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@Amatino – The main auction site where I get consistent good deals, and is nationwide, is Maxsold. We are also fortunate to live in the DC Metro area and there are usally a lot of sales within a 1 hour drive, which is about my limit. Hibid.com is also a good place to find local sales, as a lot of auction houses sell through their interface. You can get on their email list and they will alert you to new weekly auctions. Finally, there is Estatesales.net, which I’m sure a lot of people use. I’m seeing a lot of the traditional estate sale companies going online with this virus.
What I like about online sales is that I can research at my leisure, decide on a buy price in advance so that I don’t pay too much. I can get weak in my resolve at in-person estate sales and pay more for items than I should.
One tip I would share is to not place your bids in advance. Best to wait at least till the last 30 minutes of the auction so that you don’t telegraph value to other bidders in advance. Often I don’t even bid until the last two minutes, but that can get stressful if there are a lot of items you’re trying to bid on.
The worst thing about auctions is when you lose what you really wanted, yet end up winning something that isn’t worth the drive to pick up. Doesn’t happen often but can be painful on longer drives. I’ll usually try to work in some type of scavenging nearby when that happens.
Some great food for thought on this week’s show. Best advice I could give to me if I was starting off again is to focus on what you love to list and keep an eye on the online auctions. I know others get a lot from thrifts and yard sales, but I feel I do best with the lots I get from online sales. I set my limit to 10 – 20% of what I can sell something for, and usually get the items for much less. And, as Jay and Ryanne have said many times, your death piles will stay smaller if you enjoy listing the items you’re buying. I lose a lot, but still win enough to keep us in listings.
A milestone for us this month. We surpassed $100,000 in total eBay sales since we started in February 2016. I was surprised when I saw that statistic at the bottom of the Seller Level report page. Each year we sell a little more than the last and get better at picking. This year is shaping up to be the best yet.
Our scavenge of the week is a mid-century tin robot from Japan. We purchased it in a lot of toys in an online auction. It is the Masudaya Sonic Robot and appears to be pretty rare. In great shape they sell upwards of $3000. Ours is a little beat up and no longer runs, but should still bring in $1000 if we hold out. Nice thing is that we got the whole lot for $30, and three other items in the lot should sell for $100+. Also picked up a few other nice lots that should sell well.
Sales continue to be up and down but still much higher than last year this time.
Week Ending 07/04/2020
Total Items in Store: 1170
Items Sold: 15
Gross Sales: $671.48
Gross wo Shipping $516.47
Cost of Items Sold: $54.44
COGS Percent 10.54%
Highest Price Sold: $100.00 Vintage HP Printer
Average Price Sold: $34.43
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $268.26
Sold via promoted listings: 8
Promoted Percentage: 53.33%
Average Days Listed: 265.93
Longest Listed: 871
New items listed: 0@Retro Treasures – I completely agree about the perfect box, for me it is of those incomparable pleasures. I had this long, slim item this week and just happened to have the perfect box for it that I’d been holding onto for over a year. Justified! 🙂
Happy birthday, Ryanne! Had to look up existential nihilism after you mentioned it. That’s exactly my own philosophy, but I didn’t actually know there was a name for it. Now I can seem smarter at parties by throwing that term around. 😉
Had a decent week in sales. Had a great sale of a vintage fishing reel with it’s original box for $255. I purchased at auction for just shy of $50. Actually had to buy two different lots for it because the reel was attached to a rod and the box was in a different lot with a different reel. Got this in my final auction purchase before the virus got bad in our area. I enjoy selling old fishing tackle. Lots of interesting stories.
Bought from my first auction in 3 months this past week. One of the things that is great about the virus is how some auctions have changed their methods. This one has curbside pick up now and was much more efficient than they were on past sales. Got a really cool antique bible from 1882. It is huge! Weighs in at 14 lbs. Has some detailed family genealogy in it and gorgeous illustrations. I paid $46 for it and hope to sell upwards of $500 based on comps.
Here are my numbers:
Week Ending 06/20/2020
Total Items in Store: 1194
Items Sold: 14
Gross Sales: $977.94
Gross wo Shipping $807.40
Cost of Items Sold: $107.36
COGS Percent 13.30%
Highest Price Sold: $255.00
Average Price Sold: $57.67
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $112.55
Sold via promoted listings: 8
Promoted Percentage: 57.14%
Average Days Listed: 304.14
Longest Listed: 829
New items listed: 8@jmiller358 I’ve added disclaimers for anything with a bulb after a vintage bulb in a ceramic Christmas tree no longer worked after the trip through the mail. It was a strange bulb that ended up costing me $10 to replace, plus shipping. Like you, I now include a disclaimer about the bulb.
I’ve been selling a lot of reel-to-reel tapes also lately. Must be the people stuck at home finally tackling making their master mix tapes.
Not a great week of sales here, but not awful either. Sales are still up about 17% from last year for the last 31 days and sales for the quarter are up about 32%. BTW, I noticed that eBay has updated their sales reports page and provides more canned options. I like the options to easily compare current quarter with previous and previous year. A lot better than having to pick a time period from the calendar.
We ventured out over the weekend to purchase a new-to-us used car. We live in Montgomery County Maryland where most people are observing social distancing still, but we drove across into Virginia to check out a car. A completely different situation. Most people we saw were ignoring distance and mask wearing. We were wearing masks, but most people at the dealer weren’t, which made me a bit nervous. Due to some unsavory business practices we didn’t buy there and drove back to Maryland and bought closer to home. In contrast, almost everyone was wearing a mask and very careful. We had a smaller Mazda 5 for our scavenging vehicle and decided we needed more room, so pulled the trigger on a Honda Odyssey. Looking forward to loading it up with purchases soon.
No scavenges this week.
Week Ending 06/13/2020
Total Items in Store: 1210
Items Sold: 21
Gross Sales: $726.88
Gross wo Shipping $567.80
Cost of Items Sold: $101.67
COGS Percent 17.91%
Highest Price Sold: $79.95 Vintage Camera
Average Price Sold: $27.04
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 18
Promoted Percentage: 85.71%
Average Days Listed: 225.67
Longest Listed: 637
New items listed: 6@The_Seam_Store
Wow! that really hurts. Really curious how someone is able to hack the account like that. Even without the extra security features it seems like a long shot anyone would be able to guess your password. Out of curiosity, were you using the same password and email that might have been used on a site that got hacked, like Target or the like?Sorry you had to go through all that. Expensive lesson, but hopefully no long standing issues. Good luck.
Mike
I just purchased them last week, so they must be out of them right now.
I’m always intrigued when I hear of someone living and scavenging in Europe. My wife, and scavenging partner, is Belgian and we occasionally talk about moving to Belgium but wonder how the scavenging would be. We scavenge a bit on our yearly trips and find the whole culture of scavenging to be different. Yard sales and estate sales not really a big thing there. How do you find it in Portugal?
Here are my numbers for this past week. After a few down weeks sales took an uptick based on two larger sales. Best sale was an antique bible from 1828 that I sold for $299.95. I love old bibles. This one had genealogical information in it and I assume it was purchased for that reason. Paid $30 for it at an auction. The other high sale was for some lens filters for a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera. THese were in a lot of camera equipment that I paid too much for after I misidentified the camera. I averaged the cost across the items I posted so figure I have about $150 in the filters and sold for $250 on best offer. This had my cost of goods much higher than normal.
Week Ending 06/06/2020
Total Items in Store: 1217
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $957.66
Gross wo Shipping $804.65
Cost of Items Sold: $201.68
COGS Percent 25.06%
Highest Price Sold: $299.95 Antique Bible
Average Price Sold: $67.05
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 7
Promoted Percentage: 58.33%
Average Days Listed: 94.93
Longest Listed: 635
New items listed: 19@Jay – I have yet to go to an in-person auction. Would really like to, but most I see have their hours in the evenings or on weekends and its tough to get away when we have children to feed and entertain. Hoping to up my game and attend some in the future. Sounds like there are a lot of bargains to be found.
Happy birthday, Jay. Almost over the hill. Don’t worry, the ride down is a hoot!
Haven’t done my number yet, but had to comment regarding online auctions. You mentioned you thought the prices were high. My exact impression as well. We do most of our scavenging through online auctions and have been laying low through the quaranteen. The few times we’ve been tempted to bid the bidding has been off the chart. As you said, people are bidding items up way past my usual levels of 10 – 25% of estimated value. I accept that I will always lose out to the collector, but usually come out with a few lots. The last two auctions I’ve bid on I haven’t won a thing as prices went way beyond my limits, with some going to above what I could have bought the same item on ebay.
I also can relate to the comment about once you’ve one an item, you feel like you need to go all in to make the drive worth it. I hate it when the item I want is towards the end of the auction and I let things pass that would have been good buys, as I don’t want to make the drive if I don’t win the main prize.
It’s a double edged sword though, with more buyers online, there are also more auctions online. Here’s hoping the auctions stay and the buyers go back to their old ways once things go back to normal.
Cheers!
@almasty
Thanks for the discogs suggestion. I did discover that site and in many cases it was the only source in which I could find some of them. Others weren’t even there. Still not sure whether that is good or bad. May turn out that they aren’t there for good reason.
Haven’t posted in a four weeks. Don’t even know where the time went. These endless days of lockdown have me questioning what day of the week it is most days.
Interesting discussion on shipping. I’m still on the fence about offering free shipping. I have some commodity items that I include free shipping on but most items are still calculated. I did just make a major change to remove my items weighing under 4 lbs from Global Shipping and changed everything to ship direct via International First Class. I’ve already seen an uptick in sales from Canada. I’ve also started using Pirate Ship for their discount on International First class. So far, I’ve seen a discount of as much as $6 over what the cost would have been to ship via eBay.
Sales have slowing down progressively after having above average sales for most of the year. 5/9 – $582.36, 5/16 – $534.7, 5/23 – $467.68, 5/30 – $278.87. Well below my average for the year of $994/week. Interestingly though, if I look at last year, I’m up 3/6% year over year. Also had a very large return for a camera I had sold for $499. That was a big ouch.
The lower sales have at least given me more time to focus on posting items, so I have listed 200 items, averaging 50 new listings per week.
I tried something new over the past few weeks. If anyone else follows the Thrifting Board on Facebook, the founder, Jason, is frequently suggesting that posting CDs is a good pipeline for sales. I came across an auction listing for 1000 CDs a while back and bought the lot for $100. Going through them was daunting so left them alone in their boxes for a year. Finally started in on them and went through the whole lot over the past few weeks. The majority were worth next to nothing and weren’t worth the time to list, but I ended up with 90 listings that have a potential for $3,574. Four sold already for a total of $80. It will be interesting to see how many actually sell. I’m anticipating that most will be long tail. A lot of pretty obscure artists that aren’t in existence any longer and several for which I could find no information at all on the web. We’ll see…
Here are my numbers for last week, the worst for the year:
Week Ending 05/30/2020
Total Items in Store: 1210
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $278.87
Gross wo Shipping $204.55
Cost of Items Sold: $25.48
COGS Percent 12.46%
Highest Price Sold: $49.95 Hitchcock DVD Collection
Average Price Sold: $20.46
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0.00
Sold via promoted listings: 4
Promoted Percentage: 40.00%
Average Days Listed: 175
Longest Listed: 485
New items listed: 52Hope everyone is staying safe.
