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07/13/2018 at 12:16 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45341
Mike,
Your response was a little over my “accounting knowledge” head.
All I know is that WL tracks every single purchase that is made. If I back out the unpaids, cancels, and refunded items, I am left with the items that left my store and never came back. I take the COGS for that and it should be right on. I suppose it is possible that it is not 100% exact, but pretty darn close. I would guess that I am closer than 99% + of most people here on the blog.
But I am confused about your cogs in your QuickBook. How do they cogs get in there? How do you know they are 100% accurate? I take Go-Daddy as spot on because it is done electronically, but that can’t track COGS. Enlighten me.
Mark
07/13/2018 at 10:41 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45328Mike,
What about the COGS in the Sales Report?
Mark
I just ran across this site that has the title, “10 Records You Might Have Owned That Are Now Worth a Fortune” at:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/77144/10-records-you-might-have-owned-are-now-worth-fortune
I have been buying and selling records for a while and I didn’t know this information. Very interesting.
Brian and Paul – you sell a lot of records, were you guys aware of these records?
I know, this is the scavenger lottery and will probably never happen for most of us. But, with over 4,000 people on this site, there is a lot of scavenging going on. I bet at least a couple people here will come across one of these at some point.
Mark
07/13/2018 at 12:07 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45282T-Satt,
The STR is calculated: Num of Solds / (Num Unsolds Listed + Num Solds) for the time period. In this case the time period was from 1/1/18 – 7/11/18.
Mark
07/12/2018 at 11:43 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45281Mike,
Also, I don’t think you can use the WL Sales Report to accurately get your COGS. It will be close, but they will be over-stated because that report includes unpaids, cancelled, and returned items.
So, if you run that report at the end of the year and just take that COGS number that is shown in the summary for the report, your number will be over-stated. For me, that would be about 10% more than it should be. Do you just live with giving the IRS an inflated COGS number or do you have a way around that?
Mark
07/12/2018 at 11:37 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45280Mike,
I track about the same info you do for items that I buy. The only difference is that I put that info into a spreadsheet. I guess that is just habit. But that can save me time because if my buy lot is number 222 and I bought 50 items at the same place at the same time, then I just have to put buy lot 222 into my table of buy lots and only enter that information 1 time instead of 50 times. That is the power of a relational database.
That was helpful giving the step by step procedure of how to do that if I wanted to enter it directly into WL. I like WL, but that user interface is not the most intuitive interface. I guess that is why I try to stick to the db. That would be faster than ebay, but that would take a lot of time to find my COGS for 100 items at a time.
Mark
Mike,
That is one thing I really like about Wonder Lister, I have complete database access to all my data and I can slice and dice it with queries any way I want. And after I have created the query or procedure once, it just takes a couple seconds to run it again for any date range I want.
I am going have to hold myself back from creating more queries because it can suck a lot of time. Right now I think I have the right amount of analysis and reporting capabilities. I have concentrated on creating the reports and analysis that I thought would be most helpful – such as year end tax reports. I may add a weekly comparison of this week, compared to this week last year (Weekly YOY).
Mark
07/11/2018 at 11:25 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45197This is a sample of what my year end report looks like. I can run it any time for any date range, but is meant for tax time. The First table is the details of all the items I have sold for the year. This is going to include COGS at the item level. I will also be able to sum up the cogs for the summary tables below it.
Mark
Oh, I also created my query to produce my year end report of all items sold, the bin\item #, price, shipping charged, etc. The only thing I need to do now is load my COGS for the bin\item#. I have all this info in separate spreadsheets, so I have to merge it all into 1 spreadsheet, then load it into a table on the WL DB. Then link that table with the query I just wrote.
In the end, I will just run this 1 query at the end of the year and it will give me YTD sales with COGS. It will also give me state of Michigan Sales and Sales broken down by each month in the year with ASP, and possibly STR if I get to that. The tricky part to this was backing out the Cancelled, Unpaid, and Returned items. I also then have to keep appending each lot of items I list to the COGS table, but no big deal after I have that set up. I know Mike is going to say, “Why not put the COGS in a custom field?” Well, that would be a lot of work now for 2400 items already in my store. It is much easier to load the data I already have in spreadsheets and link to that. That will also give me the date I bought the item and the address where I bought it (not sure that is needed, but you never know). I could use this in the future to run further analysis on how long it takes to list an item after I buy it, etc.
Mark
I also know that my average STR per month is 3.8%. My ASP for the year is $37.22. So, as T-Satt says, I am in the 10X, 4% camp and I am good with that. My store tends to mirror J&R’s in terms of that.
I think this analysis is telling me that the following is selling well for me and keep buying these types of items:
Shoes \ Boots \ Skates
Coats \ Jackets
Vintage
Briefcases
Games \ Blankets \ dolls \ cases – Good ASP, but Long Tail
Sports equipments (including baseball, golf, hockey, motorcycle, etc)
hats are doing okStop buying the following:
– Stop buying lower selling priced sweaters
– stop buying backpacks. They take way to long to sell and have a low ASP.T-Satt – let me know if you have any more insight into my numbers that I posted above.
Mark
Here is the rest of my STR queries:
I just ran this for the phase in the title. I know that I sell a lot of the items I have, so this is a good start for me.
Mark
SalarySlave,
My thinking was close to yours because I am also part time. T-Satt challenged me with finding my real STR. I ran some queries in Wonderlister and found sme interesting info.
I just ran this again and I have some action points: Don’t buy backpacks, they are not selling. Only buy higher priced sweaters. Games are long tail and high STR – I will still buy those.
You don’t have to go crazy on this, but running thing like this can give real insight into your store.
Wonderlister makes this real easy. I wrote a procedure I can call and create these, so it is real easy for me now.
See my analysis I ran today:
Mark
This is a new one for me. A buyer bought separate items, both shoes (totally different sizes which was wierd).
Ebay blocked the sale because they said it was a suspicious buyer.
I could not relist the items so I called ebay. They said in this case, they don’t allow the items to get relisted because they don’t want that buyer to buy them again (possibly with another account). I blocked the buyer. I have to relist from scratch.
Pain to relist? Not too bad. I just went back to Wonderlister, went the listing and copy the info to a new listing. Another reason to have a backup.
Still haven’t heard from ebay on the 198 items that have photos missing from their June glitch. I could get them from Wonderlister, but that would take about 8-10 hours to upload all those pics, so I am hoping ebay can do it.
On another front, I brain stormed some reports I want from Wonder Lister. I just made a pick report with my bin number. Next, I am going to do a query that gives me all my cogs for items sold at the item level in one query. This will be my year end query for taxes. There is some pre-work to this, so I have to also do that, but this will make tax time a breeze. I am starting to sell too many items to do this manually. This will be a great and much needed improvement to my processes.
Mark
07/01/18 – 07/07/18
Total Items In Store: 2,406
Items Sold: 9
Cost of Items Sold: $40 (around)
Total Sales: $ 471
Highest Price Sold: $ 150 (Vintage Briefcase)
Average Price Sold: $ 52.33
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 0
Number of Items listed this week: 0I was off on vacation so nothing but sending out the 21 items that sold while I was gone. Not much volume, but good ASP.
I drove through from Michigan to Florida and back. I enjoyed going to Chick-fil-A in the South where they are everywhere. I don’t have one close to where I live. I saw a “Hands Free” zone near Atlanta. So I guess the law is that you can’t even have your smartphone in your hand when you are driving.
The photo issue was hitting just as I was leaving for vacation. I didn’t have time to do anything about it. I ran that utility url that Doubly suggested and it worked great. However, I have 198 listings with only 1 photo. I spot checked 1 item with my Wonder Lister ImportedPicturesDirectory. The good news is that I have a backup with WL. The bad news is that is going to be 800-1000 photos to upload. I called ebay to see what they could do. The rep said there was nothing they could do. I asked for a manager. The manager let me send the file of 198 items with their item id. She is going to send the list to the tech team to see if they can retrieve the photos. She said that ebay is planning on addressing this global photo issue by July 13th. I will let you know what happens.
Mark
06/26/2018 at 5:17 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 366: How To Run A Small, Local Business #43640We drove down to Florida from Michigan. Had a nice stop in Gatlinburg TN for a couple days. Drove thru Georgia that everyone was talking about last week. I peobably drove right past a lot of you going down I-75.
Mark
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