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My big “eBay” related events this week were purchases rather than sales. I made some long needed purchases to help my business. First, I bought a Jiffy-2000 garment steamer. It’s much better than tumbling clothes in the dryer over and over again and light years better than the crappy travel steamer I used to have that barely made a dent in wrinkles.
The 2nd purchase was an ESDDI light kit consisting of 2 stands, 2 lights, 2 bulbs and carrying case. It was $55 so affordable for what I got. My house does not get much in the way of natural light. I was hoping the lighting kit would work miracles on the many clothing items where I just can’t seem to capture the garments’ true colors. These helped somewhat but aren’t the miracle I was hoping they’d be.My current full time gravy train job is coming to end. It was originally a 3 day assignment that ballooned into a year and half. Great pay, got to work from home but they owned ALL my time. I seriously can’t even take a shower without having my phone within arm’s reach. I’m relieved to be almost done with the job but also a little freaked out because I got used to that nice paycheck. Its motivating me to ramp up the eBay business a little more than before. I have great ideas to help with my listing efficiency but not sure I have the self discipline to follow the plan.
I don’t know how one would go about authenticating that stuff. There is a large prop house in Atlanta that sells off its excess props about twice a year – I’ve never gone to their sales.
I have found that if a famous actress wears something such as a dress in a scene or even out in public, dresses just like it will sell for a lot more on Ebay. Years ago when I was a rookie to eBay I had a basic H&M dress on auction (back when thats how most of us sold stuff). I got a message asking me to sell it to a buyer immediately and to mail it express as it was going to be a “gift” to a friend. I was naive. I removed the auction and sold it to her only to discover later that it was the same dress as one worn by an actress in the Vampire Diaries. I could have probably sold it for $200 instead of $20. The buyer resold it for big profits.
Yes! I don’t know how the full time crews can do that every single day! They are almost always on set a minimum of 14 hours. They might be outside in 100 degrees for days, working a day shift one day and then overnight the next. And I don’t think the base pay is that good. It’s all the extra pay the unions negotiate that earns them their money: time and half after 8 hours, double pay after so many hours, extra pay if they don’t get 10 hours off between shifts, extra pay if they don’t break in time for lunch etc. I was once on a horrible set for 20 hours. I think the crew were getting quadruple pay at that point. Me and the other lowly extras were only getting time and a half.
Crazy good tax incentives. More projects are currently filmed in Georgia than anywhere else in the world, including California. A few large companies have even built massive studios here – Marvel, Tyler Perry, etc.
Up here in NW Georgia (Rome) they just finished 5 days of filming 4 miles from my house on Saturday. We have a fairly new highway loop that barely gets any traffic so its been used a few times for different movies. I drove my car in it for 2 of the days they were filming, including this last Saturday. The pay stinks but I got to see Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper up close and personal. It’s the first set I’ve worked on in almost 2 years, I took a hiatus because the pay is not worth the crazy long hours and unpredictable working conditions. But this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on a Clint Eastwood movie and it was only 4 miles away.
Whenever possible I try to keep one souvenir from each set I work on (nothing stolen) such as a script page thrown away by a production assistant, a parking pass, name lanyard. I don’t dare sell them on eBay – i’d be banned from every set for life if I did and got caught.
Doublythumbs, thank you for posting the link to the ebay photo scanning tool. It found a few listings that I had missed in my initial assessment. Gonna fix them now.
Much appreciated.
Good sale on the Anthropologie bedding, ChristineR. I love flipping Anthro. There is a last-chance Anthro store 4 hours from me in Augusta, GA called The Final Cut. I really need to go to it someday. A Posh reseller recently posted a youtube video of her shopping there. It’s like the goodwill bins but for Anthropologie brands.
Love the photo for today’s podcast. Your CSA story reminded me of when I lived in the DC area. In the summer we’d drive to Rehoboth Beach, DE. There were tons of fruit/veg stands along the way. We’d always stop for some fresh locally grown produce until I noticed that many of them were just buying their products from the grocery store – they wouldn’t even remove the fruit stickers half of the time.
My eBay summary page is showing that my sales are down 42% from this period last year and I can definitely feel it. My plan is to devote a little more time to listing this week. I’ve been slacking and the numbers show it.
After yesterday’s eBay photo fiasco I dipped my toe into Poshmark waters. I posted 3 items that I feel are good brands for that market (higher end brands that appeal to younger women). I really don’t understand why Poshmark makes all of its sellers “follow” each other and “share” each other’s items. It seems that doing so just causes whatever item that was just “shared” to be immediately buried by the 1000s of other items being shared at that same moment. I saw one buyer that has followed over 700,000 other Poshmark users! How does she have time to do anything else? I’m not going to participate in all of that. I figure if someone wants my item, hopefully they’ll find it by searching the key words. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Best eBay sale this week was $120 Wedgwood Oceanside Covered Casserole dish that I’ve had listed for 2 years. I used to sell a lot of dishes but have gotten away from it. It’s not worth all of the time it takes to pack it nor all of the space it takes to store.
Another good sale was $69.99 for a Ted Baker dress that I bought from Bargain Hunt for $7. I always get excited when I find Ted Baker. It sells fast for good $. I think it gets passed over at thrift stores because regular shoppers don’t understand that Ted Baker uses vanity sizing (i.e. Ted Baker size 4 is like a reg size large).
If you have Amazon Prime you can save limitless photos to Amazon’s cloud. Videos however are limited to maybe 10. I downloaded the free “Prime Photos” app from the app store to my iphone. Its also available for android phones, that’s what my husband uses.
You can set it up to automatically upload photos from your phone to Amazon whenever you’re connected to wifi. The first time it took awhile for all of the photos to get uploaded as I had about 2,000 on my phone.Joe, your comment saved my day! I didn’t want to wait and see if eBay will be able to repopulate the photos. I had 37 listings affected and was able to recover photos for all but 1 listing. It took me about an hour and a half to find and save the photos for those items. It would have taken me days if I would have had to go back and photograph everything.
While going through this exercise I came across a few interesting things.
1. Of those items that have the “This listing hasn’t had any sales in 16 months” eBay notice – those items did not appear on the US Ebay site when I did the Google search by item number but fortunately since I have global shipping, they did appear on some of the foreign ebay sites. Had I not had global shipping on I wonder if my google searches on those items would have resulted in zero hits? Time to finish updating those stale eBay listings!
2. There are some third party sites that pull in some of my listings, such as “Picclick” and 2 or 3 others. It doesn’t appear that those sites are drop shipping and they’re not increasing the price of my item. Perhaps eBay gives them a cut if they direct traffic to the item on ebay?
3. A few times the green arrow didn’t appear so I couldn’t click to view the cached photos. In those cases I was able to google the item’s title to find a link that did have a green arrow in all but 1 case. For that listing I’ll have to just retake that listing’s photos if eBay isn’t able repopulate it themselves.
4. I had 2 listings which had the exact same item number as another listing. I don’t know how that happens or what if any issue it could cause so I’m going to end those 2 items and sell similar.
I sorted by time left. The GTC that just turned over within the last 12 hours or so, were fine. It was the ones that turned over 2 days ago until about 12 hours ago that were missing photos. Fortunately that ends up being “only” 37 listings out of 923. But if I have to retake those photos it comes out to 444 pictures. Have now set my phone to automatically back up all of my photos to Amazon Prime and to apple icloud so that I’ll never have to worry about retaking photos again. Of course, who knows what the next ebay glitch will end up deleting.
Worse than the deleted photos is that Ebay isn’t copping to it, which in my experience isn’t unusual for them when there have been issues of this magnitude. Radio silence from them. One seller on another forum said that after getting irate they were able to get the poor CS rep (would not want their job) to refund them their store fees for a month.
I wasn’t paying attention to this thread until this morning and what a mess! If I have to retake photos for dozens of listings I’m gonna lose it. I’m de
finitely maybe going to sign up for SixBit now; never really saw the point in spending the $ on it before. Lesson learned: always have a back up!
