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For the sake of anyone who might fall into the same situation, I thought I should share the ultimate outcome of the auction. To cut to the end, the final sale prices didn’t quite meet my expectations and I’d probably guide others to stick with eBay and take the risk of selling direct. I sold 4 items from the box at the auction for a selling price of $2925. Skinner took 30%, so I ended up with roughly $2000.
I allowed my fear of being somehow swindled by a buyer on eBay lead me to reduce the risk and reward by working with an auction house. I convinced myself that selling with a reputable auction house would possibly get me more because they have a direct line on the “real” collectors. So, a little greed was at play as well. The reality, as we’ve learned from eBay auctions, is that if the buyers aren’t there that day, then your item won’t get top dollar.
Now, for some perspective, I did only pay $35, so I can’t complain too much, but I will certainly do differently if I’m ever so fortunate again. I also sold the George Washington forgery this week on eBay for $974.95. So, it didn’t make me rich, but I’m doing OK and I learned some valuable lessons.
@Jay – I actually didn’t have to get it authenticated. I originally sent it to Mt. Vernon to see if they had record of it and one of the historians told me they believed it was a forgery. I then started looking for other Washington forgeries. I was able to track down enough information about the forger, a Robert Spring, and his methods to provide a high enough level of confidence for the right buyer. The purchaser is a pretty well known collector and an authority in his own right, so I guess he knew what he was getting. If you search on Robert Spring forger Washington, you’ll come up with quite a bit of info on his work. It did take me a bit of detective work to find it though.
Good podcast and nice to hear T-Satt again. Another one of the episodes I’ll need to listen to again because it was so dense with information. So generous for you to share and it’s appreciated.
I had my best week since Christmas, mainly due to one large $974 sale on Saturday. Sold a forgery of George Washington’s signature from the 1860’s. My second highest sale to date, but highest in terms of profit, since this was found in the bottom of a box of ephemera I got for $34. You might recall me posting about the box last summer. Even without that sale the week was better than my recent trends, so things are looking up.
Also had a nice $149.95 sale of a broken vintage Technics cassette deck. This was a beast of a deck, weighing in at 24 pounds. I had hoped to repair it and sell it for more, but it had a really bizarre mechanism that I couldn’t figure out.
Week Ending 02/08/2020
Total Items in Store: 1173
Items Sold: 17
Gross Sales: $1,892.16
Gross wo Shipping $1,628.25
Cost of Items Sold: $61.44
COGS Percent 3.77%
Highest Price Sold: $974.95 (1860’s forgery of George Washington’s signature)
Average Price Sold: $95.78
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory: $129.00
Sold via promoted listings: 10
Promoted Percentage: 58.82%
Average Days Listed: 188
Longest Listed: 750
New items listed: 28ANother good show. Hard to imagine what eBay was like 25 years ago. I agree that it would be great for eBay to refocus on second hand and vintage and get away from trying to compete with Amazon and other retail sellers.
Week Ending 02/08/2020
Total Items in Store: 1163
Items Sold: 14
Gross Sales: $684.12
Gross wo Shipping $495.12
Cost of Items Sold: $21.53
Highest Price Sold: $60.00 (CHandelier parts)
Average Price Sold: $35.37
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory: $960.00
Sold via promoted listings: 9
Promoted Percentage: 64.29%
Average Days Listed: 179.57
Longest Listed: 662
New items listed: 24Continuing slow sales, but bright side is that we’re selling a lot of items in which we have little to no cash investment. My two biggest sales for the week were free. First was parts from a old porcelain capodimonte chandelier that was in my house when a moved in. Felt bad about parting it out but it had a lot of damage and would have been a problem to ship whole. Sold 6 flowers from it for $60. Second was a pair of African wood bookends that were given to me when I picked up some auction winnings. He gave me three sets of bookends and this was the last of the 3 to sell. Also for $60.
Scavenge of the week: Set of 6 vintage 1968 Ansel Adams National Parks posters from an estate sale. Pretty excited about them as they seem to be extremely rare. Paid $125 for the lot.
Spent a lot on new inventory at two estate sales this week. Hoping some of these new items will energize sales.
Had a breakage on one of the items I shipped out. Only the 4th time I’ve had breakage in over 2000 shipments, but this one hurt as it was a high dollar sale, $160, and I ended up refunding half due to the breakage. Worse, I forgot to insure the item and I always ensure when items are over $100. 🙁
Happy sales!
@WAbashValleyRelics – Curious about the international shipping option. I don’t see it as an option in business policies. Where did you add this in? Wonder if it is another of those things that they are rolling out to the community slowly.
That was a dense (meaning packed with thoughtful info, not dumb) show and good to hear again. Might need to listen one more time since I was working while listening and feel like I still missed some important thoughts.
An uptick in sales this week and hoping that the xmas hangover is over. Would have been even better but a $500 sale of a piece of art fell through when the buyer never paid. Crickets from the buyer until it went to an unpaid item case, then he sends a note that he is short on cash this month. Even more painful that I took a lower offer just because things have been slow. Here are my numbers for the week:
Week Ending 02/01/2020
Total Items in Store: 1148
Items Sold: 17
Gross Sales: $1,066.94
Gross wo Shipping $846.90
Cost of Items Sold: $98.96
Highest Price Sold: $199.95 (Confederate $0.25 fractional currency bill)
Average Price Sold: $49.76
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory: 12.66
Sold via promoted listings: 9
Promoted Percentage: 52.94%
Average Days Listed: 85.76
Longest Listed: 257
New items listed: 24That is the lowest average days listed number I’ve seen since I started keeping track.
@Ryanne – I wondered about that, but isn’t it usually prohibited from sale altogether? I know I have been contacted by other buyers in the past when they can’t buy items due to restrictions. I’ve never had anything flagged after the sale.
@AtomicStar – Thanks for the input. My issue isn’t that they can’t get an invoice until the next day, the ebay rep was suggesting that the person can’t pay until they receive the receipt.
Also, my understanding is that we can’t personally send invoices to GSP customers. If we send an invoice to a GSP buyer, it is supposed to remove the shipment from GSP altogether, since we don’t have any insight into the fees that are being charged, and then has to be shipped direct.
Great topic with the free shipping experiment. I’ve noticed that Terapeak even shows how much shipping was for each item what percentage of items like yours sold with free shipping, which makes it more valuable for research. It did move me to offer free shipping for some of my more commodity type items.
Here are my numbers for the week. Sales still a bit slower here, but getting back into the swing of posting this week, so looking forward to moving up again.
Week Ending 01/25/2020
Total Items in Store: 1141
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $671.20
Gross wo Shipping $520.30
Cost of Items Sold: $46.42
Highest Price Sold: $75.00 (Tibetan Silver Snuff Bottle)
Average Price Sold: $27.38
Returns: 1 (Tibetan silver snuff bottle – ouch!)
Money Spent on New Inventory: 0
Sold via promoted listings: 7
Promoted Percentage: 36.84%
Average Days Listed: 265.79
Longest Listed: 990
New items listed: 21Sucks that my highest sale of the week was also my one return. Returned for a defect that was clearly noted in the description. At least he’s paying shipping.
@Steven S – I agree about Facebook and the groups. I’ve found many to be helpful for researching and identifying items, and there really does seem to be a group for just about anything. The one caveat with the groups is that some of them are a bit sensitive to resellers utilizing the hive mind. There are so many lazy sellers that simply post “What’s this?”. I use the hive sparingly for questions but they also have their files sections that often have some great written resources.
Great show. Nice to hear how someone else got started and then grew.
Sales have fallen off a cliff for us this last week. Probably the lowest week we’ve had since September or October. Sorry to see the slower weeks return. I’m sure lower sales have to do with less listing. The holidays were so busy I had little time post new items and since the holidays ended there have been so many other things. Time to get focused again. Have a good back log of items I need to work on.
Week Ending 01/18/2020
Total Items in Store: 1148
Items Sold: 17
Gross Sales: $563.08
Gross wo Shipping $418.50
Cost of Items Sold: $49.75
Highest Price Sold: $74.95
Average Price Sold: $24.61
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: 0
Sold via promoted listings: 5
Promoted Percentage: 29.00%
Average Days Listed: 136.18
Longest Listed: 441
New items listed: 19This is something I’ve been exploring as well. I understand that there is an app called Darktable that is a Lightroom equivalent. Interested to hear how it goes for you.
Mike
I just submitted my sales tax to the state of Maryland this morning. Used to be so easy with GoDaddy, but now it’s all muddled together with no quick way to determine what was collected for Maryland or some other state. I pulled the Paypal transaction report into excel and filtered for Maryland to get the total. Took a bit of time to figure it out for the first time, but should be easier going forward.
It was interesting to see that eBay missed collecting sales tax for one of my listings. It was over 90- days ago so I can’t review the listing, but something to keep an eye out for. I only have to submit twice a year for Maryland.
Good show this week. Interesting thoughts about collectors. My perspective is that people are still collecting, but the collectibles are cycling through the years. Hummels and Lladro no longer, but action figures, vintage cameras, typewriters are now the new collectibles. I do see the next wave perhaps changing dramatically, however, with this new millennial mindset of “experiences, not things”.
Also, kudos for last weeks discussion on cross-listing, which has been incredibly fruitful and still going strong. Lots of good info there.
My sales for the week were much lower than the latest trend, as expected due to the Christmas drop-off. Still, over half of our sales for the week were Christmas ornaments. Numbers are a bit skewed due to the one large item sale, which also came with a high cost of entry.
Week Ending 01/11/2020
Total Items in Store: 1144
Items Sold: 15
Gross Sales: $1,427.59
Gross wo Shipping $1,264.94
Cost of Items Sold: $696.68
Highest Price Sold: $998.95 (Sony a7 digital camera, COGS $668)
Average Price Sold: $84.32
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: 172.5
Sold via promoted listings: 9
Promoted Percentage: 60.00%
Average Days Listed: 395
Longest Listed: 1294
New items listed: 9I took a calculated risk on the Sony camera. It was my highest dollar purchase ever, and my highest dollar sale ever. I use one of these so I knew it well and it was in pristine condition, so felt pretty good that it would sell high and quickly. It sold within 5 hours for full asking price. After fees my profit was approx. $240.
Excited about a new scavenge. I bought a few lots at a Maxsold auction. One lot I purchased for $34 had a 14K gold Hamilton pocket watch in it. The watch wasn’t even mentioned in the listing, though there was a very blurry picture. This is why I like buying lots, you never know what you’re going to end up with.
