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To Bonnie from California
Hello Bonnie, hope this message gets to you. Last week you mentioned about your case when your buyer opened a claim on PayPal.
Decided to write to you because I had 3 of these cases. One of them – the first – was painful and I lost because I did not know how to deal with it.Then I learned: I always assume good intent, no matter what, even on cheesy cases you can smell stinky tofu. The thing is this one seems to be a “semi-scam”, meaning some buyers on some occasions try to warp the system and instead of open a return case on eBay for whatever reason (my two cases were one, the lady clearly wore the Armani Tallier and wanted to send back after the party, and the other the lady wanted just see the purse (which she knew I lot more than I do) and did not have the guts to do it on eBay.
So both these ladies and the first buyer opened a case on PayPal, one of them called the Credit Card company and said she never authorized the purchase, the other opened a case on PayPal stating she never received the item.
Except for the first, the latter two were really painful, took me around 2 months to be resolved on my favor, I had to provide same information over and over each time it was escalated up in their claiming process.
Cheers
PH
Do you use Quickbooks on line or the Desktop version?
In the online version you go directly to the dashboard upon log in, you can even customize it further
🙂
Ooops 🙂
I include Freight, the stuff you mentioned like bubble wrap, polymailer and some of the fees associated that affect inventory related transactions.I am an overall nerd, which includes Finance nerd, for me the most fun of all is to build my ledger hehehe
Thank you so much T-Satt, these thoughts, feedback, considerations and advice is what I am looking for, big thank you.
For COGS, in summary: COGS is any direct cost related to the production of goods that are sold or the cost of inventory you acquire to sell. It does not include overhead expenses related to the general operation of the business, such as rent.
For our (my) case as an eBay seller: How to calculate COGS on Inventory.
Costs related to retail or wholesale inventory include:
Inventory purchases, including any discounts and allowances, Freight, Repackaging expenses, the several fees from eBay and PPal.Inventory can be calculated using different formulas.
I use the common (standard?):
COGS = Beginning Inventory + Purchases Made During the Reporting Period – Ending InventoryLet’s apply it to an example. Say you operate a department store and had a beginning inventory of $350,000 last month and purchased another $750,000 in inventory. Last month was a good month, and your remaining inventory at the end of the month was $125,000. What was the cost of goods sold for the month?
Since COGS = Beginning Inventory + Purchases Made During the Reporting Period – Ending Inventory. we have:
COGS = $350,000 + $750,000 – $125,000, therefore, COGS = $975,000.(Re)Thinking my eBay business – long term plan
Hello friends, hearing the Podcast yesterday, it was a great incentive to think about a few aspects that have been bugging me and I’ve been procrastinating on.
Several different topics but in a couple of them the theme planning, long term goals, and similar came to the mike, for example commenting about another colleague who mentioned she left the job and want full eBay ride.
Just as summary intro for those who don’t remember, my eBay store is owned by a Corporation that has other somewhat relate lines of business. So for the sake of this brainstorming, I will nit differentiate revenue from sales and for costs I will only consider the 2 out of the 11 lines of COGS I have, only those that are eBay related. You will understand my pain and where I have to focus.
Unfortunately in december the Auction House I went weekly shut down their doors, it hurt a lot since for those 2 years or so I made friends and had a lot of fun getting great products for low.
My Net Sales is 76% of my Gross Sales, which is not bad, however things get blurry when I go to calculating Profit margins (here strictly Net Sales = Gross Sales minus allowances, refunds which include the shipping).
Considering only those two lines of COGS I mention, the cost of “raw material” (how much I spend on auctions, garage sales, etc) is 46% of Gross Sales and the Shipping and Delivery piece is 26% of Gross Sales. The putting 10 of the 11 COGS lines that are exclusively related to eBay, Etsy, Bonanza, my actual COGS is 92% of Gross Sales.
My Gross Profit SUCKS, imagine the net income and other performance numbers.
Looking at the report generated for my accountant, comparatively I put too much money and have not so much sales. For the long run I would be OK if I continue in the same sales rhythm, but clearly I must change my procurement strategy.
One step is related to pricing. I do not think I price bad, but there is about 20-30% of what I sell that can be sold for several times more.
The other step is try to reduce the cost of “raw material”. I thing I buy too many things with high price.
Two examples, there was a lady selling her collection of Salvattore Ferragamo flat shoes. Each was wore once if that much. So they sell well. However I paid between $40-$60 each and I cannot make more than $100 or so on each one.
On the other hand there was a collection of Penn license plates from 1965-1975 and other states. I got the whole Penn lot for $60. They are selling crazy between $40-$50 each. This is what I need to do more.Unfortunately part 2 is that I could not find a replacement for my Auction house: relatively close, I can bid in person or on line, people had little idea of the goodies they sold.
South Florida (I live across the street from the School, 2 boys recently graduated there, the twins still go, if the school open again 🙁 ) is not a good source of Thrifts, they are eBay level overpriced, and it is difficult to go more than 50 miles radius and not even finding good surcing.
This is my top priority now.
To finish, my kids are ok, one of the twins is extremely traumatized. He cannot even sleep alone these days, he freaks out with any unrecognized noise (for example, Monday my wife was just opening the door and he freaked out).
Life goes on.
Cheers, love everything this community has offered me for the last 2 years.
Considering the information above plus your conversation with Jay during last week’s cast, most likely you accessed the wallet at least over a year ago or longer. At that time the option was to have the walled in your device with the “bills” in it.
Technically Bitcoin is not a Cloud application, more a shared/peer to peer application. Today there are online sites/services that offer you the possibility to create/upload your wallet. Paid services that have been hacked pretty bad lately.Anyway, let me know. Hopefully the Apple Genius did not had the large sight for your wallet 🙂
PayPal account in Bangladesh
Last year one of our friends here who works in Financial Services explained how people use eBay for money laundry, things I would have never thought of.
Anyway, even though PayPal is almost a bank and many countries push severe legislation to them, it is always a channel for “creativity”.
For example, I mentioned this before, in Brazil banks already have most, if not all PayPal features, so the use of PayPal there goes different ways with the company trying to offer benefits in terms of lower prices for users. Also to make purchases internationally sometimes it helps.
The thing is I have PayPal accounts in all places I lived (together with respective bank account for example). This allows the individual to do all types of sh… you can imagine in and out. Imagine someone who wants to do sh…
I do not know anything about tax, financial legislation in Bangladesh, but I see tons of reasons one of these creative people would want to have PayPal accounts in a handful of countries like Bangladesh, if you know what I’m saying …
Today, one simple person like us, having PayPal accounts in two countries can bypass a lot of things …
eBay sending e-mail about items you are watching
For me this happens in 3 or 4 situations, using the example of this last week, the ones I remember:
(1) “An item you are watching is ending soon, are you still interested” give or take some different wording
(2) “An item you are watching received an offer, make sure to act soon to avoid losing the item”
(3) When I search for an item and look different options, it keeps me talking about those or similar to those (for example, a cricket bat) like “a new one came to the marketplace”, “are you still interested?” type of thingHurricane Aftermath
Friends, been hectic around my head, in summary: most devastating Hurricane to hit FL passed over my house, my 6 months contract has been renewed (which I am not sure what to think since it sucks me from eBay), I managed to find sensational stuff from Vegas, mid century vintage, however all accumulated in a death pile, etc.
Anyway, I will try to say a few things just to keep myself around.
Cheers
Scammed on iPhone Sales
Friends, I sold about a dozen of phones or so, half of them iPhone, the rest Windows or Android. They were old phones from family.
iPhones always sell very fast, even when I say they are broken. But also, all 5-6 sales came with perks.
For example, one of the sales to Russia the guy complained the phone was broken. Attention, the list said : broken beyond repair, for parts only …Based on my limited experience, I dare to say that this space is sprinkled with scammers for some reason.
However it is not only there. People complaining not on eBay but in PayPal directly through the Credit Card that they never authorized the Credit Card expense happens quite frequently. Never had a case closed against me though.
Cheers
About Merchant Accounts
Does anyone have a Merchant Account?
Does anyone have opinions about it?Even though pretty much anybody can pay using PayPal without having a PayPal account it seems that the now hidden links to do this are hindering a percentage of the people.
At the same time more and more people ask me to pay using Money Orders for example. I do not have any solid evidence to conclude whether offering other payment methods would help with sales.
Been offering for 2 month this week and not a single case came.
Comments are much appreciated since this would require more investment, a low monthly fee plus set up fees for the services I decide to go with.
Cheers
Updates, goals and investments
Have a myriad of updates from my side of the spectrum … Most relevant is that (while in Guatemala this week) just heard from my client that my 6 months contract – which ends by mid August – will be offered at least an extension, which is financially very good for being a Consultancy agreement, I bill by the hr at a minimum of 40 hrs per week, since I am traveling like crazy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, I am making at least 50% more than the agreed per month.
Which take me to my second topic: could not find anything in Middleton, WI, even less in the countries I have visited thus far (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala), however I had found a pair of oddities in my weekly auction (a wooden rattle and a wooden apple with a wooden arrow in it). I had a collector from California buying the rattle (sold them separately) and much better than the purchase was this person’s full explanation about the object.
It is a traditional Mayan shaker found in Mexico and some parts of Central America, there is a collector movement around it. Plus other somewhat similar objects. I am going to central Mexico next week and will have to stay over the weekend for an important part of the project, I will try to find objects similar to those to sell to collectors.
Collectors are the ones who buy the most from me. Let’s see since I never succeeded even once to find things to sell during these never ending trips.
The cash from my store is aimed almost exclusively to grow the business, however I am taking some opportunity to acquire things for the daily need, considering I have a very large family to support, more or less like Jay and Ryanne mentioned, I leverage my picks to also buy things of our necessity, been excelling in managing personal costs through and through.
This week more of my former hoarding items sold, including sets of stickers from my old company, I once went to an exclusive party at the Cowboys Stadium with the Cheerleading Squad, I grabbed 30 super exclusive photos, the ones they hand out with their autographs. Found them just laying in a drawer and listed them, sold like cheap water in the desert (this was my scavenge of the week, my house seems to be limitless). Also original set of Star Wars action figures from the 1977 movies sold to Germany on Etsy.
My major accomplishment after controlling my OCD hoarding was stop buying crap during these trips. I still buy books and CDs since literature and music are huge passions in my life, but in a very controlled limited way and the useless craps are no more.
BIG BIG BIG THANK YOU LeeinTN, really appreciate it! Great catch.
Another listing of slides I used the same cheap device to scan.
This is a collection set of early 60s Vatican Slides, it helps to have a better sense of the quality of the scans since the image is not that abstract, I have 10 different scans from a total of 59 slides.
Yesterday night I was scanning a large collection of over 200 slides from a family trip to Europe in the early 70’s, very difficult to decide how to list, there are some easy bets for example a subset has the couple visiting the sites of the 1972 Munchen Olympic games, another set has medieval Bavarian castles, however there is a very large set of November 1972 of a Paris visit, from one side to have subsets of 12 would help since there are amazing local pictures but also amazing pictures of the couple, on the other side to break up the collection breaks my heart
There you go T-Satt!!!!!!!!!!!!
Having those two views gives a lot of flexibility for pricing strategy, campaigns, to accept offers, among many other things.
The average profit is the main qualifier I use to move old items or those items with any type of uncertainity!!!!!!!!!Some examples of my standard store
Friends,
Been talking about my store main them decided to share a few items from this week:
Wedgwood Etruria plates
Besides Jasperware, Wedgewood has other lines, some of them are good for bread and butter, others great collectibles. This series depicts US Christian Temples from the 18th Century. Usually people that collect local architectural, historical buildings and similar collections. Bought a lot of 7 plates of this collection for $40:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wedgwood-Etruria-England-Hist-Building-Protestant-Dutch-Church-Albany-1713-/172698704142?rd=1Kosta Boda Egg cups
Well, I think it sells for the name. Even more vintage and from a famous collection of a famous artist. There were two items, the other the bids went above my limits but I regretted tremendously. This one I paid $20 and sold same day I listed even before I had collected from the auction house
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Kosta-Boda-Egg-Cups-by-Ulrica-Hydman-Vallien-SIGNED-Birdy-Series-/172742500140?rd=1Royal Crown Cola advertisement
I purchased this 2 pieces separately for $16 total and bundled them, one from ’37 and the other from’55. The issue is the major water stain on both. So I priced it low, very low, sold same day I listed too …
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Antique-Royal-Crown-Cola-Advertisement-Posters-2Pc-1937-amp-1955-/172742494901?rd=1Army Tactical Vest
I have good amount of army apparel. These vests I found a whole bunch of them for $3, selling each for $19.95
http://www.ebay.com/itm/SDS-Zippered-FLC-Tactical-Vest-style-4117-/172709735697?rd=1
