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Milk Jugs: Way before I was an ebay seller, I would buy things on ebay related to my family history – I don’t collect milk jugs but one had my family’s farm name and advertising on it and I bought it. I think I paid $20 but I would have paid more.
In my family, we all use eBay to buy the things we want and need now. And we all have nicer wardrobes full of thifted items, I rarely wear something that I bought from a brick and mortar store.
On selling old photos: Long before I was an ebay seller I was an avid scrapbooker and family historian. Back in those days, I was buying old family photos on ebay and it was amazing.
My favorite find was a photo of my 2nd great grandmother, Annie, who I have a big charcoal drawing of but no photos. I know all about her life, she was in this religious revival cult in Maine called Shiloh and they had a thing for fasting and she was malnourished and died shortly after my great grandfather was born so after she died her sister drew the charcoal drawing of her so little Charles would know what his mother looks like. It is an amazing drawing and I have it hanging in my law office. But no photos of Annie. Until I found one on Etsy! I have searches on Ebay and Etsy for my family name, which is a little unusual for a surname which makes searching easier. I was able to find lots of other old family photos. It was wildly fun to search and find photos of my own relatives.
I used to be quite active in a scrapbooking website called Get It Scrapped and I encouraged scrapbookers to find their old relatives on ebay too. I think when you are listing old photos – make sure to put all the information in the title and/or description – anything written on the back of the photo; the photographer’s name and location etc. Family historians, genealogists and scrapbookers are searching for their old relative’s photos.
P.S. I couldn’t find a link to a photo of the scrapbook page I made with the photo, but here’s a link to the video I made about making the page (so you can see the photos I found on etsy/ebay and see how I used them): https://youtu.be/zqC5cY_rrsg
My Top Ten Suggestions for Improvements to Ebay:
1. Multiple Accounts: Make toggling between accounts easier, allow me to have windows open on my computer and iphone in more than one of my stores so that I don’t have to log out and log back in.
2. Shipping: Stop free shipping altogether or make shipping costs more transparent to buyers so that they can understand that shipping is not actually free.
3. Shipping: As an alternative to #3, make a better deal with USPS like Poshmark has so that shipping is something like $6 per item for anything from 2 to 5 pounds.
4. Customer Service: Allow sellers to contact ebay customer service reps by email rather than phone. That way everything gets documented in writing and on hold time is eliminated.
5. Listing: Allow sellers to see more than 20 drafts on their smart phones.
6. Education: Create video training content for buyers and sellers that is short and to the point and have many videos so that the topics of the videos can get very specific – like a FAQ or help section but in video form rather than written so that the steps can be shown – like go here on the screen, then go here, etc. If the videos were very short they could also just delete the out date ones and update them as changes are made to ebay.
7. Store Subscriptions: Create an extra seller level between the $60/month and the $300/month. I’m at a point where I’d be comfortable paying $150/month but I’m not quite sure about committing to $300/month but there is no in between store level that fits me.
8. Return Customers: Make returning customers apparent to the seller and allow sellers to give returning customers discounts or perks.
9. VERO practices: Create a list of products and terms to be careful about; when I first started selling I got a couple of dings because I just didn’t know. I wish I could have seen a list early on that said don’t sell these brands unless you are 100% sure of their authenticity. I wasn’t trying to sell fake things and I felt pretty sad when ebay just punished me for not knowing better and not providing a better education for new sellers about what to watch out for.
10. Pricing Items Tool: Let all sellers have that level thing that I got when I started a new store recently that showed likelihood of sale when you put in the price. I don’t know what it was called but it suggested a price and then as you put in a price it would show you how likely your item was to sell at that price. It was cool but now it is gone from my newer account – bring it back, I liked it!
I have been keeping track of my number of listings and sales for about 6 months but I haven’t gone to this level of detail yet, so here’s my first go at tracking my numbers:
02/11/18 – 02/17/18
Total Items In Stores: 2,621
Items Sold: 44
Cost of Items Sold: not sure, my guess is that I average $2.00 per item but there is some variation
Total Sales: $703
Highest Price Sold: $125 James Dean Leather Bomber Jacket vintage / worn
Average Price Sold: $15.97
Returns: nothing outstanding, I probably had one but I don’t remember
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: I didn’t keep track but I’ll guess $75
Number of Items listed this week: 94Goals & Habits:
I try to list 100 items a week, I keep a notebook of my listings so I can see my progress.
I’m trying to buy most of my ordinary clothing at the outlet and the higher end stuff from the thrift stores. I go shopping at the outlet one weekday morning for about 2 hours from 7:30 am – 9:30. I also go shopping at a thrift store from 5:30 – 7:30 on Wednesday nights while my son is at an activity. I want to go to more auctions – I’ve been a few times but haven’t purchased much. I also try to go to estate sales on Friday mornings from 9-11 am but I haven’t made it to any in a while. This past week I also spent lots of time clearing out clutter in my own house and brought maybe 6 garbage bags full of stuff to Goodwill. I also ended a bunch of lower end listings on ebay and need to gather that stuff together and bring it to Goodwill. This coming weekend my neighborhood is having a community yard sale, I’ll probably go as a buyer and not put anything out myself. I also have a bunch of stuff – hardgoods rather than clothing – which are maybe becoming death piles that need to get listed, so I’d like to start doing more listing of that sort of stuff. Also, I have one photographer that does the photos for about 20 listings per week for me. I’d like to get another photographer so that I’d have more help with taking pictures of clothing. Hiring photographers has been a process and I’m not where I’d like to be with that yet.I think clothing sales on eBay have gotten more competitive even in the short time I’ve been selling. My aunt says she used to get $30+ for baby’s Jon Jon rompers and now she’s happy to get $12. With mall brand clothing, I try to pick it up at the goodwill outlet and price some of it very low so that maybe some of those items work as a loss leader – sometimes I think making one sale promotes making another sale. I also think that making lots (ie. 4 size medium shirts from Ann Taylor) sell better than single items. Clothing sales are hard. I’m trying to get more into the vintage things. I also think that the more attention and time you put in, the more you will sell. Good luck with your store 🙂
My long winded thoughts on being a scavenger lawyer:
(First, I guess I should say that I probably talk too much – which is maybe why I became a lawyer in the first place.)
Ok, I’m not complaining, I like practicing law, I really do like helping people and I feel like we do, and it is still the best way I know how to make a living; I’m just relaying what I’ve observed in my time as a lawyer.
Practicing law isn’t what it used to be in 1995 when I graduated from law school. When people ask me now to write them recommendations for law school I always ask why they want to go, because it is expensive and you don’t necessarily make a lot of money as a lawyer anymore. In the late 80s / early 90s, a lot of tort reform came in and lawyers started making a lot less money than they did in the 1980s – which was probably the right result, sort of (but that’s a whole other topic); but law as a money maker isn’t the slam dunk it used to be. I think law can still be a good profession, but you need to have a clear plan of what you want to do going in when you lay out all that money for law school, otherwise you become a wage or contingency fee slave to student loans.
We’ve had to adjust our sails in terms of practicing law many times over the years due to insurance company practices, mega law firms who work on volume rather than quality, and the 2008 downturn in the economy hit our family law and criminal law parts of the practice hard because people no longer had enough money to get divorced or hire a lawyer after a criminal charge. Uber has dramatically reduced the number of DUI cases there are – which is a good thing for our communities, but my husband used to have a busy DUI defense practice and that is no longer. We used to advertise our law firm with a few bill boards and a few tv ads, but when the mega law firms started spending millions and millions on ads and making it so that you can’t see a set of commercials without a lawyer ad being one of them, we stopped advertising because it was like peeing in the ocean. Now, we rely on happy former clients for referrals. Good word of mouth is better for us than advertising both in terms of cost effectiveness and quality of clients. Times have changed and we’ve had to change with them.
Being thrifty: Over the past ten years, we have been working hard to get our monthly overhead at our law firm down. We continuously look at our spending and what we can cut. We were able to pay off our office building mortgage a few years ago (yahoo) so that is a nice feeling. I use part of our law office building as my ebay storage. But even with out costs significantly down from what they used to be, we now still sort of wonder how much we need an actual building to practice law. We find ourselves thinking about whether to sell the building and rent a conference room space from a lawyer friend and work from home. Most of what we do is on the phone or computer and the in person meetings with clients are scheduled – so we could just do the conference room thing. We currently rent our conference room to other lawyers and this is how they are practicing law with lots less overhead.
Also, living in Florida we got really scared by this last hurricane season, if our office building got destroyed in a hurricane, would we want to rebuild? could we afford to? If the hurricane would have hit Florida like it hit Puerto Rico, would there even be a client base to serve? Do we really want to own real estate in Florida? Our home is on the water at sea level, we are planning to sell it because we are afraid of rising tides – like literal rising tides water in our backyard and house – and the overall value of Florida real property. We are also concerned about ever increasing flood insurance and property taxes. Long term, I think we will move away from Florida when we retire which the opposite of how most people look at Florida and retirement.
I think a lot of lawyers and doctors today aren’t where they thought they would be financially; many professional people we know have started side businesses. The whole world seems to have changed. I can only figure we have to change too going forward. I think scavenging is a really beautiful, useful, environmental and smart and fun thing to do. I’ll bet I’m not the only scavenger lawyer.
I’m very thankful for your podcast and this forum. I’m also thankful to be able to be a lawyer, I still take a lot of pride in my profession and really do love what I do.
1. Returns on Higher Dollar Items: I keep a small amount of money in my pay pal account because it once got hacked and the scammer took $2,000 in 15 minutes by hacking into my ebay account and then purchasing things and sending them to that Markley Street address in New Jersey. Pay Pal refunded me and the whole thing was resolved. But. Since then, I’ve kept a very small amount of money in my Pay Pal account. Most of the things I sell are lower dollar items at this time, so I keep enough to cover any possible returns. But, I am hoping to get into higher dollar items. I’m wondering what your philosophy is on how much money you keep in Pay Pal, especially when higher dollar items could be returns. What do you do?
2. Arguing on Podcasts: I listened to a podcast by Dax Shepard recently where he interviewed his wife, Kristen Bell, and they started the podcast with an argument about going to the craft store. Later, they said they left the argument in the podcast / didn’t edit it out so that people could see that they weren’t as happy and perky and agreeable as they appear to be in their Samsung ads. I have worked with my husband for 20 years and when our kids were little and heard us talking about work they would always say “stop arguing” – and we’d be surprised that they thought we were arguing, because we were just talking and maybe had different opinions about something. I think having a partner is great, especially when they have different strengths and weaknesses than you do. I think it is also very normal and healthy to argue / have differing opinions from your partner, this is how issues get explored and how good decisions get made as a team.
3. Storage Building: I can’t wait to see more photos / a video.
4. Inventory System: I have my items stored by type of item and then alphabetically in the case of clothes. My husband always wants me to do the spreadsheet / numbering system and I just don’t want to do it that way. I think just keeping like items together is enough, even with a large inventory. The numbering system actually scares me a bit because if you can’t find something, then where are you going to look next? With keeping like items together, you can always think, ok, it’s not in pants, maybe it accidentally got put in with the shorts, or something like that, so you can actually find things.
5. Vintage Henckles Knife with Horn Handle: I found one! I was so excited. I found it at the Goodwill Outlet and when I went to check out they said they couldn’t sell it because they don’t sell knives because once a cashier got cut. So, ok, that was disappointing, but I understand the policy is for safety, that makes sense. So, I said to the cashier, you should put that back into the regular store so someone can buy it because it is a really nice knife. She said that they have to just throw it in the garbage. This made me sad. I hope she just took it home with her or some scenario where that knife didn’t end up in the actual garbage.
6. Meow. Kitty!
(continued)
7. Coffee Hound Mug: I love that! It reminds me of my how my grandfather and father-in-law (both WWII generation) went about life. I will forever be on the look out for these.
8. Box Lots: The ones at my local auction go for more like $50-$60 so I’m a little shy about bidding. I think I need to go to more auctions so I can find the right fit for me. The one I go to seems high, the last time I went, there were a couple of those hand made rugs that you are always talking about and they went for $600 each.
9. Laundering Items: I have recently wrecked St. John and Worth clothing items by trying to wash them either by hand in the sink or on the delicate cycle. I didn’t even put them in the dryer. I’m not sure what else I could have done – short of having them dry cleaned – but it was frustrating and I feel like I should watch a bunch of laundry videos on you tube. I have a lot to learn.
10. Negative Feedback: The 12 month thing seems so harsh.
11. Listening to this Podcast: I listen via you tube when I’m at home and on the computer. I listen on my iphone via itunes when I’m out and about in the car.
12. Meal Prepping: I’ve totally been doing this because of your podcast. The curry butter chicken in the slow cooker was awesome! Lately, I’ve been having fun with an air fryer – not for the meal prepping – but just for dinners and snacking – it is great for roasting vegetables, making vegetable chips, and making crispy chicken wings.
13. Regional Dialect / Gee Gaws: I never heard of that one, but I did grow up drinking from the bubbla and using all sorts of crazy New England dialect. There’s a New York Times quiz here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html and at the end it gives you a map of where you are from – mine was spot on.
1. Queer Eye: On how perspectives have changed – I’m currently addicted to the Assassination of Gianni Versace mini series which comments a lot about how things have changed. Super good binge watch if you haven’t seen it yet – I think there are about 7 episodes out so far and there are maybe 10 total.
2. $500 challenge: I’ve been trying to convince my daughter to take pictures for ebay for me for pay & that she would be able to make $20 / hour which is more than what she’d be able to make at a part time job. She hasn’t been all that interested in taking pictures for me. She said she’d rather just open her own ebay store. She wants to make $1,000.00 as just sort of a challenge to herself to see if she can. She is 14. Can a 14 year old have a pay pal account? (I know this is a google-able question – so I did and it looks like there are student accounts for paypal).
3. Selling Old Shoes: I prefer poshmark to ebay for selling old shoes but I don’t like selling old shoes. I did pick up my first couple pairs of Doc Martens last week so I need to get those posted soon. I’m interested to see how they’ll do.
4. Ebay recommended prices: I recently opened another ebay store and when I did the listings on the new store, I would type in the title – say, Chico’s womens pants – and it would have a recommended price and also a little speedometer looking thing that would change depending on the price I entered – so if the price I entered was something they thought was too high then the spinner pointer thing would go to “less likely to sell” etc. It was very interesting. But it went away. I don’t know what it was called or how to get it back, but I liked it and it was informative.
5. Guaranteed Shipping: I’m also super confused by this and how to do it. I tried to do it and it didn’t seem to work. I don’t get it. At. All.
6. Slow Week: I have been selling on ebay since May 2016 and the first year I did $100/day and $700/week pretty consistently and without really knowing what I was doing. Now, I’ve got a little more experience but I’m doing less and I’ve been at $500/week for all of January. This past week I was back up to $700/week. But it has felt slow to me. I’d like to be progressing to do more like $1,000/week. So for me, if I’m doing less than $700/week it feels slow.
It would help if we could see the entire photo – like the back of it and how big it is. I used to do a lot of genealogy research and there are web sites that help with dating photos, just google “genealogy dating old photos” and you’ll find a bunch of helpful sites.
(super cute photo btw)
My sales in the last 7 days:
$125.00 James Dean Leather Bomber Jacket (got at Good Will Outlet paid by the pound maybe $2.50)
$ 65.00 Mycra Pac Grey Reversible Jacket (regular goodwill $5)
$ 50.00 Exclusively Misook Jacket (Salvation Army $6)
$ 40.00 Dansk silverware 10 pieces (thrift store $1.00)
$ 40.00 Metlox Poppycock Vintage Canisters (estate sale – whole giant dishes collection $20)
$ 40.00 Ulla Johnson blouse (thrift store $4)
$ 38.00 Lot 29 Looney Tunes Jacket (thrift store $5)
$ 36.00 Lularoe pants with bumble bee print (thrift store $3)
$ 31.00 Anthropologie pants (thrift store $2)
$ 30.00 Tadashi blouse (Salvation Army $4)
$ 30.00 Royal Doulton sugar bowl and creamer (Salvation Army $4)
$ 20.00 Pottery Barn spoon and knife (salvation army $0.20)I sold lower priced items too and I’m trying to blow out some of my lower end stuff with sales. This is just the stuff I sold in the last week that I’m proud of right now.
I have a bunch of old coins that my nana found while digging in the garden in New Brunswick, Canada back in the 1940s and 1950s but the coins are from I guess the 1700s and 1800s.
I’m kind of getting to the point where I’m ready to sell some of the things like this that I’ve inherited but what is stopping me is being leery of putting things like this on ebay for fear of weird buyers and, I guess, just doing the research.
I guess I have my own answer (just do the research).
But I’d be interested to know if the coins are a sort of a problem type of product to sell. I guess I have my own answer on that too and maybe I’ll just start by listing one and seeing how it goes.
I get superconfused with ended and unsold listings.
I have gone through a couple of times where I have accidentally double listed things because of what I think are glitches in the ebay system when I move things to auction and also when things end and then I have to relist them. Then I’ve had to go through and meticulously find and delete the duplicates. This is time consuming and annoying.
I think my solution to this problem is that I just stick to list forever instead of listing for a specific amount of time.
I wish ebay had a way to prevent double listings.
