week. I noticed that sales would be good for a few days, new items and old would sell, then kind of slow down to a trickle. The longer the period between listing, the slower the trickle became.
I came across the daily refinement guy and was really impressed with his sales volume. I figured I’d try his method and see if anything changed. Instead of pushing out all the items in one go, I made drafts and then would push out 5 a day, every day without fail. I wasn’t really listing that many more but was putting a consistent number up every day. I have to say this did make a difference! I was consistently selling stuff and not just the new stuff I listed. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve kept up with the daily listing method and at the same time my inventory has become more homogeneous as I’m only listing model train items. I have found that my daily sales will grow to be, on average, just a little less than what I list daily. When I was doing 5 a day, we quickly grew to selling 4-5 items a day but not much more. Now that I’m doing 10 items a day, we tend to average around 7-8 items a day in sales. What’s interesting is that the sales are very consistent. We do often get a bump on the weekends and when ebay as a whole is slow we sell less too, but it’s not uncommon for me to sell as many items on a Tuesday as on a Friday/Saturday. I can’t prove that listing every day automatically makes a lot more sales, there are other factors such as what I was listing and time of year that I can’t totally account for. But I can say listing every day sure makes the sales more consistent which I find helpful from a business perspective.
As for the Daily Refinement guy, I think he is focusing more on his “mentoring” business which is an aspect of him that I never was thrilled about. I think there is value in many of his methods and I can see why some people might be willing to pay for better access to his advice but it’s not for me.
So I finished the post card that I’m going to include in our packages. Here is a view only link to the finished project. It includes an ebay coupon on one side and a little thankyou message on the other.
Now I just need to figure out the most cost effective way to get it printed. Canva wants $50 for 200 of them which seems steep.
@Zach, what model Zebra printer do you have?
Do the free FedEx and UPS labels have their branding on them? Most of my items ship USPS First Class.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll have to check out the Rollo and Dymo options. Where do you folks get your thermal labels from? Are there any things to be carful of when buying them? I buy my half-sheet labels on ebay but have gotten burned a number of times with bad quality ones that get jammed or ones that are not laser printer compatible so the toner smears. I pretty much stick to known good vendors now.
@Jay the collector groups might be a good idea, thanks for the suggestion. Despite being part of the “millennial” generation (barely) and an IT guy I’m a social media luddite. I’m not even sure if I can interact with those groups through my business Facebook “page” or if I have to do it as me and just reference my business. I have to start doing the same thing for my IT business too, customer acquisition is my least favorite part of the business.
Total Items in Store: 872
Items Sold: 58
Gross Sales: $1,106.93 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $592.59 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $172
Highest Price Sold: $70 (Lionel Locomotive)
Average Price Sold: $19.09
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $172
Number of items listed this week: 70I’m terrible about doing this consistently but here are the numbers for at least last week. Overall sales have been pretty blah, July was worse but we are still not selling 10 items a day which is my goal. Our average sale price is still super low as well and will probably remain that way until I start getting some traction with buying higher quality items through private collections as opposed to getting all my inventory from online auctions. I’m working hard at building the online presence for the business. I setup a Wix website a little over a month ago and this past weekend I created a Facebook page. I’d like to do at least one other social media platform but I’m honestly not sure which one. Our target demographic is retired men and I have no idea what social media that demographic uses. My little brother calls Facebook “boomer book” and says only old people use it so I figured that was the first place to start!
I’m actually working on something like this right now. I use canva.com and they have tons of free templates as well as premium ones that cost money. I recently setup a website for the business on Wix so my plan is to include a little card in each package with a basic thankyou note, a coupon code and direct the customer to visit our website. I’m sure you could include some basic return instructions in the thannkyou note part if you wanted.
@AntiqueFrog, I’m not sure intentionally keeping the return process a secret is the best idea either but I do agree that maybe saying something generic like “if you have any issues with your item please contact us right away” might be a better way of doing it, at least it encourages the customer to reach out to you for help before they file a case with ebay.
Just listened to this episode and it’s actually more related to the recent bipartisan threat of regulation that has them scaling back. Sounds like Bezos put out a mandate that he wanted Amazon’s private label brands to have 10% of total sales on the platform. That directive caused an explosion of new products as the private label team tried to reach the 10% goal. Now that congress isn’t happy and is considering a bill that would prohibit Amazon from selling on it’s own platform they are re-evaluating what they are selling and questioning if it’s such a great idea.
Will, it’s great to see there are other resellers out there using social media to drive sales to their own website. I feel like this is the “next step” in any business that sells physical goods these days and as a reseller I see it as the key to being more platform agnostic.
Wow, this is great information Zach. I actually was contemplating setting up a Shopify site recently. My primary goal was to have a website for my business that I could use as a marketing tool to solicit that I buy model train collections, but I figured if I could sync a Shopify site with my eBay inventory maybe I could drive some sales through the website too. I signed up for a trial on Shopify and began the process of setting up the store and after a few hours invested over a couple of days I put the brakes on the whole project. The complexity of the setup and fields not carrying over from eBay to Shopify that you experienced are exactly the things that caused me to bail. I ended up settling for a much simpler, and cheaper, Wix site that accomplishes my primary goal and still has a basic “shop” link in the navigation menu that takes the person to my eBay store. I may have to revisit Shopify or the ecommerce features in Wix in the future as several model train distributors I’ve spoken with recently will only sell to dealers that have a brick & mortar store or a business website with a shopping cart like Shopify, they will not deal with you if you only sell on Ebay, Amazon etc.
