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I said I’d try posting numbers so here they are. I’ll see if I can get into a habit of doing it on Mondays. A little back story. I’ve sold on eBay for many years, probably since 2008 or so, never full-time. About a year ago I made a huge change and went full time, but not selling on ebay, I started my own IT business. My wife works full time in accounting and her salary pays our bills and provides health insurance. The plan was to sell off the ebay inventory as well as a ton of items in my garage to cover costs for the IT business until we got a few customers and then shut down the ebay store. A year later, we have a handful of IT business customers that cover the bills but I really enjoy selling on ebay and can’t give it up! I sold off a bunch of my personal model trains, mostly stuff from when I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s but I learned that I enjoy selling that stuff and it sells well. I buy large lots on social media and online and then part them out. Currently I’d say about 200 items in the store are model trains but it is a majority of what sells day to day. We follow a strict regimen of listing at least 7 items every day and have a large back-log of drafts that we pull from on days that we don’t make new listings. We are definitely in “growth” mode and don’t generate a ton of profit but I think that will change once we reach our goal of selling at least 10 items a day.
Week March 20-26, 2022
Total Items in Store: 532
Items Sold: 26
Gross Sales: $656.42(including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $361.40 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $74
Cost of helpers: 0
Highest Price Sold: $140 (steam train locomotive)
Average Price Sold: $25.25
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $215.05
Number of items listed this week: 52I actually got turned onto Daily Refinement about 6 months ago and while I have zero interest in doing clothing like him I will say there is some good advice in there if you are serious about building a big eBay business. His advice about building up a bank of drafts and posting a consistent number of listings every day has worked great for my store. We used to spend all week getting a big lot of listings ready to go all at once. We would have decent sales for a few days and then things start to slow down. Now we follow his daily model and have nice consistent sales all week. We still sell more on weekends of course but it’s always nice to see stuff selling consistently day in a day out.
I never used GoDaddy Bookeeping but I have been using Quickbooks online for about a year now for my eBay business. The base package is $25/month and I suspect a lot of ebay sellers could get away with this one. The big “gotcha” of the $25/month version is that you can’t do proper inventory item tracking. Not a big deal for an ebay reseller who just buys random one-off stuff and your “inventory” is more of a generic dollar amount you spend each year rather than a list of individual items but for my IT business I needed to track parts inventory and that bumped the price up to $80/month which is a bit excessive I feel. There is another online bookkeeping package out there that is gaining popularity called Zoho Books. I have several small businesses I do IT work for that use it and say it’s cheaper than Quickbooks. I’ve never used it but could be a more affordable option.
Nice to see this group is still active. I popped in because I was considering posting weekly numbers, I’ll try to start next week. We are selling mostly model trains if you can believe it!
Jay and Ryanne,
Whether you know it or not you guys have truly been one of the biggest and best influences in the eBay reselling community over the years. From “list it and forget it,” “set a high price,” having “FU Money” and of course “Always be listing!” Your “eBay Mantras to Live By” have inspired us all to keep at it and not give up. A lot of us have followed you for many many years, from your early days with Mike and Wendy talking about sustainable living, renovation of your first vacation rental, Traveling abroad while still selling on eBay, your podcast about running an AirBnB business, building your own storage building, hiring your first eBay helper employee, Jay’s love of the scratch and dent store for cheap food to “eat on” and now running a cafe and coffee roaster business I appreciate you allowing us all to live vicariously through your many adventures.
I very rarely block people so the ones on the list probably need to stay there. As Elle mentioned most users I block are ones who harass me about an item. I honestly love eBay for this feature. I have worked more than my fair share of retail jobs and the ability to basically tell somebody “I’m sorry but I’d rather not have your money than deal with you” is something I probably wished I could say dozens of times at those jobs.
I’m honestly not sure how eBay reports the income to the IRS, this year will be the first year my gross sales are high enough to trigger their issuing of a 1099 and in past years I just manually tracked my income/expenses with a spreadsheet. Even if they only report the money made after the deducted fees it’s still a bit annoying as my records will not reflect true gross sales but rather some variation between gross and net. I guess I’ll have to ask my accountant about that and see what she says.
Wow, this is actually just what I was looking for today! The summary download lists all the ebay fees so now I can hopefully plug this into my monthly business expenses. The detail download on the other hand is a pretty ugly csv file. I’m guessing that csv file could be fed into some other program that was written specifically to suck all that data in and use it to automate things a bit more.
So, I heard last week’s podcast comments and it sounded like Jay was curious how things have been going. I’d love to give him a big success story but the reality is that COVID really screwed things up for a while.
My brother ended up getting sick shortly after my last post, he’s OK now but seems to have had a few relapses. We never were able to confirm if it was COVID-19 because you had to be in the hospital on your death bed to get a test back then and luckily he was just bed-ridden for a few weeks. My job and my wife’s job sent everybody home for about 2 months. My home office is were I do all my ebay work and it pretty much got taken over by all my wife’s paperwork for her accounting job and toys from our 3 year old who we also had to watch while working form home. So, basically no ebay work was happening.
Things have settled down on that front now. I shipped things when they sold over the last 4 months but just listed my first items last week since March. My brother also just started helping me again. I still have the storage unit and it’s still eating up a good chunk of the profits from the few things that sell each month but the wheels are turning again for the first time in a while.
I also did a side-job with a co-worker setting up all the IT equipment for a new grocery store last month, they bought one of the bankrupt Lucky’s Market locations with everything in it and we pulled a ton of computer equipment out of there that the new company wasn’t going to use. PCs, laptops, cash register computers, wireless access points, servers, a complete phone system… it’s all in the storage unit now and I’m starting to list it.
I just read the latest article in the Wall Street Journal about this and its very disheartening. I love selling on eBay but to read that executives lashed out so childishly at small-time critics makes me feel conflicted about using the platform. I’m also very surprised that nobody internally put a stop to this until law enforcement got involved.
Yep, I get these once in a blue moon as well. I feel like ebay has this unshakable stigma that everybody on there is trying to scam you so as soon as something goes wrong people jump right off the deep end and start yelling SCAM! SCAM! The fact that your buyer did a total 180 once you offered a reasonable explanation is actually proof they probably are not “crazy” just maybe not the brightest bulb in the box 🙂
While I agree that people are too quick to throw good stuff away I also feel like companies encourage this behavior by making new things of low quality that can’t be easily repaired. In the computer industry I think ink-jet printers are a prime example of this. They are made super cheap to get people to buy one and start spending money on the enormously overpriced ink. Then, when the printer breaks a year or two later there is no way to get parts and a new is even cheaper so it just gets tossed. I actually have some customers who buy a particular model printer knowing it will only last about a year. Then when it breaks they just buy another one because a “good” printer costs so much more than the cheap junk ones.
Jay,
The storage unit should be gone by the end of March, we are down to the last dozen computers and some extra bins of loose items. My brother is about the same as me on space, he has room for a small pile of computers that are actively being worked on but not space for everything that’s in that storage unit at once. The number of computers I get from work probably averages out at like 3-5 per week which is a very manageable number once we get through the glut.Here are the numbers for February
FEBRUARY
Computer items listed: 43
Computer Items Sold: 26
Most interesting sale: Dell Inspiron Laptop $85
Total Gross Sales: $935.62
Cost of Goods Sold: $47.00
Shipping Fees Collected: $170.79
Shipping Fees Paid: $191.41
*Estimated* Ebay and Paypal fees: $148.82
Storage Unit Rent: $167.98
Money Paid for Helper: $145.00
Carryover fees from previous months: $182.79
Total estimated income after fees, wages and rent: $223.41Good news, I’m finally in the black! Bad news, it’s going to take until the end of March before the storage unit can finally go away. We are starting to get stuff moving a little faster but it was definitely a learning process.
One of the logistical challenges we had to overcome is that my brother lives in the middle of the city, about a 40min drive with traffic from my house in the burbs. We had to come up with a weekly process of getting assembled, untested, uncatalogued computers to him and then get the torn down, labeled and cataloged parts back to me for photographing, storage and listing. Overall it’s working well now and he can get through 6-10 computers (about 20-30 items) per week in his spare time. I’m hoping this will get our monthly listed items up to something more like 100 for March instead of the 20-40 I’ve been doing so far.
I’m also starting to learn what items are the best sellers and which ones are duds. Motherboard+CPU+RAM combos do very well and can go for as much as $100. We have stopped selling these items individually as much as possible and instead just pull the complete set out of the computer and sell it all in one bundle. CD-ROM drives on the other hand are pretty crummy sellers. Unless there is something special about the drive the cheapo DVD+RW drives that come in most home computers just don’t sell.
Getting rid of most free shipping was the right thing to do. Things are moving a bit slower but the good stuff still sells well and now when it does I’m not losing 20%-30% of the sale to shipping fees. Overall, with almost $1,000 in gross sales for the month I’m pretty pleased. Here’s hoping I can turn that into something closer to $1,000 profit next month.
Jay,
The used computer parts category seems to have more than 50% of the items offering free shipping so I figured I had to do the same. Based on the last several months though I’m backing off that strategy and only doing free shipping where I can put the item in a flat rate box or send it first class, that way I have a good idea of what the shipping cost will be and build it into the price.As for the storage, I could probably store 10 or so computers at a time in my house but any more than that it would be too much. My regular ebay inventory already takes up a whole wall in my garage and living in Florida means no basement and deed restrictions in my neighborhood mean no sheds allowed in the backyard. I have shelving in my home office that I cleared out to store the parts once the computers are disassembled so I think the plan is to really push to get as many disassembled as possible this month.
