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@Retro Treasures WV How often do the lots you get have items that go for $20+? My biggest complaint with my current train sourcing is that most of the items are in the $10-$15 range and I really want to boost our average sale price.
“Currently this impacts only a select group of buyers” I’ll be interested to see if it helps for you Jay. I already had it on and I still get deadbeat buyers from time to time but not in the quantity that you guys do I think. I find that if I send the buyer an offer and they accept it they almost always pay however if I accept an offer from a buyer there seems to be a higher likelihood of them never paying. It’s almost like people like to fool around and see if you will even accept their offer, but then when you actually do they change their mind and decide they don’t really want the item.
Total Items in Store: 635
Items Sold: 40
Gross Sales: $916.06 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $486.26 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $106
Highest Price Sold: $35 (set of vintage brass train tracks)
Average Price Sold: $22.90
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 75A little late with the numbers. Mondays are always hard because of our shipping volume and the IT business is always busy on Mondays too. Overall sales were very blah, not as many sales. Lots of people wanting stuff for 50% off and not many multi-item orders. Meanwhile my main online source for train inventory is getting kind of crazy on prices and there isn’t another train show in the area until the end of the month. I might need to step up my marketing efforts to try to buy local private collections. I did take a bit of a gamble on a big lot of plastic kids thomas the tank engine stuff from a Japanese company called Tomy and I’m finally getting around to listing it. So far the sales prices look good, should be able to turn a $30 box into $300+ so maybe Tomy/Tomica stuff might be something I add to my catalog. Another brand I’m interested in testing is Brio wooden trains. I have a bunch of it in storage from when my son was into it and I’m tempted to sell it as a test to see how fast it moves and at what price.
On the topic of promoted listings. I do 1% promoted listing ad rate for all my items all the time and it seems to make a huge difference in the amount of traffic my listings get. I pay attention to my traffic report a lot and 80% of my sales are from promoted listings.
Total Items in Store: 605
Items Sold: 44
Gross Sales: $1,190.07 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $630.11 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $59.40
Highest Price Sold: $95 (cisco switch)
Average Price Sold: $27.05
Returns: 1 (cisco switch)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $140
Number of items listed this week: 60It felt like a good week because we were selling a lot but our items are fairly low dollar so the net was not quite what I had hoped. Still selling some computer equipment here and there, three more Cisco switches, this time they were given to us from a local telco company that the IT business partners with. One of the 3 got returned due to us not properly describing the extent of the corrosion on some of the ports. The high return shipping cost and it being our fault I just gave them a full refund and told them to pitch it, so that hurt a bit. I did get to visit another train show and that is where the $140 was spent on a bunch of train cars and some other random scenery items and track. I’m finding that many of the dealers at these train shows appear to be retired guys that maybe are supplementing their retirement income selling used trains. They tend to get pretty excited when I offer to buy a whole box of stuff so I think that will be my strategy going forward, look for somebody who has a large box of a particular item and offer to buy it all for a good discount. I even got a deal on a box of items from a large local train shop who claimed he “does not negotiate on price” but with a little bit of friendly insistence he just couldn’t resist the chance to clear out a whole box of random kits.
eBay is proving useful for my IT business too. Refurbished computers are super popular with small business owners on a budget and I like selling them because I can mark them up a lot more than new computers. I used to buy all my refurbished computers on Amazon but ebay’s new computer refurbisher standards has made it a lot less risky, and cheaper, to buy my refurbished PCs on ebay now. I picked up 3 Dell Optiplex 7060’s for $350 and sold them to a customer for $650 and bought a Latitude 5090 for $300 and sold it for $500. The real money in IT is always the labor and monthly service contracts but it’s nice to make some extra $$ on the sale of the hardware too.
Total Items in Store: 593
Items Sold: 36
Gross Sales: $1,501 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,056 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $198.00
Highest Price Sold: $385.00 (Synology Rackmount NAS)
Average Price Sold: $41.71
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $112.00
Number of items listed this week: 60Sales did seem to pickup this week which was good since I didn’t have any more $1,300 cisco switches to sell to save the week. We did sell one other piece of computer equipment on consignment for $385 but that is now the last of that stuff. On the model train side of things I’m working on trying to grow the number of repeat customers and multi-item orders we get. Most model train purchases are low dollar $10-$15 items but it’s very common for the person to be looking for multiple items. 95% of model train sellers on ebay do not offer free shipping so the value in shipping discounts is very large as a percentage of total purchase price. So far I’ve just done basic stuff like rebranded our ebay store to be model train focused using store categories to break down the inventory into type and scale, all non model train inventory got shuffled into an “other” custom category. I also created a basic text-only item description template that emphasizes the value in combining shipping on multi-item orders and removed immediate payment requirements from all the model train items so the buyer has the opportunity to request a combined invoice before they have to pay for an order. In the works are plans to start using coupons to entice buyers to purchase more than one item and maybe even some sort of monthly newsletter that highlights new items like the large collection of vintage train car kits that I bought at the train show a week ago or links to articles from master modelers that highlight how to use the inexpensive vintage stuff we sell to make low-cost but high end looking models.
I feel the pain. Florida is a pretty bad location to ship things on a nationwide scale. I honestly gave up on offering shipping options. I’ve gone to a flat $4.50 on first class items. Sometimes I make a little extra and sometimes I lose depending on the weight. For anything over a pound it’s calculated priority and anything over 3 lbs is FedEx ground. I’m sure I lose a few sales but I’m sure I win a few too. I sell a ton of stuff to buyers here in Florida, especially the Miami area.
Wow, this is really sad. While I’m not a fan of those pay for coaching groups that a lot of these big youtubers push I saw him as a guy who had a very good work ethic and had managed to build a nice business for himself. Really a shame he risked his business for such a shady low margin deal. As for him being “finished” I’m sure he’ll pop back up in some form or another.
I agree that sales were in the toilet this past week. We had a big sale of some networking equipment we sold on consignment for a friend but that pretty much saved the week. We split the profit (after eBay fees and shipping costs) with the friend 50/50 so that is why our cost of goods sold is so high. On the sourcing side of things I decided to attend a local train show on Saturday. It’s been many years since I went to one of these and never went with the intention of buying to resell so it was an interesting experience. Most of the vendors at these shows are pretty old-school and it was refreshing to see how willing they were to haggle and give large lot discounts. I ended up purchasing a whole bin of 40 old HO train car kits for $2 each and these will sell for anywhere from $12 to $25 each so I consider that a win. There is another show in two weeks and I think I’ll be going to see if I can do even better.
Total Items in Store: 566
Items Sold: 27
Gross Sales: $2,227.85 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,765.76 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $825
Highest Price Sold: $1,350 (lot of 3 cisco network switches)
Average Price Sold: $82
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $133
Number of items listed this week: 55They used to say here in Florida was one of the best places to go for cheap living but the last two years have put the final nail in that coffin. I live in the Sarasota area and 400k-500k is the price of admission now for a reasonable (not a dump) 3 bedroom house. Property taxes will set you back 3k-4k on that house and everything from car insurance to medical insurance costs more here than other parts of the country. I’d love to move to Tennessee, my in-laws live in Chattanooga and that area between Chattanooga and Knoxville seems to be pretty and affordable. Problem is, my wife works for country clubs and Florida is one of the best places in the country for that.
I’ve actually been thinking about getting a setup like this for photographing model trains. I’m not so sure I want to do video but I think it makes a lot of sense for me. Right now I put the train on a piece of track in my photo booth, take a photo, then take the train off the track, rotate the track, put the train back on the track to get a photo at a different angle.
Now I think kids don’t get into it often, they just play video games. Older guys, once they retire and have free time do get into the hobby and they want quality stuff so prices are very high which makes for a very big market for used items at a discount price.
I’ve listened to a good amount of his stuff and I’d say its pretty likely that he has heard of this community. He used to be what he calls an “everything” seller before he decided to focus on just clothing and seems pretty in tune to the reseller community so my guess is he’s listened to Jay and Ryanne a few times. I’m not a big fan of his coaching “club” that you have to pay a monthly fee for but I do enjoy his perspectives as a more volume focused reseller.
Total Items in Store: 541
Items Sold: 50
Gross Sales: $1,068.80 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $634.23 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $80
Highest Price Sold: $92 (large lot of train cars)
Average Price Sold: $21.38
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $45.16
Number of items listed this week: 49Sales “felt” slow but 50 items sold seems decent. Our average sale price is pretty low so we really need more like 100 sales per week to see some decent profit. We are slogging through a bunch of old death piles of electronics which is slowing our listing down but I’m hoping to kick it into high gear and do 10-15 items listed per day once we get all the electronics done in a few weeks. I’m also exploring new sources for model trains. Right now I am just buying them online but estate sales are big business here in Florida and I bet I can make a relationship with a few of the bigger local estate sale companies so they just sell me all the trains from an estate. Also considering advertising in some of the local rag-mag coupon books. Model trains is an old man’s hobby and while it sounds morbid I have a feeling there are plenty of recent widows who are looking to sell their late husband’s collection.
Wow, I clicked the link to create a buyer group that was in that article and already I like the added information. 688 total buyers and 16 repeat buyers in the last year, I guess there is nowhere to go but up from there 🙂
