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David has the jist of it. As he said, a lot of the smaller sellers were on auto-pilot and didnt really pay attention to the new fee structure. In a few months the lower prices books will be gone, I already see a shift toward higher prices to cover the new fees. If you are not a FBA’er the new fees amounted to about $1 increase, not that big of a hurdle to overcome. FBA sellers were hit a little harder.
Penny sellers are still very abundant they just raised their prices, I believe the new threshold is around $5.10 for most penny book sellers. At that price they are at their old margins and if it worked then it will work now.
On the plus side I am selling more than ever through alibris, half, abes, ebay and several other venues. I am able to knock the price down about 12% from our base amazon price.
I have one part timer that comes in Monday through Wednesday, he primarily helps pack in the morning and then pictures a line of stuff I have set out the night before for ebay. Then I have a contractor that goes to our single largest charity partner Mon, Wen and Friday to source for books. Listing remains the bottleneck, around 400 items sitting around waiting to be listed. Most of my time is dedicated to listing items on Amazon.
I am toying around with the the idea of teaching my oldest daughter how to list. She is looking for extra cash to supplement her part-time job and this wouldn’t interfere with her college class schedule.
I sold a ab glider last year. If its similar to the one I sold it had a chair on a stand and some handle bar type things. I took it apart, went to REI’s dumpster and got a large box and some packing material, and it all fit in no problem. Weight came in around 30lbs so it wasn’t even that expensive to ship.
Not sure about the chair, is that the kind where you flip upside down and do sit-ups? They ship these items to customers houses so they normally disassemble fairly easily.
Nice post! I sorta followed that path.
I’m happily stuck somewhere between the 3rd and 4th phases I guess? I still sell a lot of items below $30, heck below $10, but I also sell items for over $100. Don’t think I want to progress to just selling higher end items. When I buy in bulk I cant see throwing away items that will make me a quick $5-7, I don’t purposely buy those items they come with a bunch of junk that I do want to buy.
LeeinTN,
I saw a similar situation last week. I noticed while listing several books that the same seller had thousands of books priced at $8 that normally sell for $20 or more. Not sure how a just launched and zero feedback seller was able to list so many items and accept so many sales. Normally they will throttle your sales for several months to make sure your a legit seller. If you chek the sellers feedback now you will see hundreds of negative feedbacks from buyers who were ripped off. Seller probably make 20-30k used some kind of fake tracking number to get the sales depsoited, and then closed out their account before amazon could sieze it.
File a A-Z claim and amazon will refund you.
Ebay
Total Items in Store: 9354
Items Sold: 111
Cost of Items Sold: $128
Total Sales: $3963
Highest Price Sold: $325 Leica DRP Camera
Average Price Sold: $35.70
Returns: 4 (broken lamp and clothing)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $452
Number of items listed this week: 125Best week in a long time on ebay. Highest sold item was a vintage Lecia camera for $325 to another reseller. Two large kids book lots, a goosebump kids book set $188 and a Dr. Seuss book lot $180. Great looking signed football coaching book $173. We started listing a lot of toys from that huge container lot purchase. A lot of them sold for $40-60 and the highest was a pair of Annapolis Cadet GIJoe figures for $125.
Not on the totals listed above because they sold on amazon. A Seed of Chucky toy set for $125, a self help workbook for $225, 3 sets of magic tree house book sets for $108 each and a contracting sourcing book for $128.
I have never gone to a live auction, it’s a weak point in my sourcing. I have done plenty of storage units and moving units auctions but for some reason I cannot find time to go to a live auction. I would meet you guys up in DC but I dread fighting that traffic, after seven years of commuting up there every day I avoid it at all costs. I have started looking more at online estate auctions, there are two very close auction houses that have went 100% online. They do not really picture or put up box/table lots.
Negative feedbacks happen, its been three months since we had one but we just received a negative for an item lost in the mail. I just focus on getting more positive feedbacks and let the negative be, not going to stress about it.
Taking a few days off this week and then traveling for Easter, pipeline is stocked so hopefully sales will stay steady.
Total Items in Store: 9205
Items Sold: 142
Cost of Items Sold: $175
Total Sales: $2860.28
Highest Price Sold: $240 Singer Sewing Machine
Average Price Sold: $20.14
Inventory Purchased $85Good week, tops sellers was another Singer sewing machine from the storage unit buy for $240. 18 Williams Sonoma cookbooks for $85, and seven broken xbox consoles for $68. Not counted toward totals, but my son sold off all of his skylander toys for $85. Off of ebay we sold another lot of D.C. firefighter jacket scraps to our buyer in Germany for $375. On Amazon we sold an Alfred Hitchcock “Birds” Barbie for $90, everything else was under $60.
Back in February I had a large amount of item sent back from Amazon FBA instead of taking the long term storage fee. The last box finally arrived last week, Amazon sent me a report that stating 85 items were lost/damaged in warehouse. Total refunds for lost/damage was $350. In addition many of the boxes arrived damaged with large holds in them or split seems. The books were literally pouring out of the boxes when the UPS drivers dropped them off. I have several cases in for reimbursement based off poor packaging.Ebay tape seems to be a mixed bag, at times it great and other times I can’t seem to keep it on the box. Not sure if it’s the humidity, or heat but it seems to have gotten worse at lately.
Hit two milestones recently, 10k feedback and maintained a 16k (gross) month.
I agree, knowing that someone has been in our private space would scare the crap out of me. I wouldn’t sleep good for months or ever let the kids stay alone again. We put up a decent home security system and monitor it from our phones. Total cost was under $500 without monthly monitoring charges.
Plus I have teenage daughters in a neighborhood full of teenage boys.
Depending on the size of the house it could make for a good warehouse! Probably cheaper in the long run then renting a storage unit or getting an office space.
They said they couldn’t ID the problem but they would pass it up the line. In the meantime I made all new shipping templates, added a few banned countries to make it different than the existing template with problems and started to list everything under new templates.
Jawa,
Check your local government surplus, I buy from schools, libraries, colleges, water authorities ect.. Almost every county,state and federal organization has a way to sell off their unwanted stuff.
Not sure what else you have around your area without a city name? Farm equipment, Equestrian supplies, rock climbing?
I agree with Eve, and I have said this to Jay before they started their amazon experiment. Amazon is boring, unimaginative and a soulless grind. But, its easy and pays the bills. Going on 8 years and I drag my feet listing and packing on amazon but really enjoy scavenging and listing for ebay. With amazon’s continually hike in fees I have started a slow turn away from amazon and leaning more toward ebay in the last few months. Maybe in a few years I will have amazon on passive mode just selling whatever is left in stock.
