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Steven, I think your cat is trying to tell you to clean off the fence for her.
In my experience, sales of non-giftable items are slow through mid-January every year so keep that in mind when looking at December results. I think much of the used computer items are going to be long-tail, so storage fees and recurring listing fees are going to make it difficult to be profitable without more listings. I agree with Jay that you should try to figure out alternative storage for now. If the business continues to be a drag on the household budget you might not be able to keep it up.
There are buyers out there for these components, folks like me continue running old equipment if it’s adequate to do the job needed. Right now my main system is a Thinkpad T420 which is 8-9 years old and I have an even older Thinkpad T60 running at my warehouse, used just for shipping, that used to be my primary computer.
I think your goal of $250 per week in 2 years is too conservative, you should be able to do much better than that, but it depends on the time and effort you are willing to put in.
I take 20% of the gross monthly sales for myself. The remaining money goes to pay expenses and to buy more items to list. Everybody is different on this, but this works for me.
You got it right, get busy. If you have fixed price listings that renew during that time they will be counted as part of the 500.
All you can do is represent your reason with PayPal. I have found them to be willing to listen and they don’t always rule for the buyer.
I haven’t seen that unless I make a change to any aspect of the policy, that will trigger a new policy with a generated name. Back when I was listing with InkFrog, which has been years ago, I used to get a new policy for every listing it seemed. Just one of the reasons I went away from them. It took me quite a bit of work to clean that up and just have a few standard policies.
I was chatting about this with the clerk at our post office this afternoon. She said she had found bags of Amazon packages at the back door several times when she opened at 7:30, but now they are being handed off somewhere upstream and come in with the other mail. I thought to myself I guess it’s a good thing to live in a small town, but then I looked up Pioneer, its population was 1,094 at the 2010 census, abut the same size as my town.
I used to do detective work when I found an item that wasn’t listed, but over time I became less interested in why and just got it relisted. I’m more concerned about the opposite situation where something sells that I no longer have, that situation causes extra customer service work and can be a bad experience for the buyer.
The process I am using now reduces these inventory issues. I use a picklist from my inventory app to pull daily orders, that list shows the number remaining and I physically verify if qty shows zero or only a few remaining on multi-quantity listings. Maybe once or twice a month I find an error and correct it without it ever becoming an issue. I started using the inventory app to keep inventory in sync between multiple marketplaces and the picklist is a bonus benefit.
I can also print the inventory list for an audit, but I haven’t done that for quite some time but probably should.
I dislike that offers we send don’t show up in offer history. I received an offer yesterday which I countered only to have the buyer reply to say I sent them an offer to them for $xx.xx a few days ago. Kinda’ makes us look foolish I think.
In my opinion, it’s not good to attack the buyer in feedback. Think about what other potential buyers might conclude about you based only on the feedback you leave. Better to be more professional, perhaps something like “I’m sorry you are unhappy, but there is no smoking at our end. Please return”.
I started selling almost 11 years ago when I was 60 in order to have something to do in retirement and perhaps add to my retirement savings if things went well. About 3 years in I lost my job due to outsourcing and was out of work for 17 months. That’s when I really ramped up the business and I was able to survive that challenge without having to dig into my retirement accounts or savings. Then I worked another 3 years until finally retiring from my paycheck job at the end of 2015. Now selling is something to fill my days.
60-80 orders per week on average.
That will go down starting this week, we don’t have giftable items. That will drop to 40-50 orders from now to mid-January since we don’t have giftable items.
We have an advantage in that we are in the center of the country with a narrower spread on shipping costs. Most of my items are light enough to go first class, or they can ship in a flat rate box or the USPS cubic rate on small heavy items. For heavier large items I only have free shipping to the Continental U.S. I take into consideration expected shipping cost when sourcing items and stay away from heavier and odd-sized items.
I rarely lose money on an order due to shipping cost, it just all averages out in the bigger picture. Since I don’t specify shipping service, just economy or extra cost expedited, I can choose the lowest cost shipping option that will get the order to the buyer on time.
I used to use calculated shipping and was worried about the effect of free shipping on profit. The total shipping as a percentage of sales is actually lower, while sales went up noticeably.
There are 2 or 3 other sellers for most listings I sell on over on Amazon, maybe up to 10 or more on very common parts. I generally see the same 3-5 other sellers but not on every listing but I don’t pay a lot of attention to that.
In general, prices are higher on Amazon and using the same price there will make me competitive or lowest and I can often sell for a higher price there. I generally hold the Buy Box on 30-50% of my items, many of which I am the only seller.
Most 3rd party sellers on Amazon offer free shipping (of course all the FBA sellers do), I rarely see a seller who charges shipping having the Buy Box.
It’s a jungle over there (a jungle river) and it’s not the same as eBay. It’s strictly business and what is good for Amazon, sellers get treated better currently on eBay. It’s 1/3 of my sales buy 1/2 of my problems or more.
Oh, by the way, there is no need to apologize at all, if I came across as upset it wasn’t intended. I’ve listened to most of the podcasts you and Ryanne do and I can see we have many of the same general ideas and outlook on selling (and life too I think).
Sell (whatever you can find cheap) and be free.
