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Total Gross sales: $1744.06
Net sales: $1560.12
Total sales: 15
The tide has turned – had a great week last week. After several weeks of uncharacteristically low sales, this week had 2 very large sales that brought me up for air. The big sale was a vintage surf movie poster “The Endless Summer” for $799.95. I picked this up in a large lot of posters from an online auction in early December. The lot cost me $4. The poster was up less than 24 hours.
We don’t see furniture much as we don’t have a lot of space, but picked up a nice pair of night tables at an estate sale for $50 and resold them on Facebook Marketplace for $400.
Finally had a nice sale on Etsy, too. Sold an antique spelter bust of Beethoven for $199.95. I’d had this listed on eBay for almost 2 years fending off several low ball offers. Picked it up at an auction for $13.
We stopped by an estate sale on it’s last hour last week and loaded up the van with lots of great collectibles. Surprised a lot of the items were still available. We bought a small cabinet and had to come back the next day to pick it up. The owner allowed us to walk through one more time and gave us some great deals on the remaining items.
The full numbers are below. I need to pare this down a bit, but I like statistics and each data point is nice to track, for me. Probably not so much for others.
Week Ending 1/15/22
Total Items in eBay Store: 1085
Total Items in Etsy Store: 89
Items Sold eBay: 12
Items Sold Etsy: 2
Gross Sales eBay (W/O shipping and tax): $1,524.16 *includes FB Marketplace
Net Sales (After fees) eBay: $1,365.29
Gross Sales Etsy (W/O shipping and tax): $219.90
Net Sales (After fees) Etsy: $194.83
Cost of Items Sold: $99.27
COGS Percent 6.36%
Net Profit Margin: 83.76%
Highest Price Sold: $799.95 Vintage surf poster
Average Price Sold: $124.58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $440.00
Sold via promoted listings: 10
Promoted Percentage: 71.43%
Average Days Listed: 478.07
Longest Listed: 1713
New items listed: 12“And if you read a couple books or spend a week doing research, you probably know more than 99% of people on that item.”
@Jay – This is why I am developing a nice library of collectors books. With all the information available on the Internet, it only scratches the surface of what’s available in books, perhaps especially for collecting. I have books on beer steins, penny banks, christmas ornaments, pottery, money, etc. Now if only my memory was what it used to be and I could hold on to what I read…$100 for a yo-yo, wow! What type of yo-yo was it? Great for you.
Week Ending 1/15/22
Total Items in eBay Store: 1084
Total Items in Etsy Store: 83
Items Sold eBay: 14
Items Sold Etsy: 1
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $377.70
Net Sales (After fees) eBay: $298.51
Cost of Items Sold: $30.86
COGS Percent 10.34%
Net Profit Margin: 70.86%
Highest Price Sold: $51.20 Keen Shoes
Average Price Sold: $25.18
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 13
Average Days Listed: 390
Longest Listed: 1215
New items listed: 1These numbers really show me how crucial it is to “always be listing”. I’ve only listed 4 items in the last month due to a bunch of other priorities and it definitely shows in my sales. This January has been way below average in sales and not listing is clearest indicator I can tie it to. Worst January I’ve had since I started keeping good records.
Have already listed more this week than in the last month so hopefully things will begin to turn around again.
Regarding the Weird Al video, I was impressed that he seemed to actually be familiar with eBay and some of its culture, more so than casual stereotypes. Definitely has a picture of my listing area. 🙂 I hadn’t seen that video before. Thanks for sharing.
@retro-treasures-wv – I’m impressed by how quickly you’ve bounced back and how hard you are hitting it. Congrats on the great start to the new year.
Week Ending 1/8/22
Total Items in eBay Store: 1102
Total Items in Etsy Store: 52
Items Sold eBay: 20
Items Sold Etsy: 1
Gross Sales eBay (Not including shipping and tax): $440.70
Net Sales (After fees) eBay: $351.29
Gross Sales Etsy (Not including shipping and tax): $19.95
Net Sales (After fees) Etsy: $18.24
Cost of Items Sold: $29.06
COGS Percent 7.86%
Net Profit Margin: 73.91%
Highest Price Sold: $90.00 Antique Jewelry Box
Average Price Sold: $21.94
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 16
Promoted Percentage: 76.19%
Average Days Listed: 463
Longest Listed: 1549
New items listed: 1A below average week this week. Historically, first week of January has had great sales for me, so a bit disappointed. I shouldn’t expect much better, though, as I haven’t been posting much lately and my numbers are dropping. Guests left Friday, so hopefully get on a listing spree to bring sales back up.
Had my first Etsy sale last week. A small $19,95 item that I’d had up in my eBay store for a few years. Processing was pretty straight forward. Did have to Google how to get it to print the postage on my 4×6 labels.
Sales Report for: 1/1/22
Total Items in Store: 1120
Items Sold: 15
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $763.49
Net Sales (After fees): $621.47
Cost of Items Sold: $85.00
COGS Percent 13.68%
Net Profit Margin: 70.27%
Highest Price Sold: $294.95 c.1890 Fortune Telling Cards
Average Price Sold: $50.90
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 12
Promoted Percentage: 80.00%
Average Days Listed: 358
Longest Listed: 1106
New items listed: 1A little late the party again this week. A decent week to finish out the year and surprising for the week after Christmas. Have been busy with out of town guests and playing tour guide. Barely had time to get sales out the door, so no time to list.
Not a huge number of sales, but had one great sale of $295 for an antique c.1890 deck of fortune telling cards. Funny thing about this sale is that the buyer originally gave me an offer of $200 to which I countered $250. They countered again at $225 while I was making breakfast so I didn’t get back to their offer right away. Before I could respond again they went ahead and purchased it for full price. They sent a note saying that they felt the cards had “good vibes” and didn’t want to let them get sold out from under them.
I got a rare return of a camera I sold the week before. Buyer returned unopened because they found a better price. The morning I got it back I relisted it and it sold again within 2 hours for $13 more than I sold it the first time. Gotta love that.
Had one item break in shipping, again very rare for me. It was sent to France. It was a small building for an HO railroad. Easy for the buyer to fix, but I just refunded their full amount.
I just realized that eBay’s sales report will provide a full year of data in one report so I ran my report for 2021. Then ran the 2020 report as well. I feel like they used to not have data that far back, or maybe just not so easily accessed. My sales for 2021 were down about 16% from 2020. I was relieved as I thought it was much worse. Actually happy with that since it was a year full of distractions that kept me from listing as much as I would have preferred. I listed 782 items this year vs. 1024 in the prior.
Then I relisted this Barrett card, and later that night it received an offer which (after some negotiating) led to a sale the next day.
@craig-rex – always love hearing about these; reinforces the positive side. It just isn’t worth wasting the cycles worrying or getting angry. That energy is better spent on working for the next sale.Sales Report for: 12/25/21
Total Items in Store: 1137
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $1,168.60
Net Sales (After fees): $962.87
Cost of Items Sold: $112.00
COGS Percent 11.63%
Net Profit Margin: 72.81%
Highest Price Sold: $325.00 Vintage B-1 Soda Thermometer
Average Price Sold: $58.43
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 15
Promoted Percentage: 75.00%
Average Days Listed: 411
Longest Listed: 1521
New items listed: 1Had a much better week than expected. Two large sales really boosted the week. Biggest sale was a cool 1940’s/1950’s advertising thermometer for B-1 Lemon Lime Soda. I paid $39 for it on an online auction. Second sale was the coolest though, a set of 3 antique hand-colored prints from the late 1700’s. Sold the lot of 3 for $300.
Also had a cool sale of a vintage educational video game called Quake Busters. It was produced by the United Nations in 1996 to educate people on the dangers of earthquakes. I was asking $200 but took an offer of $100. I got it in a huge lot of CDs, so had about 0.25 in it.
Found another benefit of having SixBit this week. Somehow, eBay ended one of my listings without notice or any input from me and SixBit flagged it. I called eBay about it and their records show that I ended it with “Item No Longer Available”. I received no notice from ebay and it wasn’t in my Ended items, just disappeared completely. I’d have never known except for Sixbit. Now I am considering going through my listings and reconciling to see if their are more like this.
I have 13 items cross-listed to Etsy and feel like I’ve got the process down now. Have had visitors for the holidays and haven’t had time to do more, but plan to cross list about 200 over the next two weeks to see what comes of it. Had one of the items sell on eBay that I had cross listed and the program ended the item on Etsy as promised, so that is looking good.
Hope everyone had a great holiday and enjoys the New Year.
Mike
@Jay – Once you understand the process, it only takes a few more minutes to create the Etsy listing. My pictures are mostly square in eBay, so I won’t have much problem there. The main time effort is description clean-up. See the attached screen shots. First is how the eBay imported information looks. Second is what the etsy section looks like after listing is populated from eBay (very little information is transferred, just quantity and price). Thirds shows the essential fields which must be completed for Etsy that are different from Ebay.
Sales Report for: 12/18/21
Total Items in Store: 1157
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $697.04
Net Sales (After fees): $560.20
Cost of Items Sold: $94.29
COGS Percent 16.83%
Net Profit Margin: 66.84%
Highest Price Sold: $65.00 Stuffed Bear with Santa
Average Price Sold: $27.88
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 15
Promoted Percentage: 60.00%
Average Days Listed: 446
Longest Listed: 1852
New items listed: 0Another below average week of sales, dollar wise. Number sold was above average, but the price per sale was way below what I usually get. As with others, the week started off strong, but died by week’s end. Big sale of the week occurred on Friday with a sale of a large stuffed Santa riding a bear for $65. Most interesting sale was a set of Audubon microphonograph bird cards. Each card has a small record that can be played in a handheld microphonograph. I acquired them with the player, but the player was no longer working. Paid $5 for the player and cards and sold just the cards for $29.95.
Spent most of my time this week working on learning how to cross-post items to Etsy using SixBit. For me it isn’t a very straightforward process and I had to go back and forth with support a few times before I got it right, but I finally have a few items listed. Now that I have it figured out it should go faster.
The biggest pain, once the proper configuration items were figured out, is editing the description for each item. When Sixbit imports the eBay listings, it copies the description with hypertext mark-up, which doesn’t work with Etsy, so each description has to be copied and cleaned up. It will be less hassle when creating a completely new listing for both simultaneously.
Some of my confusion with the initial set up is likely due to my not being familiar with Etsy. For instance, I didn’t have shipping preferences set up in Etsy, so no shipping preferences were available in Sixbit. I’m sure I’ll keep uncovering other gotchas as I sell a few items. If I can find the time, I may write up a “lessons learned” that I can share in case anyone else is interested.
Merry Christmas one and all!
Mike
@annaesthetic23 – We found out about the grant on the Nextdoor app. Someone from the county government posted a link to the application. The only requirement was to register your company on a county website for local small businesses. They set aside $789,000 earmarked for “Online Sales and Telework”. Amount of award was based on the number of qualified applicants.
Regarding Sixbit, the cross-posting is one of its features, but it has many other features that could be justified for a business of your size. It backs up all of your listings to a database and includes all your photos. It can be used for inventory tracking. It allows you to schedule listings to be posted by the app so that you don’t pay eBay the scheduled listings fee. You can work entirely offline, except for uploading, of course. I’m still digging in but finding more as I work through it.
Sales Report for: 12/10/21
Total Items in Store: 1182
Items Sold: 26
Gross Sales (Not including shipping and tax): $1,241.25
Net Sales (After fees): $1,015.21
Cost of Items Sold: $146.56
COGS Percent 14.44%
Net Profit Margin: 69.98%
Highest Price Sold: $225.00 Vintage Toy Outboard Motor
Average Price Sold: $47.74
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 19
Promoted Percentage: 73.08%
Average Days Listed: 330
Longest Listed: 1190
New items listed: 17Good sales week. Interesting that I sold the exact number of items this week as last, but average sales prices were higher so made another $500. My best sale was a toy outboard motor from the 1950’s for $225. I bought it along with its original boat for $100, but the boat was in pretty rough shape, so I sold it separately for $75. Motor was originally frozen from rust, but being from 1950, it was pretty simple to take apart, clean, lube and get running again. Had it up for less than a week for $300 and had several offers. Something to keep an eye out for.
As I mentioned above, we applied for a small business grant from our county and received $1300. I decided to use the money to try out Sixbit and have spent a good portion of last week and this trying to figure it out. It’s a bit more complicated than I anticipated and not very intuitive, IMO. My main purpose is to hopefully cross post to Etsy. Not currently selling on Etsy so have both learning curves to master at once. I’ll keep you posted on how it plays out.
Some of Etsy’s restrictions have already raised some roadblocks. I have about 45 hand-painted Christmas ornaments from a local artist that passed away that I thought would be perfect for Etsy, being the hand-crafted marketplace it is. Then I come across this prohibition:
“Examples of prohibited reselling include the following:
- Curating a collection of others’ handmade goods that you did not design or make”
I could just say they’re older than 20 years and thus vintage, or fib about creative involvement, but I hate to misrepresent items. I actually have no idea how old they are as I haven’t been able to find any information on the artist, not even an obituary. I guess they don’t want their marketplace flooded with goods mass manufactured in China or other countries.
