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3/22/20 – 3/28/20
Total Items In Store: 1103
Items Sold: 41
Total Sales: $ 1,739.29
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 769.12
Highest Price Sold: $ 75 (Nike Air Diamond Turfs on Ebay)
Average Price Sold: $ 42.42
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 95Gut Sales Report for the week: We had an overall mediocre, but it was boosted by Saturday where we had 11 sales, and the week ended up meeting our average. It still feels like we are just being saved by these days where we have a bunch of sales all at once.
Challenge of the week: We ordered our first wholesale order of shoes from a contact on Instagram. Having never done any type of online buying like this, I’m curious to see what the quality of the shoes will be that we get. They are thrifted shoes, so I’m just hoping there aren’t too many issues with them and that we can keep sourcing like this for the meantime.
Scavenge of the week: Still no Inventory locally, but 100 shoes coming in this week from an online wholesale order. Fingers Crossed!
3/15/20 – 3/21/20
Total Items In Store: 1016
Items Sold: 41
Total Sales: $ 1,822.30
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 863.39
Highest Price Sold: $ 90 (Nike Odyssey Reacts on Ebay)
Average Price Sold: $ 45.25
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 57Gut Sales Report for the week: I felt like we were having a terrible week all week. We had a couple days with 2 sales and I thought for sure this was the week where the rug got pulled from under us. But looking at our numbers, it was an average week, which goes to shows that my feelings about the reselling world ending was largely in my head.
Challenge of the week: Our goal is to try and find a reliable source for picking up inventory wholesale in these weird times. We had talked about it for months, but its time to sink or swim because all the local thrift stores that we used to hit have been closed as the cities start locking down.
Scavenge of the week: 0, we picked up no inventory because all our thrift stores are closed. We have always kept a healthy backlog so we should be able to keep listing for a month without any issues.
On the podcast Jay had asked what we are going to do since our regular routine was hitting around 10 thrift stores every week. Honestly we don’t have any answers, but we are reaching out to people, to see if they will ship us inventory, and just try and maintain as long as possible. As someone who graduated from college at the end of 2008, I felt the brunt of the economic meltdown and was always cautious about how we grew this business. I still work fulltime, while my partner handles the business fulltime, and since my job covers a majority of our expenses, and let’s me save some every month, it’s not full on panic mode yet, for us. However that could change depending on how long this lasts.
It’s on Ebay’s listing page, I was completing a draft and have just left it blank previously under the assumption that ebay was handling it, but I made a sale to New Jersey last night and noticed that Ebay didn’t take any sales tax in the order breakdown, and it might be because NJ isn’t collecting sales tax yet, but I wasn’t sure.
That would be great if that’s what people got out of this, this might be the first time anyone under 20 has experienced a situation where they cant find everything they want from Walmart/Target/Amazon etc. as soon as they think they need it.
3/8/20 – 3/14/20
Total Items In Store: 1000
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $ 1943.00
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 861.41
Highest Price Sold: $ 100 (Poshmark)
Average Price Sold: $ 44.16
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 135
Number of items listed: 117Gut Sales Report for the week: Sales were normal, which is more disconcerting than if I had seen a sales drop like everyone else who I have talked to. We hit 1,000 active listings for the first time and we did it on the anniversary of our first ever sale, so feeling cautiously optimistic.
Challenge of the week: Still killing that death pile since there is a virus out there that we want to avoid as much as we can. We have a couple hundred items we want to get caught up on, and to make a real effort to getting our Ebay store up and running properly.
Scavenge of the week: Nothing of note, lot of bread and butter shoes.
Thanks for the context, your Ebay numbers are amazing, and yeah if Poshmark is so down despite sharing then its definitely not worth the hassle outside of the 5% you were talking about with cross posting.
I am going to take a couple guesses on the reasons for the low sell through rates, as I mainly sell on the other sites, and not Ebay. For Poshmark, I am guessing that Libby isn’t self sharing her closet daily, which would bump her in the search results. With Mercari, its hard to sell anything unless you have free shipping, from my experience.
I can give my experience as a newer seller, because when I came into the Posh/Instagram reselling community last year, cross posting was considered the norm for the larger sellers that I followed, because they weren’t really selling on Ebay. So when I started listing, I would post everything to Poshmark, and crosspost to Mercari. The idea being that I had to self share and be active on Poshmark to sell, and Mercari would be the list it and forget it platform. When these new services came in, I pretty much just ignored them, because it doesn’t take more than an extra couple minutes per listing to cross post, so it wasn’t saving us that much time.
–do you like the process of listing everywhere?
We like the process, but it’s biased because we really don’t know any different. The reason we like it is because we aren’t dependent on only 1 platform. We have days where Posh is dead quiet and Mercari will pick up sales and vice versa. Also spreading our sales means we can have great results with each platform doing mediocre for us. So for instance, last night we had 5 sales on Poshmark, and 3 sales on Mercari, so our day looks amazing, but neither platform had to go gangbusters, and 8 sales is only slightly above our daily average these days.–Is it difficult to manage the same item across multiple platforms?Yes and no, it’s easy enough because we sell one off items for the most part, so it’s not like we are tracking quantities and we have really built in a routine where we deactivate the item off the other platform as soon as it sells on one. However that doesn’t mean we don’t forget sometimes and have had the same item sell on multiple platforms, we try our best to keep that from happening, but we are human.
–Are your sales better overall (more things selling?)In the last year we have had 1,100 sales on Poshmark & 256 sales on Mercari, so 23% more sales that we would have just being on Poshmark alone. We also list our expensive items on Ebay, and have had 40 sales from there, & they were all really healthy profits, but it’s not something we have the time to grow currently.
–Do you price differently on different platforms?Yes because of how the platforms are set up. Poshmark has the buyer pay the shipping label, so we set our base price on there. With Mercari, when a buyer wants to buy your items, Mercari defaults to sending an offer that’s 15% below the sellers asking price. Since that’s the default, we bump up our price accordingly, so that the end result is still the same. Ebay we list high and forget.
3/1/20 – 3/7/20
Total Items In Store: 927
Items Sold: 45
Cost of Goods Sold: $ 962.57
Total Sales: $ 1,964.00
Average Price Sold: $ 43.64
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 900.52 (36 Items Friday, 58 Items Saturday)
Number of items listed: 46
Highest Price Sold: $ 109 (Nike Air Force 1 Black History Month)
https://imgur.com/a/lpBH7PaGut Sales Report for the week: It was a really good week for us, averaging a little over 6 sales a day and we have been focusing for the past few month on sourcing higher quality items and taking care to photograph them well. Even though our overall ASP is around $34, in the past month we are getting closer to an ASP of $44.
Challenge of the week: We have a backlog of 150 items that we are trying to work through, but we realized in February that we sourced 333 items, and listed 343 items, which meant we essentially hadn’t made any significant dents in our back log. Our perception was that we had made some real headway, but the numbers told a different story.
Scavenge of the week: 3 Pair of Tory Burch slip on’s for $15 a piece.
https://imgur.com/a/bWyiX0OKen
2/23/20 – 2/29/20
Total Items In Store: 915
Items Sold: 52
Total Sales: $ 2513.97
Cost of Items Sold: $ 1210.49
Highest Price Sold: $ 195 ($30 pair of Sneakers)
Average Price Sold: $ 45.58
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 613.12
Number of items listed: 79Gut Sales Report for the week: This was our best sales week since we have started selling, but overall it was also our best sales month as well, so it wasn’t a one time thing. We sold 180 items in Jan, 182 items in Feb ($8,295.59 total/ 143 Posh, 32 Mercari, 7 Ebay), so I’m hoping this is a positive trend and not some sort of 1st quarter bump that will end up crashing in the 2nd quarter.
Challenge of the week: We are in a constant battle to keep our house in some sort of an organized fashion, but with how aggressively we are trying to grow, it’s been a battle where we win some weeks and lose others.
Scavenge of the week: Nothing out of the ordinary, we picked up a lot of bread and butter items as that’s mostly our business model. We find rare or cool sneakers one in a while, like the pair we sold this week, but our business isn’t reliant on those.
I have a secondary account where we have listed items we didn’t want in our main stores(clothing and other categories), and while they did sell, it took months to sell the 10 items, because unless a buyer was looking for that exact item in that exact size our listing would never show up on the first page, and it’s my guess that most buyers aren’t willing to go through pages of listings and will buy whatever shows up in the first page.
This is from my own experience, and I sell a lot of bread and butter sneakers (Nike, Converse etc.) so if someone is looking for a pair of red converse high tops, there are dozens if not hundreds of listings for such a pair. Making that sale is highly dependent on your pictures, title and how high on the sales results you are, which is similar to Ebay, but the difference is Posh is blind to your previous selling history and treats all sellers the same (there’s no top seller plus weighting in the results).
Our two biggest limiting factors is finding good inventory, and time to process and get it listed.
Our routine currently is sourcing the whole weekend, and then having Eric process and list the shoes during the week, before the next weekend and do it all over again.
The reason it takes so long is that we clean all the pairs in an effort to upcycle the pairs and get more profit out of each pair.
It’s a lot of work, but it’s also resulted in really happy buyers and decent profits overall.
We find most of our used shoes from local thrift stores. We don’t go to Goodwill because they are too mainstream and have been very dry for us, but we are lucky enough to be living in an area where we can pick up 50-75 pairs a week without too much trouble. It does mean our weekends are nothing but sourcing 10+ hours a day to find the inventory we want, but it’s been working out for us so far.
For Poshmark, selling a pair for $34 would net us $17.20 in profits ($6.80 fees, $10 Inventory costs, 0-$2 shipping). The $2 for shipping is if we have any stale inventory where we do an offer to likers, where it sends a 10% discount as well as $2 off shipping.
For Mercari, our ASP is $42, because we offer free shipping and just list everything slightly higher to account for the shipping costs, as that’s the only way to sell on there. Selling a pair for $42 would net us $17.80 in profits ($4.20 fees, $10 inventory costs, $10 shipping).
