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VT – I have Jay’s instructions for uploading images to this forum bookmarked here, in case it helps: https://www.scavengerlife.com/forums/topic/how-to-upload-a-photo-to-your-forum-post/
Sorry Amatino, I’ll have to go back and check for your email! I have 7 or 8 email accounts and since I almost never get email from anyone but retailers and spammers, I don’t check them often.
THANK YOU AMATINO for the prize you sent me!! (Hopefully I posted the image correctly so a picture of the prize shows up.) You really did not have to do that! You expend so much time keeping this group running and then you made(!) and sent me a prize at your expense! It is so thoughtful and wonderful and nice of you! I will hang my prize prominently in my eBay room to motivate me to keep on listing! Prize is shown next to Cookie, who deserves mention as she spent nearly every moment with me as I was listing – taking up a generous 1/4th of my desk space.
I have 43 listings again this week. I’m kinda surprised because it felt like I spent most of the week taking inventory. I’ve completed inventory on only 17 out of 90+ bins (Whaaaaaa!) My problem is as I go thru each box I’m adjusting prices, cross posting to other platforms, fixing listings or ending and donating the item if it’s been around for too long and no longer worth the hassle. Eventually I’ll need to just take inventory and worry about the listings later.
I saw the Freemont Exemption to the county business tax law but I’m not sure I qualify and I haven’t sent in an exemption request. I’m going to take inventory first and then see if my CPA can get me the exemption. Fingers crossed.
My listing goal for the year is to avg 33 listings per week which is approx what I listed last year.
I have been audited but not on my ebay business specifically. As others have said, it’s simply a letter you receive in the mail with them usually asking you to verify one of your deductions. It’s not like on tv where characters are running around collecting boxes of receipts. For me, I had a deduction that was under my former married name and I had to prove to them my name change in order to claim the deduction. This happened 3 years in a row.
Currently, I am waiting for the IRS to process my 2019 return. I filed a month early via Turbo Tax but the IRS says I never filed, even though I have a confirmation number stating that the return was accepted. Rather than just stating they didn’t get it, they sent a very confusing letter to me in July asking for some of the tax return but not all of the schedules and W-2s. I then heard nothing. After calling everyone at the IRS, I finally got someone to tell me that they are claiming they never got the stuff I faxed to them back in July. It’s crazy how tight lipped everyone at the IRS is about my OWN return. I feel like I only got the information I got, because I was super friendly and nice to one of the reps but it took me days of calling. The IRS is a mess.
It doesn’t make sense to me either. This is called a “Business Personal Property Tax”. By my count, this means one item gets taxed at least 4 times: Once when I pay sales tax when I purchase it, then my buyer pays sales tax when they purchase it from me, I pay income tax on what I make off of selling it and the county gets to tax it when it sits as inventory. Now imagine all the other times that one product was taxed along the line before it even gets to the point where I initially bought it (when it was imported into the country, at the wholesaler’s level, etc).
I called my CPA and he said yep, this was a real thing. I don’t know why the county suddenly sent me the notice this year when they never have in the past. I’ve been reading up on it and it appears that a lot of the bigger companies get an exemption from having their inventory taxed as an incentive to bring jobs into the county but so far it does not look like a tiny businesses such as mine qualifies. Surely there must be a threshold that has to be met but I don’t know yet.
43 listings for me this week. I was on target for much more but a migraine sidelined me yesterday and is doing it’s best to sideline me again today.
I’m not going to get to my monthly challenge. Saturday I got a notice from my county tax assessors office. They are taxing me on all of my ebay inventory, listed and unlisted. So while I have pretty good spreadsheets, I don’t keep track of the inventory until the item sells. That means this month I’ll be going thru approx 70 bins to take inventory of every single item. I looked into Easy Auction Tracker and I’m going to start using it to log every single item I bring into the house to sell.
I’m looking at their website right now, FAQs section. It says upto 5 Ebay stores can be added on one spreadsheet. They also have instructions for adding details about sales on other platforms but I’m not real clear on the process.
Retro – Let us know how the unfilled bubble wrap experiment goes. Can you use just any kind of hand pump? I’m wondering if the pump I use to fill the air mattress would work – I just plug it into the wall, no manual labor required. But maybe it would be more trouble than it’s worth so I’m curious how it turns out.
Ebay used to not offer the free shipping supplies and the store subscription price stayed the same.
I never expected Ebay to continue with the store coupons as long as they have. Eventually I’m sure they will get rid of it or at least reduce it. Can you imagine the uproar from sellers when that happens?
In 2021, in addition to the usual numbers I record, I kept track of where I purchased every item. Last night I spent some time analyzing the data. In total I had over 30 different places I sourced from over the year. I discovered that 25% of my profits for 2021 came from one epic estate sale haul! It was the estate of a clothing hoarder addicted to eBay auctions. It was probably a once in a lifetime estate sale but fingers crossed I’ll come across one again. After estate sales, items from an Amazon liquidation store accounted for 19% of my profits, followed by Goodwill at 11%. My least profitable sourcing location was the annual library book sale – maybe I’ll skip that one this year.
Wow Vintage Treasures! 9 miles is way too close for comfort for a fire storm such as that!
Amatino, if I pasted the Imgur link correctly you should be seeing a solution I found for some of my poly mailers. I didn’t want to spend more money on Ebay stuff so I saved from the recycle pile two old USPS priority 1095 boxes (the 15 x 12 x 3 size). I closed both ends of the box but not before cutting out a little section on the top near one end. This allows me to store the poly mailers flat and I can easily grab one poly mailer at a time. I use this for the 13 x 10 poly and I have one for the 15 x 13 poly. I write the size of the bags on the front end of the box. It won’t work for bags larger than that unfortunately but perhaps if I found a wider & longer flatish box it would work. I stack the two 1095 boxes on top of each other to save space. The boxes I’ve used have held up for several years.
