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Mike (in Atlanta),
“I have close to 300 shipping boxes on our Excel inventory sheet, both USPS and FedEx and can grab and go with close to a perfect fit most of the time and if not then down size one to fall under the wirgt mark to save a little if only a few ounces over.”
I was meaning to ask you where you get all boxes from. I am assuming that you mean 300 unique size boxes. USPS doesn’t have anywhere close to that many different boxes, so I assume a lot of these are yours.
I have close to 40 unique boxes (total incl. USPS) and I thought I was doing well.
Please share where you get yours and how much you pay for (or free).
Mark
Habnab,
Lol, don’t worry, we will positively spotlight to the masses even though you are late!
Mark
Alert: ebay is having issues with Fedex labels right now. Avoid using Fedex labels until they get this worked out.
I get the error: “There seem to be some issue processing your request” – and yes the message says, “seem” instead of “seems”.
I got this error after creating the label and when I try to do a reprint label. The ebay rep said it is a known issue now that they are working on.
Mark
My wife and I got a kick out of sending a package to Mankato MN.
We are Little House fans, and that is the big city they always used to go to on the show.
Mark
Brian,
I was watching the Pawn Stars, Season 15, Episode 15 where this guy brought in 80 Beatles records – most of them were sealed. The appraiser, I think was Clint from Hounddog Records, said that a sealed record is worth up to 15x as much as the same NM record.
Mark
Jay,
I read sone of the preview of the book. It does sound interesting. Sounds like this guy made it big in LA.
Mark
05/13/18 – 05/19/18
Total Items In Store: 2,395
Items Sold: 13
Cost of Items Sold: $40 (around)
Total Sales: $ 414
Highest Price Sold: $ 60 (Vintage Leather Bag)
Average Price Sold: $ 31.85
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 23
Number of Items listed this week: 37This week was good till Tuesday when sales started to fall off the cliff. They are slowly climbing back up the cliff, but slowly. I did a new sale where I take 15% off if they spend $35 or more to try and drum up business.
Sunday and this past week was a great time for me to find some great Hockey equipment. Not sure why, but just found a lot of unrelated sales with Hockey equipment for cheap. The hockey stuff seems to sell well for me.
Mark
I looked into getting a VA at one time. From what I was reading on the web, some of them were awesome, but a lot of them were not good at all. As I recall, the person had to go through 3-4 VA’s or more to finally get a good one. A lot of the VA’s would just disappear. I was not willing to go through all that drama. But if you did go through the work and found a really good VA worker, it would be well worth it.
Mark
I see the pros and cons of what Jay says and the pros and cons of what Troy says. I seem to agree with both of you.
I agree with Jay that data entry is hard work and you lose efficiency as time goes on. I also agree that tasks work better when done together.
I agree with Troy in that it is much “easier to look for two sets of skills” when looking for people to do the work.
My take on this is that it depends on the actual person that you have to work with and what their particular skills are. Some people are good at multiple things, some are not. I am glad that my current lister can do it all. The process is much more efficient than when I separate out the tasks (outside of my house). However, I am not sure I could easily find another person like that without a lot of hand holding. If I were to get another person, I would start them on photography and then see if they can do other things well. It would be ideal to get someone with ebay experience, but that may just be a pipe dream.
When I look at the future of my business, if I were to get much larger, ideally I would want people to be interchangeable. For example, have 3 people: one photographer, one lister, and one shipper. But cross train them so that everyone knows how to do the others job. In my low season, the focus would be on listing, in the high season, the focus would be on shipping. So in this model, you would be able to easily shift people around to the work needed at the time. Not sure how that would work in real life, but that is how I picture it now.
Mark
If ebay moves away from “vintage pyrex and used shoes” as it is being called here, does that mean that the demand goes away? No, the demand will still be there. Either ebay fulfills that demand or some other platform will. Sellers will just have to move their items to the best platform(s) for these types of items. If ebay wants to lose that piece of the market, someone else will snatch it up. We are already seeing many sites that specialize in certain types of items. This may pave the way for Bonanza, Truegether, or some other platform in the future.
The scary thing would be if the demand for these types of items goes away. That is possible, but I don’t think it is likely.
Mark
Mike,
Also, maybe you can slow down a bit. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week is a bit much even for us younger folks. Maybe just work less hours in a day or take a day or two off to recharge. Remember the old saying that you have to stop to sharpen your blade? Seems like the schedule is wearing you out and you just need to take a little time off.
Mark
Mike,
I didn’t give that info to them about the table\column. I had to look it up and I guess I got lazy when I sent the message to WL.
I think the WL product is pretty good. They just need to beef up their documentation and support. could see though if you were not good at technical stuff that WL could be confusing.
Mark
Mike,
When I look at the database level, the data is not in the table. So, I don’t think this is a front end user interface error.
I think that either ebay isn’t sending the data (most likely in an xml) to WL, or WL is getting that field and then “dropping it on the floor” instead of putting it in the DB (but only for the USPS data is being dropped, Fedex data is getting there).
The table\column it should be going into is:
[WonderLister].[dbo].[Transactions].CMP_ShippingCostToSellerThe weird thing is that my Fedex shipping cost is in this field, but not USPS. That may be a clue.
I deal with this type of stuff all the time in my regular job. It is just a matter of the developer tracking it down to see what piece is not doing what it is suppose to.
Mark
Mike,
I am a little confused here. I am not talking about shipping I do outside of ebay, of course they won’t know that. I mean the shipping that is selected inside of ebay when printing the labels. I would think ebay and WL have access to that.
That chat thing with WL is a little wierd. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t an interactive type of thing. I didn’t see any response in my email either.
Mark
