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I use to transport blood samples to Walter Reed in something that looked nearly identical to this. It had a case on the inside that held the blood in vials and a separate part attached to the interior case that held cold packs.
They are from India, do a search for India Knife and Fork Set on ebay, range from $9-20 on the sold listings.
Retro,
For awhile they had me shipping everything to Nevada, 50lbs boxes of books really rack up charges. That lasted about three months then they had me ship everything to North Carolina for a year. Now I ship to New Jersey and Kentucky. So hopefully ride it out and it may change.
Are they splitting up identical items or different items in the shipment being separated out to different warehouses?
If they are splitting identical items to different warehouses you can adjust an option to change that.
Settings —> Fulfillment By Amazon—> Inventory Placement Option On/Off
This will force identical ASIN/SKU’ed items to one location regardless of quantity. They will charge you for this service based off of the weight of the item, but it may save money versus separate shipments to different parts of the US.
crystalachey,
Not a bad system, and it works for you so that is really all that matters. I think the problem would start when you add a helper..or even two helpers.
What if the top has two primary colors, or it has no primary colors but equally shares four colors? What if its color is Burnt Peach, Bluish/Green or Greenish/Blue, Taupe or whatever other crazy colors people label some of their clothing. Then it can be interpreted differently by each person listing and pulling.
The other problem I have is space. Let’s say black is the primary color of most of your tops and bottoms (Your store is now up to 8k items) you now have boxes and boxes stacked up and marked black 1-80 but you have an entire empty section near the solo Yellow Top Size Small Box and the Green Top Size XXL. You can move black boxes over to the under utilized sections but, this will complicate pulling black items as they are now in two or three different locations.
You are limiting your options by not utilizing the empty space in each box. It may not be a problem now, I am not sure what your available space or items listed hover around. But, as you grow you will want to squeeze every drop of space out of your current storage configuration before being forced to expand your storage. Trust me I went from rec room storage to single car garage, two car garage and a basement, 1.5k sqft office and now I am in a 3k sqft warehouse and still running out of space.
Ultimately, go with what works best for you, each time I changed my storage area I had to completely retool my storage methods. I am hoping this plan and space holds me for awhile longer.
Jay- Yep all jumbled together. When I go to pack I print an “Awaiting Shipment” list and just sort them by color first. Then proceed to pull in order. For me, it actually makes it easier to have items mixed up. Instead of going to a shelf with 100 books and looking for one book, I may be going to a shelf that only has one book amongst other stuff.
BwBark, your right the title is very important and I hate wasting precious keyword space, but its a time-saving measure on my part. A few items wouldn’t be a problem to get the email and write them down. Tomorrow morning I have 48 items to pack, probably more by the time I get into the office. Just easier to have all of that info in one easy to print page.
I guess I could put the code in another field, or even in the item description. But you would have to go and look up each individual item and write the location code down. There are some programs that can allow you to input a location code and print pull lists directly from the program instead of using Ebay. I think Inkfrog and Auctivia have some of those functions.
Dylan,
I am generally up, eBay more than any others because that is what I concentrated on growing this year. Two weeks left and I am hoping those numbers keep shifting up.
Amazon 5.5% Up
Ebay 19% Up
Alibris 8.3% Up
Half 3.5% Down
Barnes and Nobles 4.3% Down
Just started Bonanza this year, will see how it compares next year.• Ebay
• Total Items in Store: 8300
• Items Sold: 151
• Cost of Items Sold: $205
• Total Sales: $3249.58
• Highest Price Sold: $145 Size 60L Suit
• Average Price Sold: $21.52
• Returns: 3 (clothes)
• Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $220
• Number of items listed this week: 50Since the shopping season has started the last few weeks has produced solid numbers. Top sellers this week Size 60L suit for $145, Flames of War miniature gaming models $123, broken kitchen aid for $40.
Didn’t list a whole lot on ebay, been focusing more on getting the last rush of FBA items in before the Christmas prime cut off date. Amazon FBA sales have really spiked since Thanksgiving, and we are clearing out a huge glut of board games and toys that are in FBA.
Question about the building, when you say stick building to you mean something like a barn or pretty much a house? Will you run into any zoning/HOA problems constructing a large building and running a business out of it in a residential area? I know it’s not allowed here but I am sure the zoning is different in Luray. I have been looking for some land close to Woodbridge that will allow a metal building for our warehousing, zoning has been the main obstacle to overcome. I would like to get out of the renting a warehouse and just build one instead, that way when we leave we have a property to rent out.
Country Lane,
That’s exactly what I want, the one I have priced out is about 6,000sf, 23k for plans and material a lot extra for labor, concrete and other associated costs.Sounds like I use something very similar to MDC, I adapted mine from the system our base supply folks used when I was in the Air Force and did a year at their warehouse. They had somewhere in the ballpark of 30,000 different SKUs. Everything from nuts and bolts to the wing of an F-15.
They divided the warehouse up into three main sections, then subdivided into 8 rows per section and continued to subdivide as needed by the size of the part. So rows with very small parts would have a lot more sections than rows with larger bulkier items. Their SkU’s were complicated but the same principle can be applied.
We use a simple sku code at the end of our title of the listing to tell us where its located and how long its listed. For example, BL5-1201 would be Black Row, Shelf 5 and it was listed in December. Its easy to teach any anyone can go directly to the shelf where the item needs to be pulled and only have to look in a four-foot section of shelving.
The reason it goes in the title is so that when you hit print items awaiting to be shipped all of the information is on one piece of paper. If it was buried in the listing or some type of database that’s extra time spent looking up information instead of moving on to pulling and packing.
Never mind I found a site that sells them.
Look at this beauty, its 4% off right now.
http://www.adorama.com/orcp.html?RRref=productPage
Kinda crazy.
I think they look great. Is the table material just semi-translucent plexiglass or plastic? I think the table dimensions look small for a lot of the large objects we shoot. We use a six foot table covered with white cloth and a white backdrop. We are listing a lot of government and fire dept. surplus items that are inherently dirty and they get the drops dirty. We bleach and wash them but it’s starting to become a pain.
Congrats!
I think that’s amazing considering most of them are dated postcards and this is your side job. I don’t think I have even seen a postcard worth selling in all of my years of doing this.
Did you ever figure out what you wanted to do with those medical books?
Sorry wife already snagged me for Christmas shopping. I would be up for meeting sometime in January.
Would love to meet up with some fellow ebayers. Unfortunately my daughter has a swim meet at 3pm in Woodbridge. Wouldn’t be able to stay long before having to battle southbound traffic.
Count me in for the next one.
Everything is automated, I upload an excel file to a program I use. For example, I listed 500 DVDs/Sets Saturday in about three hours.
It would be a hassle to list/delist each item on all of the venues and take the risk of double selling before you get the chance to remove it.
Program is called Monsoon, they take a commission but its well worth it in time saved and cross marketing profits.
