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[PBJelly]

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As an eBay buyer, I actually hate when sellers have “make offer”, but seem to only want to take off a couple bucks. Why even use “make offer”?

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<div>Some people only want that couple bucks off.  A lot of these items are 15 dollar trains with free shiping, so 12 dollars is 20% off.  That’s a pretty good deal percentage wise for a new in the package item. 20 percent off of an item is a good deal.

There are a lot of items I do not put best offer on, because I do not want to take any lower. People send me best offers via messages though, so it’s not like it really stops anything.

I use best offer a lot of those types of items that I have 20+ of each sku, and if you want to do a Disney Princess birthday party for 20 people and you want to buy 4 tablecovers, 2 center piece sets, 2 packages of decorations, 1 scene setter, all of which I have free shipping on because it’s first class mail, then I can cut you a 25-30 percent discount just from shipping cost.

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[PBJelly]

As someone who does thrifting and retail arbitrage, I will take the offer usually on the thrifted item if it’s not below half of my listed price. I usually have only have 1 of each item and my margins are usually pretty good, even at a 60 percent offer. If I counter, I just try to nudge them up a few dollars.

With my new in the package retail arbitrage stuff, I counter, and I counter high. I want to make pretty close to my asking price to get my money out and a healthy profit on stuff I have usually aged or traveled across the country for. I also usually have multiples of the item. I am not a big fan of poisoning the well where I drink, so I do not take half price offers on retail arbitrage stuff usually, unless they’re buying a bunch of birthday party supplies from me, or it’s an item that I priced really really high because I have the only one.

I have turned off auto reject, and if you send me a 20 dollar offer on a 60 dollar item, I just counter 55. About one in twenty times someone will come way up and I’ll sell my item.

[PBJelly]

Those are LEGO City, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t see anyone Marvel or anyone LEGO Friends (which is girl branded LEGOS) but if you have those I’d sell them separately.

I think the yellow car is set #3831 LEGO Raceway Rider which would have me guess that the green car is also a LEGO Racer set.

[PBJelly]

@Jay &  @PBJelly I am another small potatoes seller who pulled out of Amazon over the last couple years. I was mostly dealing in retail arbitrage and books. Books were fun because it was a hybrid between eBay treasure hunting and big Amazon sales, but grew into an extreme amount of competition. Lots of scanning software and territorial sellers. More Amazon fees and regulations, which made it difficult to keep on top of and analyze as a hobby seller. Retail arbitrage was similar, but became harder to do as more brands began to assert their official Amazon presence and lock 3rd party sellers out of their items.

It was really lucrative while it lasted. I did 130K last year in gross sales and the year before that I was in the 200k of sellers. I made a lot of money, but I had grandfathered rights on a lot of brands. I don’t think opening an account today would afford someone the same benefits.

[PBJelly]

Sounds like you’re doing it smart. I’d always fear the risk of all the up front money. I imagine you sometimes put up $5k? to buy a bunch of inventory.

I’ve put up 20k for inventory trips before, after hotels and gas. I spent around 20k on my big KMart trip. It is still really scary every time, but I have a pretty good feel for the toy market. I don’t worry as much about say, LEGOS, as I do for like Little People (though Little People sell really well too, in my experience) or VTech.

And @amatino, yeah 80 miles is nothing to a Texan. I was just up 16 for a pumpkin patch today!

[PBJelly]

Selling toys this time of year is likely super smart since xmas present will be needed by all.

You said FBA stopped working in March? What is it like now?

I have pulled all of my stuff from FBA, just because of how they handled it. They stopped shipping out my orders because of coronavirus, and it wasn’t just like a two week readjustment, it was months. I gave them until May to get things in order and they just made a bunch of new rules without fixing their shipping times. They changed how much inventory space you could have and those calculations, based on sell through rates, and then they tanked everyone’s sell through rates by taking 3 weeks to ship out items my customers wanted (but still taking all of their fees.)

I still have some straggler items that sell (because they can’t find them to ship them back to me), and the time from pending order to shipped can still be two weeks.

I’m glad I got off the sinking ship though, to be honest. Fees were going up, and I every January I’d be hit with a tsunami of returns.

[PBJelly]

Glad the podcast can still be useful for people who have sold for a long time.

Are you still doing the retail arbitrage for toys? How does that math work for you?

I’ve stopped sourcing for the moment because my backlog is so huge. I recalled all of my Amazon inventory (210 cubic square feet) in May because the delays from March were not being handled two months in. I have 90 percent of it back now, so I’m trying to sort things where duplicates stay at the storage unit and the one I have listed stay at my apartment.

The numbers were usually doubling my money, sometimes I’d hit a home run and get to 5X or 10X my money, but I am usually happy with twice as much as I started with, after fees.

At my in person flea market stall, I aim to triple my money, but that whole business is a place I put things I do not want to pay shipping for on eBay. Lots of 50 cent Squishies sold for 4 dollars, and 20 cent Hot Wheels sold for a dollar, which is a great mark up, but those would never fly on eBay

I’m really big on store closures. I traveled the country when Toys R Us closed, then I did the same for Kmart. I messed around with the local Tuesday Mornings that closed (didn’t find a whole lot but I check those every month or two so no surprise), and now I peck around online from time to time to see if there’s GameStop closing within 100 miles of my house. Retail Arbitrage is a lot more work on the sourcing end, but that’s my favorite part so no harm no foul.

 

[PBJelly]

Great episode! I’d have to add about auctions, the only time I like to use them is when I need the item to be gone by a certain date. In late August I sourced some homeschool workbook sets, and I did them by auction just because I knew if they sat until September they’d probably sit for a lot longer. I paid to have them shipped all Priority and had the auction started at a comfortable price, profit wise. Otherwise, I’d agree to generally avoid them.

I’m new but I’m going to attempt to do some numbers for this week. I’ve been doing cash accounting, so I’m going to estimate what my cost of goods sold is, but a lot of the items I’ve sold are Amazon recalls from when FBA stopped functioning in March.

Numbers for this week:

Items in Store: 1252

Items Sold: 37

Total Sales: $1351.10

COGS: 140ish?

Total Profit: 869.1

Average profit: 23.49

Average sales price:

Highest Priced Item: 456 dollars for a lot of Telecommunications Goods that were gifted to me. They really saved my bacon this week.

New Listings: 135

As a toy seller, I’m trying to get all my toy listings live before the end of this month, so my listing numbers are not usually this hardcore. I did choose to not open my stall this weekend since it was 93 degrees out, so I pushed some of that time into listing.

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