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[NC]

Nice, I really like Rome but don’t get up there very often. It’s still a good 40 minutes from me.

Yeah it’s been a couple years since I did extra work as well. Last time I was an extra, my wife and I were able to do it together and we ended up not leaving the set until like 2 in the morning and had to sit around outside in the freezing cold for hours lol.

The only time I made a decent hourly rate was doing a 1700s Gala scene in a show. They taught us this old school dance we had to do and that bumped up my pay. I think I ended up making $20 an hour and it was fun dressing up in 1700s attire with the powdered wig and everything.

[NC]

My two cents – I’d check out the 2020 version of the iPhone SE. It’s basically the iPhone 11 minus a couple camera features and smaller size with a little less battery life. I use Total wireless and got mine brand new for $250. Total wireless uses the same towers as Verizon and for my wife and I to share 12GB of data a month we pay $60.

[NC]

Hey Julie, clicked on your profile since it said you were in Georgia. Sounds like we’re not far at all from each other if your on the NW side. I live in Dallas and have also been an extra a few times 🙂

small world! I wonder if we’ve ever been at the same sale before lol

[NC]

You could make a list of all the books you want to look up and pay for a month of Worthpoint to research there. I believe it’s $20 a month to get access to the “worthopedia”. I did some freelancing writing for them so I got a year subscription for free and it has come in handy for many items. I may pay for it once my subscription ends if I keep coming across items I can’t find anywhere else. I found a couple items that had sold for way more than I would have listed them for if I didn’t use Worthpoint so if you can do that a few times a year the subscription pays for itself.

[NC]

My dad and I share two antique booths and I mainly keep selling at it because it’s something we can bond over. I made a couple thousand in profits in 2020 and I probably went to the store every 3 weeks or so. I’ve found that selling small, lower-priced items is what works for me. It only takes a few seconds to write the tag and stick it on the item and I can fit a lot more inventory in the booths.

I usually sell 30-50 items a month and mostly $10 items but I do occasionally sell a couple things per month for $50 or more. My dad does better than I but he puts more time into it and doesn’t do eBay. He usually grosses $1,000 a month or so and sells more furniture than I.

If your store is okay with it, I would take pictures of your booth and do a facebook marketplace listing (if you have facebook). I’ve gotten a lot more people to come to the store and buy something because they saw my listing on facebook.

[NC]

You can actually set it to pay for eBay shipping with your credit card even if you have money in your PayPal account. Not sure if this is how it is for everyone, but I can go to this page and see a list of things I’ve set up as automatic payments and I get to choose the payment method for each transaction type: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/connect/. eBay shipping comes up as “eBay Inc Shipping”.

I use a credit card that gives me 1% back on all transactions so if I pay $300 per month in shipping that saves me $3. Not much, but I don’t have to do anything to get that $3 now that it’s set up.

[NC]

Right, yeah I think you have to experiment with things at first to see what works and what doesn’t. Then, stop doing the tasks that don’t bring an ROI and focus on the ones that do.

Like with eBay, listing more items is far more important to the amount you sell than tweaking things is. If you list a new item, you’ve created an opportunity to make more money vs if you tweak a listing, you only make it more likely to sell something that may have sold eventually anyways.

[NC]

Congrats on episode 500! There’s a book I read a while ago called Atomic Habits that lines up with what you were saying about just sticking with it. It says basically, success is the result of doing a few right things over and over again and over time your progress compounds kinda like investing. I think everyone should read that book but especially business owners.

As far as paying for shipping labels with a credit card, all you have to do is go to print a shipping label, scroll down and “select how to pay”. Set it to PayPal and then go to the transaction in PayPal and set it to pay those types of transactions with a credit card.

 

[NC]

Thanks, I’ll look into getting a local banker. I actually set up the network for the antique booth I sell at so I bet there are all kinds of little jobs like that I could do using my IT experience. But now every time they have a computer issue they call me lol. I bet I will end up “the IT guy” for most people I do work for if I start freelancing.

[NC]

Numbers for the week of: 1/17/2021 -1/23/2021
Total listings: 2554
Items sold: 78
Gross sales: $769.36
Net sales: $604.47
COGS: $228.94 – not sure what my COGS for the week were so I just put in the month total.
Average price sold: $9.86

I have a low average sold price because I’m building a patch store and my average sale price is about $6. I have a store with random items that is currently at about 500 listings and I’m wanting to get that up to 1,000 listings and keep it there while I build the patch store to infinity.

I also have an antique booth that brings in about $100 a week after fees. I only take items to it every couple of weeks and it’s super easy to manage so it’s worth the extra couple thousand it brings in a year to me.

Working my way to becoming full time. I work from home in IT and just don’t like what I do. Not sure why I enjoy putting junk on the internet for people to buy but at least I’ve found a way to make money that is fun to me 🙂

I’ve thought about quitting my IT job and working with my dad a couple of days a week remodeling houses. I would at least make enough working with him to cover our mortgage and then I’d have 3-5 days a week to focus on selling.

I can’t decide if I want to take the leap or not because we want to move here in a couple of years and I’m wondering if I’ll have a hard time getting a mortgage without a W2 job? We’ve got some equity in our house so maybe I’m being overly cautious. Any of you scavengers get a mortgage with just your eBay income?

 

[NC]

I don’t know if it’s because I just joined managed payments with my patch store a few days ago or because I messaged eBay on Facebook, but I looked at my account today and the 50,000 free insertion fees had been added 🙂 … Now to see how quickly I can get 50,000 patches listed lol

[NC]

Yeah, I hold that same view. I have never been one to hold back due to fees. I also like to look at my store on a monthly level vs keeping up with what items have been listed for years. As long as I make way more per month than I pay in fees, I don’t care if it takes me 3  years to sell something.

[NC]

Ah, yeah I saw the massive amount of additional listings for those specific categories. I have two stores, one for random items and another I started in June as an experiment where I’m building up a massive inventory of patches. Similar to what the Postcard guy does that has been on the podcast.

I did a separate store for the patches so I could ship with stamps and keep top rated seller on my other store but I guess I would’ve been better off to just have the original store because I don’t get the collectibles promotion on the new store. I don’t know what to do at this point as I feel like I’ve got the patch store to a point where repeat customers are coming back and following my store. I also don’t know if the additional listings promotion is for sure a permanent thing.

[NC]

Anyone else ever done this math for subscription fees? If I’m correct, it doesn’t make sense to pay for an anchor store subscription until you reach 3,400 listings. You get the first 1,000 listings for $60 with the premium store and then each additional listing is 10 cents so it takes 3,400 listings to equal the $300 anchor store subscription. Just wanting to get this out there and see if there’s a hole in my thinking.

$60 = 1,000 listings

$240 = 2400 additional listings

$300 = 3400 listings

[NC]

My numbers for April:

Amount of Items sold 56
Gross sales $1,027.55
Shipping charge to customers $393.90
My shipping cost $(341.18)
Cost of goods sold $(177.25)
eBay fees (including my eBay store subscription) $(181.00)
Paypal fees $(61.86)
Additional business expenses $(12.72)
Returns $(77.77)
Total net profit $569.67
Average profit per item $11.47
Amount spent on new inventory $(388.04)
Active listings at the end of the month 606
New items listed 71

To see what I sold, check out my blog post.

[Author]

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