65

[Mark S]

8/6/17 – 8/12/17

Total Items in Store: 2,088
Items SOld: 12
Cost of Items Sold: $35 (around)
Total Sales: $348
Highest Price Sold: $112.50 for an Antique Boat Propeller
Average Price Sold: 29
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 165
Number of items listed this week: 11

Not a great week for sales. Friday – Sunday was dead.

I had a good experience at an estate sale. I went on Thursday and found a lot of nice
shoes that I was interested in, but the prices were in the $12-$20 range. This was a bit steep for me even though they were great shoes.

So, I figured the shoes will probably not move well in an estate sale and especially at those prices. I found out they would have 40% off the next day.

So, on Friday I went back with the strategy to ask them if I bought a large quantity of shoes, could I get 60% off. They said they could get close to that and that they would work with me. So I got 11 pair and I ended up getting 54% off.

So, I paid about $5.90 a pair, but the average selling price is $60.44. So, that is a good strategy to use for shoes at an estate sale. Don’t think it would work as well for other items. I think it is the fact that shoes do not sell well at estate sales, even if they are great shoes.

Mark S

[Mark S]

FYI

I just tried to accept an offer for an item and ebay would not let me. I called ebay and they verified that there is a problem with ebay and accepting the offers right now. They said to give it 3-4 hours (that was an hour ago). I messaged my buyer to let them know and they said they were having all sorts of issues with ebay right now.

Mark

[Mark S]

Mike,

Wonder Lister has been great, but some of the features you mentioned in Wonder Lister I don’t have.

I looked it up in pricing. It appears that you don’t get “Description Templates” and “CSV Export for other marketplaces” till you are paying for their “Silver” which is $25\month. I am only paying $10 a month for Bronze. I don’t see the pick list report either, does that come with Silver also?

I really like the BIN location feature. I put that in all my new bulk listed items. I put the container # and the item # – 120-12 (Bin 120, item 12). I could use this to find my COGS later.

One other question. Wonder Lister shows how much the buyer paid for shipping. However, it doesn’t display what I paid for shipping. I see the fields in the DB but they are blank. Do you know if they are working on this, or is this one of those things I will also get with a Silver Subscription?

I have my bulk listing process down now for WL, now I’m working on semi-automating the pictures – it is an invention that I’m working on that I may sell in the future. Once I get that up and running, I may be able to list as many as 10 items per hour when I get good at it.

Mark

[Mark S]

7/16/17 – 7/22/17

Total Items in Store: 2,111
# Transations: 18, 25 Items sold
Cost of Items Sold: $50 (around)
Total Sales: $787
Highest Price Sold: $92 (2 Tied, both Make Up)
Average Price Sold: 43.72
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 26 created, but not listed yet

About $425 of my total sales were from the make up. I think the promoted sales really work. I
set up the promoted sales for a lot of the make up listings. The next day I made 5 sales for about $300. Two of the listings of make up had not seen any sales yet in 32 days, so I would have to say it was the promoted listings. My average has been 1 sale every other day for the make up, now I am making multiple sales for 2 days in a row. Some of the sales are less than $10, but I will still take it.

Mark

[Mark S]

Doublythumbs,

I can’t imagine that happening! I had some small flooding that only got a few loose things wet, but a total loss, that is hard to handle.

I will remember to say a prayer for you tonight.

Mark

[Mark S]

7/9/17 – 7/15/17

Total Items in Store: 2,115
Items Sold: 11
Cost of Items Sold: $30 (around)
Total Sales: $355
Highest Price Sold: $94.95 (Tinted Lip Balm)
Average Price Sold: $32.27
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0

Slow week for me, but yesterday was good. Mostly slow except my make up sales. The make up was a pain to sort and list, but now that it is listed, it is so easy. People have been buying multiples, so I just put them in a small bubble envelope and that’s it. Had so many sales that the 18 gallon container for them is right near the PC. It is so nice to have a $95 sale and then you put it in an envelope and all done. Make up is on my BOLO. $660 in make up sales so far and not quite a month.

I have been noticing is that scavenging has been getting a lot easier for me. I have the following on-going “venues” that consistently have great items for a reasonable cost:

Garage Sale – Guy who buys whole estate sales and has Barn sales for it every other weekend.
– Others in my area that have sales in the Spring and Fall

Estate Sale – Have one with great prices that sends me the early Bird preview about every 2 weeks

Thirft Store – Have a great small Church Thirft store close that has great items consistently.

Rummage Sales – Same church’s having annual Spring and Fall Sales that are great.

Also, I have been working on getting a process down for bulk listing with Wonder Lister. I think this will save a lot of time by putting the standard stuff in the .csv file.

Mark

[Mark S]

Total Items in Store: 2,129
Items Sold: 6
Cost of Items Sold: $30 (around)
Total Sales: $281.00
Highest Price Sold: $125 (Vintage Riedell Skates)
Average Price Sold: $46.83
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0

Not a good week for sales, but I was on a 2 week vacation with extended handling time and I didn’t list anything. I used Atlanta Mike’s advice and used TeamViewer to connect to my home computer from the beach in Florida. This enabled me to change my handling time from 10 days to 5 days midway through a 2 week vacation. It was quick and easy. I used a phone hot spot so that it was secure. When I got home, just changed it back to 1 day. I could have just kept changing it down to 4,3,2,1, but I was too relaxed at the beach.

The good news was the “Make-up cache” that I bought and now have listed is doing well. Brian B was asking for an update, well here it is. I paid $150 for about 650 make up items that I could list (some were damaged and not worth listing). There were 54 distinct listings worth about $9,000. My estimate is that I would sell $50 – $300 a month of these. So far in 17 days, I have had 8 orders for $284. So this is exceeding my expectations.

While I was on vacation I read a very interesting book by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It was called “Shoe Dog”. What a great read. I was able to share his passion for shoes via my selling of shoes on ebay. I have nearly 200 shoes listed and probably over a hundred more to list. I looked up some of the vintage Nike shoes he talked about and they go for a lot of money on ebay. New bolo for me.

Mark

[Mark S]

ThriftShift,

That’s quite a deal for a 42 foot Catamaran. I did a quick search and couldn’t find any under 100K. Why is this one you are looking at so cheap?

Market

[Mark S]

I know there has been a lot said about Wonder Lister (WL), but I wanted to share what I see as the Top 10 Benefits.

Top 10 WL Benefits (Mike – feel free to add to this)

Beginner

– anyone can do these (even the technically challenged!)

1. Generate your Weekly Numbers (or any date range you want).

2. Perform a Manual backup of your database to save on your local machine (you can set it up for automatic later).

3. Ability to look at your listings, sort them to find issues.

4. Easy Item editing.

Intermedidate

1. Easy bulk editing – Change Handling Time and most other fields you want.

2. See Shipping profiles and get shipping options updated.

3. Perform Bulk Relist.

Advanced

1. Bulk Listing of your items from a spreadsheet.

2. Access to your data at the database level

– You can slice and dice the data anyway you want.

– This will allow you to do financials as well.

3. Add Cogs so you have everything in one place.

I have been working on getting my COGS into WL. It may take me a while, but I think it will be worth it.

Mark S

[Mark S]

T-Satt,

By the way, WL will give you your weekly numbers (or whatever date range you want) with just a few clicks. I used to hate figuring out all the stats for the week, now it is easy. With you volume of sales, I can see that it would be much more time consuming.

Yes, the returns are crazy. I hardly ever get returns and I had 3-4 this week.

Mark

[Mark S]

Mike,

I was looking for this at the database level. I was looking for a table called “returns” or “refunds” but didn’t see any. I think they may just put them in the transactions table. I can’t replace go daddy this year because my data in WL only goes back 3 months from this past Friday. I asked for more data but the tech support says they are limited to 3 months back because of ebay. I would think they could get more from the backend but maybe not. But they don’t delete data so I will have all the data going forward. Those are some nice features that you described Mike, I’ll have to take a look at those. I will also have to look at the user guide. Really a great product. I read that the guy who started WL worked on turbolister for 10 years.

Have you looked at the data In The database? I am learning the tables and writing my own Sql queries (I do sql server development at work). I also want to use WL for my cogs but that will take a bit to do.

[Mark S]

Jay – You can do a 15 day free trial with Wonderlister. It is $10 for up to 2500, $25 for up to 5000 listings, and $50 for up to 10,000 listings, so you may want to start with your second store to see if it works for you.

[Mark S]

Jay,

I think Mike was referring to Sixbit that requires another server. In any event, I just used my stand alone PC and got it to work without any issues. The set up should have been easy, but since I had an older version of SQL Server loaded on my PC it didn’t work. I chatted with their tech support and they got it working for me. The bulk editor on WL is so much better. You just highlight the items you want to change, go into the bulk editor and change the fields you want to. I only did this for about 35 scheduled items, but I think Mike said that it would work for as many records as you have to update on ebay. This will make updating handling time for my upcoming vacation a breeze.

The bulk lister is what really sold this to me in my trial period. Basically, you just enter your listings into a .csv file, fill out your store specifics and the things specific to the item. It took me a lot of trial and error because there are a lot of required fields and I didn’t see anything telling you what those were, but I figured it out (after about 20+ attempts!).

It works great if you have all like items. I was doing this for the makeup I had bought and the dimensions were all the same. I was able to load 35 listings incredibly fast since I already had the title, price, and quantity already in a spreadsheet.

My goal is to be able to set all the basic settings and upload a batch to Scheduled listings. Then just add the pics by phone and measurements if needed. I may have to add some item specifics and a description if that is needed for the item. I am thinking that my wife and I could list upwards of 200 items in an 8-10 hour day doing it this way (because I already have the spreadsheets with the basic information already there).

[Mark S]

Total Items in Store: 2113
Items Sold: 13
Total Sales: $513.83
Highest Sale: $112.50 (Vintage Polo Jacket)

Decent week. Sold a lot of jackets.

Got going on Wonderlister and I believe this is going to be a game changer for me.
I love the bulk lister and I think that will make a big difference. I have access to
the data behind the scenes in SQL Server and I love getting a behind the scenes look
at what data goes into ebay\Wonderlister. I think that it could replace GoDaddy for me
except it doesn’t seem to have return items in it. I will have to look into that.
Thanks Mike for suggesting Wonderlister!

Mark S

[Mark S]

Mike,

I found a post from you from April by doing a search on Shopify. You said, “But to go live with owns own web site you need to speed a lot of time and have the knowledge to drive your own traffic to your store, then convert it. It will take a lot of upfront work, then constant working your store by writing new, and relevant content almost daily.”

What you said sounds right. Shopify’s website would have you to believe they do everything for you. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between and probably depends on what you sell. If it is a “constant working your store” then I don’t think I would be interested. But, I have quantities of certain items: it would be interesting to see if a Shopify web site could attact people to say, all used shoes or all used jackets.

Mark

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