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Weekly sales 5/23-5/29
Random Item Store
Total items 516
Items sold 12
New items listed 17
Gross sales $374.04
Net sales $240.01Patch Store
Total items 2333
Items sold 30
New items listed 66
Gross sales $201.05
Net sales $160.05Etsy
Orders 12
Gross sales $91.52
Net sales $90.82Net sales total $490.88
Not too bad of a week for me during this slow season. I certainly resonate with the feeling of being an outsider. The longer I work a corporate job and think about the different career paths, the more I realize none of them are appealing to me.
The new house has been great so far. There are several big expenses on the horizon though. Need to get a tree cut down, get gutters, and a lawn mower. We at least kept some of the cash we got from the sale of our old house so all these new expenses will be covered. I still haven’t gotten around to getting my huge storage building the way I want it but it’s going to be sweet once I do. We have an 11 month old baby so that throws a wrench in my productivity as well.
I haven’t had any issues buying patch lots so far. I have only had issues trying to sell certain ones lol. I bought 2,000 USPS patches a while ago and then figured out that I couldn’t sell them on eBay. It was just a thousand each of 2 versions of patches though so I made two listings on Etsy and have been selling about $100 a week of them each week with no issues.
My current death pile of patches is a lot of about 10,000 I bought from someone in Canada who worked at a patch company that went out of business in 2004. I paid about $1,500 total and if I just sold them all for $5 a piece that’d be $50,000. I regularly sell some for $10-$15 a piece though so I’ll probably do better than a $5 average. At my current listing rate, I won’t have to buy more patches for a year probably.
Weekly sales 5/16 – 5/22
Random Item Store
Total items 511
Items sold 7
Gross sales $176.40
Net sales $74.22Patch Store
Total items 2297
Items sold 27
Gross sales $254.75
Net sales $203.98Etsy
Orders 10
Gross sales $90.95Net sales total $369.72
I need to start posting every week and keeping myself accountable. I’d like to go full time eventually but have been kinda stagnant lately. We moved in March and it’s been hard to get back into a routine ever since. I’m slowly piecing a process together though. The slow sales also cause some discouragement and on top of that, eBay has suspended my patch store recently due to a “counterfeit” suzuki patch. They said, “if you can’t guarantee that an item is 100% authentic, don’t list it”.
I thought that was funny since no one can guarantee that an item is authentic if they buy it used from somewhere other than the original company… It just sucks cause I plan to build the patch store up to tens of thousands of listings but if a patch has a company name on it there’s a chance I will get slapped for counterfeit or VERO. Guess I’ll have to ditch the patches related to businesses if it keeps being an issue.
Pasting this as plain text from google sheets:
Week of 2/28-3/06
Total items listed: 2,853 (80% of which are patches)
Total items sold: 61
Gross sales: $719.19
Net sales: $503.90I’d recommend reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear if you haven’t. I listened to the audiobook while listing and it opened my eyes to the importance of small daily habits.
How I apply the book’s teachings to eBay is I have a set goal of daily listings I want to hit each weekday. It’s not a very hard number to hit and it has enabled me to be way more consistent than I used to be. I’ve listed over 3,000 patches since June because of the daily goal.
Not sure what your eBay numbers are, but find out how many items you list on average per day. Let’s say it’s 3. List 3 items every weekday for a month and it will start to become part of your everyday routine as long as you tell yourself you HAVE to hit that number at a minimum.
Now all you have to do is add to that daily number and you will start listing more every day. 2 more items a day is 10 items a week or 40 a month. If you keep at this indefinitely, you may find you’re listing double the amount you used to on average and it won’t feel like a lot more work because it will have become a daily habit.
Another thing you can do is make some of your distractions treats for hitting your daily goal. Make a rule that you can’t go into the kitchen until you have listed 3 items or something like that. Whatever you can do to make listing more attractive. You’ll likely sell more items if you list more consistently so that will be a positive reinforcement in itself.
Yeah I guess a lot of people collect them. There’s basically a patch associated with everything in the world so you can cover all types of interests with them. I don’t know much about boy scout patches but I’ve seen some go for hundreds. Those are hard to come by though. I think the most I’ve gotten for a single patch so far is $60-$70.
Lol yeah, I still have a full time job so my current goal is to just list 20 patches a day. I’m only selling 5-10 patches a day right now so I my active listings keep going up. I think if I can get to where I’m selling 50 patches a day and list 60 or so, I will have a good balance and be able to live off the income. It probably does take a specific personality type to do this kind of selling. Listening to podcasts certainly helps me get through the drudgery
Yeah I’d like to know his process too. I can list about 20 patches an hour with my current process. Honestly you can buy all the patches you’ll ever need from inventory right from eBay. I’ve got a pile of about 10,000 to list and I just started doing this 8 months ago. They’re pretty much all vintage too.
here’s his store: https://www.ebay.com/usr/patchpeddler
The interview episodes are awesome! I really enjoyed the one with Terminal99. You should do another interview with him sometime. I follow his store and he’s still trucking along.
Someone I would like to hear an interview from is the owner of the ebay store Patch Peddler. I’m trying to replicate them. They have just under 40,000 patches listed. After 8 months of going at it, I’ve got 2250 individual patch listings and have sold over 1,000 patches.
I decided to go all-in on patches when I came across patch peddler and did some math. eBay shows they sell about 6,000 patches every 90 days. If you just sold each patch for $5, that’s still $30,000 each quarter or $120,000 annually… Judging by their sales, I bet patch peddler is closer to $10 average sale price.
Actually, I don’t know what I’m saying. I currently store all my inventory on 2 of my garage walls so that’s like maybe 100 square feet and the storage building we’re getting is bigger than our entire house we live in now
Yeah and with taxes and insurance it will be about $1150 a month. We’re currently paying $675 a month but I feel like I’ll be able to store about 5-10 times more items than I currently can so I think that will make up for the increased expense eventually… plus we kinda hate the neighborhood we live in so there’s that lol
We bought a house for $276k and are selling our current house for $200k so it will be more expensive but we only owe $77k on our current house so we have a lot of equity to put down. If our house hadn’t appreciated so much then we wouldn’t be buying right now but it made sense to us to go ahead and move.
Had to put eBay on pause this week due to buying a house and selling our house. I am excited about the move though! We are going from a small house in a crowded subdivision to a bigger house on 3 acres and it just so happens the new house has a 1500 square foot storage shed on the property with power… I wonder what I’ll do with that building 🙂
the market is crazy right now but we were able to sell our house for double what we paid in 2016 so that helped ease the pain of the new mortgage.
Looks like you can also get the deal I was talking about with Consumer cellular:
I actually just bought the iPhone SE from Best Buy on the internet with no contract. They had some kind of deal for total wireless specifically. It came with a prepaid card thing but I just popped the sim card I already had in it and it works fine. Looks like Target is doing the same thing. I’m not sure if you can use the total wireless phones with any other carrier sim card so that may be how they’re getting there money.
