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As stated in my new years goals post, my plan is to average at least 40 new listings a week this year in order to really put a dent in my (neatly organized) death pile.
you mentioned continuing scavenging and listing those items right away. How many new items do you find each week these days?
When you come across a good sale, you got to go all in. I know we also make most our profit from specific valuable hauls.
Good to see you didnt run into any listings that might have been mysteriously removed. We also found that any bad listings were our own oversight.
Agreed. I think with ever changing technology and bad user interfaces, people want the TV they already knows works for them. Hey, I’m happy to help for a price!
So yeah, I have about 3500 unlisted items.
We currently list about 100 items a month. That’s almost 3 years of inventory for us!
How many items are you listing a month?
Out of all our community members that I know their numbers, you’re the most profitable one that also has a full time job (and big family). So you know you’re business.
Since you’re putting your goals out there, curious what your toleration for certain things are:
–You said you wanted to clear out all eBay from your garage, so where will it go?
–How much are you wiling to pay for storage per month? And for how many months?
–What’s the limit of listed inventory you think your storage can currently handle?
bro, you have a lot of unlisted inventory! If you get it all listed, do you have enough space to store it all? Storage really is key to business.
I’d put a moratorium on buying more items until you make a serous dent in what you already have. Is all that unlisted inventory quality and worth listing? Or do you need to cull the herd and redonate?
Totally understand. You do what you got to do. Like I mentioned, we drove up to an hour a day between storage areas each day getting inventory to ship. Our time eventually became more valuable.
Unfortunately, most HOA’s do not allow such things for those of us who live in neighborhoods.
It’s good to get involved in your HOA and become president. (Modern problems require modern solutions 🙂
Difficult to say. Maybe ask him for his address and call/chat eBay to see if the address is valid.
I agree that the stores that try online selling but don’t have the knowledge will crumble under the weight of unsold inventory. One local thrift store stopped selling to the public and went online. After a year, they pulled down their online store. I assume now just sell in bulk to other dealers or send more expensive items to other auction houses.
We’re in NYC for the week and are enjoying just scavenging on the street where people leave stuff out in front of their stoops. My kind of shopping.
We had an Oculus a couple years ago. Im sure they’ve improved but back then, there were no games/apps for it other than cheesy demonstrations.
Resident Evil in VR and Stereo sound would give me a heart attack.
Craig, I feel like you’re the perfect example of someone with the exact right history who has tapped into a specific niche at the exact right time . Sure, anyone could probably dig in and learn what you do, but it’d take time….and that person (like me) probably wont have the right combination of passion and previous knowledge.
Passion for the items you sell really cannot be overrated. This is why I’m always skeptical of people who run Amazon businesses where they sell products shipped from China. The numbers look amazing and maybe its all cool. But I imagine that without the passion, the business falls apart when problems arise (like any business will have). The passion is what sees you through.
Consider short term storage unit rental.
If you have the room on your property, have you considered buying/building a storage shed specifically for eBay? If you can decide that online selling is a long term business, the investment is worth it.
You’ve heard our story: We sold on eBay for almost 10 years and had our inventory spread out over three properties and two storage units. Not only were we paying rent on storage, we wasted a lot of time driving around to manage items. Plus our home was a storage area. In our defense, we’re cheapskates so it was what we needed to do to store thousands of items. Time was something we had in abundance. eBay as our life so we slept among our junk.
But then two things became important: our time + our living space. We wanted to wake up, walk 25 feet, get an item and ship it. We also wanted wake up and not have eBay inventory all over the house.
So we decided to spend $20k on a storage building behind our house. You could do it cheaper, but we decide to excavate a specific part of our land, pour a concrete pad, insulate, and run electric to a 40′ x 26′ metal building. We took out a Paypal Working Capital loan, so eBay profits paid for the building over two years.
Over 16 years, our “rent” is about $100/month for that building. It buys us our time, our clean house!, + our property is more valuable because everyone loves a storage building.
To me, it sounds like you’re at this point. Do you invest in your business? Or rent space because it may not be a long term business?
This doesnt surprise me. It’s similar to the auction houses now just selling online with local pickup. More eyeballs.
