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Incredible! Talk about going all in.
I love the story in the listing: “My grandpa was an Air Force pilot and this was his retirement nest egg.” Assume he died and his egg kept him safe till the end.
–From your video, it looked like many boxes of the same card. Will this make it easier to list? Or are most of the postcards unique?
–Do you have enough storage in your current space to safely store all these cards?
–When you say these cards may be worth $1-million, do you expect a big jump in income over a period of 2 years? 5? 10? How long tail are these?Their business plan is 100% a sweatshop, but if you have really good work instructions and hire people to run it for you, you can focus on the areas that are enjoyable. In alot of their videos you can see his workers in the background taking photos. They don’t mess around!
That’s the way to do it. I’m impressed. I imagine they have a lot of staff turnover because that is a super grind of photographing and listing all day. Paying people even $15/hr (plus W-2 taxes) is likely not enough to keep people glued to a table month after month.
Have you seen a video where they discuss hiring and keeping staff? That’s where I assume much of their time goes.
This guy is a machine with 43k items. And it looks like he sells all “one of a kind” used items.
I cannot think how he has time to scavenge, list, do customer service, and ship.
Very true. If you focus on an easy-to-store niche (postcards, patches, hats, media, coins, stamps), then its much easier to have a huge inventory on your own.
But if you sell clothes or miscellaneous items like many of us do, I cant imagine building a 30k item inventory. We’re at 8k items and it’s a beast.
It’s exciting to see you build your pipeline. I know it wasn’t easy, but I think you’ve made it over the big gap.
Next step is you’ll be taking vacations while still make that same money every week.
I have never seen him at a sale or at the post office in this area.
If I were him, I’d be buying in bulk and having stuff shipped to me (buying estates, pallets of clothes, etc). Then, I’d arrange to have USPS do a pickup each day at my warehouse.
I met a guy at the thrift store this week who showed me that he had sold $31,000 on Mercari last month with 26,000 items. That is the largest store I have heard of personally – either here or in person. He also sells on ebay doing cross listing with Six Bit.
Only stores I’ve seen that size are sellers who have a warehouse and a staff. $31k sales in a month is impressive, but I’d be curious what how much it costs to sell that much (employees, building, utilities, etc).
Plus, Im sure there’s lots of variety within any niche that must be interesting. I’m sure its fun finding patch collections with rare ones.
It’s sure made Popeye Postcards successful with his deep dive into postcards.
I’ve definitely shared those feelings of wonder, and fear, as I’ve moved further and further into my trading cards niche. I know the ins and outs of what’s valuable and what’s not and why, so I don’t have the fear that prices are going to suddenly bottom out.
We got some great advice about a decade ago from an older seller. He said if you take 15 minutes to read a webpage or wikipedia article about an item/category, you probably know more about that topic than 50% of the planet. If you spend a couple hours doing internet research about that topic, you probably know more than 90% of people. And if you read a couple books or spend a week doing research, you probably know more than 99% of people on that item.
Lesson: it’s easy to become an “expert” because most people don’t take the time. Knowledge is really key to scavenging.
Craig, your posts always remind me that you make money because you’ve done those deep dives. Anyone could do it, but 99.9% of people will never know what you know about sports cards. That’s the barrier to entry.
I do low value/high volume and some people spend more time dealing with finding and processing high value/lower volume.
This is a great way to verbalize the choice. Spend time listing long tail items that are cheap and plentiful to find…OR spend time searching for rare and high dollar items.
But it’s all time. Havent found a short cut.
the lockdown when literally NOONE here was sick at all, they enacted work from home protocols, shifted schedules, spread out breaks/lunches etc. When we are TRULY in a severe outbreak…they do nothing.
As a close neighbor to you, I can attest that people are over the virus. Whether it’s because of their political beliefs or exhaustion from two years of having their life turned upside down. Seems people are all just assuming they’ll get the virus and rolling the dice with no vaccine. In our small county, there are several deaths a week to COVID. (Though people often say they died “with COVID” but actually died from other causes)
Glad you’re being safe.
I thought the same thing, but then learned that the US military dumps truckloads of used gear on the market every day. I’m sure it’s really crazy now that we pulled out of Afghanistan. When I was picking up lots at military auctions in my little Tacoma, I’d meet guys who picked up their buys in giant box trucks. They bought multiple pallets every week.
Here’s one seller I met. His store is right by one of the auction locations. Very low cost items in multiples. https://www.ebay.com/sch/alleghenyoutlet/m.html?item=391983552181&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.m3561.l2562
$4.60 with FREE SHIPPING!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/301841414909?hash=item4647267afd:g:urwAAMXQW7VRFJC1
Five years ago, there was a guy selling off his military surplus store. He had a back store room with stuff piled four feet high. You could get on top of the pile and walk across the room. He obviously just loved to buy auction lots and was a horrible seller.
We crawled through and bought a truckload of stuff…that ended up not being great stuff. Most of what he had was garbage, damaged, gross.
No idea what this guy’s store is like, but the US military (and other militaries) are selling containers of used equipment each and ever day. It’s overwhelming. Unless military items are truly antique or have some kind of provenance, most of it is generic and not very valuable. This has been our experience. We still have several racks of military gear we cant sell.
