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Jasono0o8,
Are you still interested in getting paid to list items?
It might work for you to list for me. Brighton would be a good area to meet for a pick up \ drop off.
Mark
Brian,
I am with you on estate sales! Did you see my post at the top for my “Scavenge of the week”? That was a bit atypical, but deals like those abound at the estate sales. I checked for this weekend within 30 miles of me and there are 58 estate sales! No lack of them around here.
I like to review the estate sales and go only to the ones I think are the best for what I am looking for. This always seems to work for me. I usually pick the vintage ones and usually find the vintage stuff that most everyone overlooks.
I think the estate people are overwhelmed with the volume of items to sell. Because of that, I think they research the obvious expensive items and then “wing it” on the other items. The problem is that there experience is limited and they often overlook gems.
I also like garage sales and rummage sales.
I like auctions, but I have had such little time lately that I have avoided them because of the time commitment.
Mark
07/15/18 – 07/21/18
Total Items In Store: 2,407
Items Sold: 6
Cost of Items Sold: $25 (around)
Total Sales: $ 232
Highest Price Sold: $ 75 (Electricians Leather Pouch)
Average Price Sold: $ 38.67
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $
Number of Items listed this week: 2Very slow week even for this time of the year. But today has been a good day already, so things are looking up.
My process improvement for the week: I wrote a script for WL to get all of my unshipped sales and create a pick list. The pick list is automatically sent to an Excel spreadsheet with the following information: Title, Purchase Date\Time, my Bin #, my COG, Price the buyer paid, and shipping charged. Later, I am going to tie this to my container table so that it will tell me where exactly where the bin is located. Then I will have all the information I need and more to go get the items. This is just a little help right now because I’m only selling a couple of items a day if that. But it will be great for the busy season when I have to pick over 10 items at a time.
Scavenge of the week: I took my 10 year old daughter with me to an estate sale. I had been busy buying large Matchbox cars from the early 70’s. My daughter saw my interest in cars and alerted me to some really old dusty cars. I couldn’t really tell what they were because they were caked in dust. I could tell they were promo cars and 2 were from 1964 and 1 from 1963 (I could read this on the license plate). The lady only charged me $1 each, so I couldn’t go wrong with my educated guess. I had to wipe all the dust away at home to see what I had bought. To my surprise, after all the dust cleared (literally), I had a 1964 Corvette Sting Ray Promo Car in my hand! The only real issue was the front chrome bumper was missing. I am still going to ask $200 for this car. The other two cars were a 1964 Oldsmobile Cutlass and a 1963 Corvair Convertible with some issues with each of them. I will still ask $75 each for the other two cars.
Mark
T-Satt,
Yes, see my post above to Jay about adding processes. I am still trying to get to the cycle counts you suggested, because I do see value in that. I have enough work to do that if I went full time, I wouldn’t have to wonder what to do.
Mark
Jay,
I would like to try this full time, but I need to get my listings way up before that. I do like my job, but I feel it is holding. me back from my full potential on ebay, but necessary right now. I think my store is having growing pains. I add processes as I see that I need them such as loading all my cogs, but that takes time. I am planning on taking a couple half days a month for the next severals months from work to get caught up on my store. I also need a big push of items to get listed for the busy season.
Mark
07/08/18 – 07/14/18
Total Items In Store: 2,407
Items Sold: 18
Cost of Items Sold: $55 (around)
Total Sales: $ 596
Highest Price Sold: $ 60 (Vintage Briefcase)
Average Price Sold: $ 33.11
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 22.5
Number of Items listed this week: 13Decent week for this time of the year.
Trying to get back into the swing of things after coming back from a long vacation.
I was able to get some great items at some garage sales yesterday. I had to go to a city about 20 min. away I don’t normal go to for personal errands.
I hit a bunch of garage sales on the way back. I bought 8 items for an average buying price of $2.81 and average selling price of $61.I wrote my query for WL to get all of my sales with COGS(COGS part is To do). I just have to load all my spreadsheets of cogs into WL to finish that task. That will save me a ton of time at tax time.
I started reclaiming container space yesterday. I was able to free up 3, 18 gallon containers and 2, 30 gallon containers.
I have realized that once your store gets this big, there are so many tasks to do other than listing. Sometimes it is hard to know which to do first on a limited part time basis. I feel like I need to work full time just to get caught up on everything I need to do.
Mark
Retro,
Yes, that Sony Playstation item I would consider a commodity item.
How did you determine that the Hoka One One shoes will sell for a minimum $50 price and less than a month? From trial and error? Or what research do you do to know that? I would like to know this, but all I seem to be able see is that yes, my item had 5 sales in the last week and they were all around $50. But that doesn’t tell me how long it will take to sell.
Please explain how you can tell how long it will take to sell.
Mark
Mike,
1. I believe in keeping it simple so it is very close to the actual number and doable.
2. I think my method gets me to where I need to be and I could defend it if I were to be audited.
I think my method sticks to the two points above. I was just curious how other people were doing this. I did this manually last year for about 800 sales and it was very time consuming. I just wanted to see what others are doing. My hunch is that a lot of people just “wing it”. That would not pass point 2 above.
This is my process improvement for this year. Once I get this fully in place, it should work fairly smoothly with little time spent. I think this method would easily scale to a 20,000 item inventory.
Mark
Retro,
I understand your point and I agree that if you buy junk, there is no guarantee.
However, most people on this blog are pretty good at buying great items. But, no matter how much research you do, you can never guarantee a sale unless you have a commodity item that is way under priced.
So, I would agree Luftmentsh and ebaymom that it can feel like a slot machine in one way – that is that you never know exactly when you are going to get a sale and what item it will be.
But in another way, I agree with you – if you buy great items, you know that they will sell. But you still have to admit that just because you know they will sell, you don’t know when and for what price (in advance, unless you set limits). This is especially true of long tail items.
So, long tail items seem to fit the slot machine theory. The items that are commodity or those that just sell fast, that is more predictable. So, in summary, I think it depends a lot on your type of store as to how well the slot machine analogy fits.
Mark
Mike,
I googled this. It looks like we are just using different accounting methods for our COGS. This is what I found,
“The cost of goods sold is the cost of the merchandise that a retailer, distributor, or manufacturer has sold. … The second way to calculate the cost of goods sold is to use the following costs: beginning inventory + the cost of goods purchased or manufactured = cost of goods available – ending inventory.”
I use the first method, you use the second method. It appears for the “ending inventory” part for you, you are doing inventory counts, correct? I could never do that for 2400 items, let alone the 20,000 I hope to have one day. I would much rather do the first method where I know what I paid for each and every item sold that did not come back to me and get the grand total. That was the point of my query, to do just that.
Am I getting what you are saying, or am I missing something?
Mark
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
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
