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[NC]

Weekly sales 9/19 – 9/25
Random Item Store
Total items 1128
Items sold 33
New items listed 70
Gross sales $748.90
Net sales $487.73

Patch Store
Total items 3467
Items sold 54
New items listed 140
Gross sales $388.24
Net sales $303.18

Etsy
Orders 43
Gross sales $394.55
Net sales $335.37

Gross sales total $1,531.69
Net sales total $1,126.28

eBay sales were almost identical to last week. I’m wondering if that’s going to happen more often as I continue to do the same thing week after week. Etsy has blown up the last couple weeks. I guess a lot of people are buying post office patches for Halloween.

[NC]

Weekly sales 9/12 – 9/18
Random Item Store
Total items 1086
Items sold 32
New items listed 70
Gross sales $741.60
Net sales $492.54

Patch Store
Total items 3359
Items sold 51
New items listed 140
Gross sales $385.78
Net sales $296.88

Etsy
Orders 30
Gross sales $306.20
Net sales $260.27

Gross sales total $1,433.58
Net sales total $1,049.69

Another decent week and hopefully sales will only go up from here for the rest of the year.

[NC]

It’s all speculation, but even if you don’t increase the amount you list it may be beneficial to spread them out over the week. 35 a week would be  5 items a day and I feel like listing an item tells eBay you’re home and ready to do business. It’d be an interesting experiment to run anyways

[NC]

I actually only have 3 listings on Etsy and they’re all multi quantity so all I do is fulfill orders that come in. Once I sell out of these 3 items I will just stick with eBay.

 

instead of trying a different platform, do you list 7 days a week? If not, you could make drafts when you list and save some for the days you don’t plan to make new listings and launch the drafts on those days. I believe eBay wants us to list 365 days a year and launching drafts is the easy way to do that

[NC]

Weekly sales 9/5 – 9/11
Random Item Store
Total items 1013
Items sold 27
New items listed 90
Gross sales $549.60
Net sales $335.50

Patch Store 3141
Total items 3
Items sold 57
New items listed 147
Gross sales $389.26
Net sales $307.20

Etsy
Orders 17
Gross sales $174.30
Net sales $148.15

Gross sales total $1,113.16
Net sales total $790.85

Patches came through for me this week. I have 3 listings on Etsy that are multi quantity listings so all I have to do is fulfill orders when they come in. Two of the listings are post office patches (I found out the hard way eBay doesn’t like those) that I bought a thousand of each. I paid 50 cents a piece and sell them for $5 and have been making a few hundred dollars a month for over a year now. I don’t think I’ll buy anymore but it’s kinda been like printing money. I think a lot of people want the post office patches for Halloween costumes so sales are going up now. Someone just bought 15 yesterday.

[NC]

Weekly sales 8/29 – 9/04
Random Item Store
Total items 1004
Items sold 34
New items listed 88
Gross sales $760.65
Net sales $394.99

Patch Store
Total items 3148
Items sold 35
New items listed 164
Gross sales $288.42
Net sales $163.90

Etsy
Orders 11
Gross sales $75.75
Net sales $64.39

Gross sales total $1,124.82
Net sales total $623.28

Another meh week for me but it could be worse and I’m staying steady with listing the same amount of items every day. Hopefully things will start picking up in the next couple weeks.

[NC]

Weekly sales 8/22 – 8/28
Random Item Store
Total items 950
Items sold 22
New items listed 79
Gross sales $623.99
Net sales $411.17

Patch Store
Total items 3026
Items sold 35
New items listed 163
Gross sales $269.26
Net sales $211.85

Etsy
Orders 20
Gross sales $179.55
Net sales $152.62

Gross sales total $1,072.80
Net sales total $775.64

Getting in my groove as far as listing but this week was a lot slower than previous weeks. Looking forward to Q4…

[NC]

Sad that your voices won’t be filling my ears on Monday mornings anymore but understand the decision. It’s clear that your process is still valid today so I wouldn’t say you guys aren’t relevant in the community anymore. No telling how many of the YouTubers started out by listening to you.

I didn’t realize full time eBaying was a thing until I stumbled across this site in 2018. Ever since then eBay has been my part time job and now my main source of income. I appreciate all of the knowledge you guys have shared over the years. I’m sure you feel like you’ve just been repeating yourselves over and over again but that’s what Dave Ramsey does and he’s one of the biggest podcasts out there lol.

 

[NC]

Thanks for the podcast! I guess we’re all trapped in a way, nobody gets out of this thing alive lol.

Weekly sales 8/15 – 8/21
Random Item Store
Total items 893
Items sold 36
New items listed 79
Gross sales $1,210.32
Net sales $839.97

Patch Store
Total items 2898
Items sold 56
New items listed 147
Gross sales $438.86
Net sales $332.50

Etsy
Orders 13
Gross sales $157.85
Net sales $134.17

Gross sales total $1,807.03
Net sales total $1,306.64

 

Wow, I had no idea I had this good of a week. I know I sold a dirty wedding dress for $150 and a motherboard for $100, but didn’t realize how many other decent sales I had. I discovered this week that I can list 45 patches in an hour if I list on my computer instead of my phone so that’s good information to have. If I can start listing 50 patches a day, things should pick up nicely. Will have to see if I can actually do that or not though.. I’m sticking with 10 random items a day and focusing the rest of my efforts on patches.

I’ve started creating extra drafts on the days that I list and averaging out my listings every day so that I list the same amount 7 days a week. I think this helps show eBay that I’m active every day and I believe it will help sales. It only takes 5 minutes to get my drafts listed on the days I don’t create new listings. Now I know how many listings I need to do, how many items I need to source etc. It helps me feel like my day is actually done when I reach my daily goals.

 

I heard a story of someone who gets lots of stuff every 3 months and they would get everything up as soon as they got the inventory. They switched to spreading out the listing of that same inventory a little every day and sales shot through the roof. I think there’s something to it. I also think eBay likes to see us ship out as quickly as possible because it shows that we’re going to fulfill the orders quickly. eBay gives the traffic, we’re supposed to have quality listings, good customer service, and order fulfillment. Anything that shows eBay we’re doing a good job surely helps get more traffic to our stores.

I’ve been using Wave and it works well for me. I still use my credit card through Paypal to pay for eBay shipping and my credit card links to Wave so it’s easy to track. I use Ally bank which is an online bank and it connects to Wave as well. You can link other bank accounts to Ally so it’s super easy to transfer money in and out of. I’m also working with my dad 2 days a week and have an antique booth so it’s nice to use Wave and keep everything organized. The only issue I have with Wave is that it won’t learn to categorize all of my eBay shipping transactions so I have to go in every couple of days and categorize them. It only takes a couple of minutes though.

 

 

 

 

 

[NC]

Thanks for the input Simon! I’ve always picked up hats that I thought were cool but hadn’t focused on them as a main niche. After thinking about it a lot, I’ve decided it will probably be better for me to list a set amount of random stuff every day and then focus on my patch store. I’m more likely to find $100 items more frequently if I have a broad search vs if I try to only look for one category of stuff. I can always pick up every hat I think is cool still while also picking other stuff. I really like vintage and want to delve more into jewelry if I can find a good source for it

[NC]

Congrats!

[NC]

I think I’ve just gotten a little stagnant with my patch store because I bought a huge lot of them and a significant amount have foreign languages so it takes extra work to list since I have to google the words to see what they say. Once I slug through them, it’s back to American-themed ones where I can list much faster. I’d like to learn more about military patches, but I know from the ones I’ve bought before that there are lots of reproductions in that category.

[NC]

Weekly sales 8/8 – 8/14
Random Item Store
Total items 850
Items sold 26
New items listed 57
Gross sales $527.49
Net sales $292.58

Patch Store
Total items 2809
Items sold 57
New items listed 135
Gross sales $336.28
Net sales $258.68

Etsy
Orders 12
Gross sales $140.65
Net sales $119.55

Gross sales total $1,004.42
Net sales total $670.81

Appreciate the convo! I think what I plan to do is get my random item store up to 1,000 listings and maintain it there with maybe 5-10 listings a day and then focus the rest of my efforts on patches. I’m netting about $1k a month right now selling patches so if I can build my store by about 4x then we could just about live off patch sales alone. I enjoy selling patches and it is a very deep category. Takes volume to make money, but you can list about 5 patches in the time it takes to list 1 bigger item and you can store thousands in one closet.

[NC]

Oh yeah I hate selling clothing personally and would go get a job if it was the only thing I could sell lol.

I’m just obsessing about my processes right now since I just went full time and am buying way more stuff than I used to. Since I’m a one man operation, I’m trying to optimize and it seems like narrowing down the amount of categories I sell in would help simplify the way I list, ship and store the items. Like you said, I would need to find the category fun though.

Maybe just focusing on smaller stuff would make the process easier. I do enjoy the treasure hunt

[NC]

Yeah, I think you have to be reasonable about the niche you decide on. It has to be something you can find a lot of consistently for cheap. I feel like if you’re resourceful enough, you can find a good source for just about any category you want to sell in though. Clothes are obviously the easiest thing to find a ton of consistently.

I can’t decide if I want to keep selling random stuff and have my patch store be my niched category, or if I want to focus on patches and one other niche. I know I can make a living selling just patches if I can build the store up to a certain point but that’s going to take a while even if it was all I focused on.

 

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