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02/26/2018 at 11:45 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 349: Having A Huge Inventory Is Not The Goal, It’s The Strategy #33894
Items in Store 987
Items Sold 22
Total Sales $686.00
COGS $93.00
Total Profit $593.00
Average profit $26.95
Average sales price $31.18I left out a few things I don’t think will be paid. A while back I started my suits experiment. A strange thing has happened with the suits. The nice suits haven’t sold, but the crappy ones I listed anyways (holes, missing buttons, wear at pockets, etc) have ALL sold. These were items I considered simply not listing at all. Average sales price of the damaged sold suits and blazers is around $35. Just goes to show that there is a market of everything. I made almost $200 on stuff I was gonna toss just with suits.
The inventory size debate is definitely an interesting debate. I originally ran a high STR store that never crossed 100 active listings. My highest month was $3k. I was doing ebay full time, micromanaging my listings, pricing so that my item would sell first, etc. Once I went back to work at my new job that wasn’t sustainable.
My strategy the last 2 years has been to amass inventory and list what I can when I can. I always list slightly above the market high price. I’ve reinvested in inventory, equipment, and storage. The whole point was to create all the infrastructure and inventory needed so that if my day job ended I could switch immediately to ebay with several months of backlog inventory to list. I won’t have to buy anything for several months if I go full time, which is critical to building up capital/profit quickly.
I know what I can do in a very limited part time business, and I know what I can do in a full time business with zero experience or facilities.
By combining the two – the experience, equipment,and facilities I have now with the time I had when I started, I can do some serious ebay business!
02/26/2018 at 11:28 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 349: Having A Huge Inventory Is Not The Goal, It’s The Strategy #33888A lot of businesses still rely on machines that use floppy drives. Keep replacing cheap floppy discs and drives, or replace a million+ dollar machine. Which do you think makes more sense?
My best sale on floppy disks was a sealed new box of 100. I sold it on amazon FBA for $150.
02/22/2018 at 1:25 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 348: Acknowledge When Hard Work Pays Off #33682Items in Store 1001
Items Sold 15
Total Sales $482.69
COGS $61.00
Total Profit $421.69
Average profit $28.11
Average sales price $32.18Really late to post my numbers this week because we’ve had a stomach bug working its way through the house since last Friday. With 2 adults and 4 kids, we ran the gauntlet of bodily fluid horrors this week! We also had two water main breaks in our neighborhood during this stretch that shut our water down for hours along with a 24hr boil water advisory each time…ugh!!!
Having said all that, I did get some extra time to list. Occasionally I will do a trial run to benchmark my listing times. I timed myself listing a tub of clothing – a mix of jeans and shirts. This time includes everything except photos. I inspect, measure, weigh, research price, and fully complete the draft listing except for the photos. My average time over an hour of listing was 3.5 minutes per item. I was not able to benchmark my photo taking because the ebay app was bugging out pretty bad this week. Last time I benchmarked photos I was at 2-3 minutes from start to submitted listing, so I am right at 6 minutes per completed clothing listing.
I am part time with way too many responsibilities between work and family, so maximizing and optimizing my time spent on ebay is crucial. I try to group tasks together as much as possible so I can be efficient. I have 3 business day handling, so typically I’ll only ship every 2-3 days. This lets me make a single trip to storage (less time per item for picking from stock), and I can really get into a groove on packing and shipping to reduce my time per item (I’ve packed and shipped 15 pieces of clothes/shoes in 20 minutes before – the only thing that slowed me down was the ebay loading time after clicking “purchase label”).
I’m one of those folks who is balls to the wall, or flailing pointlessly – very hard for me to have a speed in the middle. I CANNOT listen to the podcast while listening and I definitely can’t watch TV.
Hope everyone is having a great week.
02/22/2018 at 9:49 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 348: Acknowledge When Hard Work Pays Off #33646I think this would be a great application for the cauliflower rice substitute. Kim Chi is such a strong flavor that all the rice really contributes is texture.
02/22/2018 at 9:45 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 348: Acknowledge When Hard Work Pays Off #33644Enjoy the Merry-go-round which I’m sure at this point you’ve rode out. Ebay will tell the buyer you were 100% wrong and contradict everything you said. Then they’ll reverse to the buyer on appeal. You’ll call back in and they’ll reverse back to you again, while telling you the buyer was definitely wrong and NOT to communicate with the buyer in any way. Then they’ll do a final reversal to the buyer and try to tell you that you can’t appeal again. You’ll call back in and they’ll reimburse you fully as well.
This is the strangest customer service method I’ve ever encountered, but it is seeming like a rite of passage for all scavengers here. I’m glad we have a positive, solution oriented environment here that helps us make it through these weird ebay quirks with our sanity.
I took some time to view your store and have a few notes, some of which may be duplicated here already.
-Many of your items are generic run of the mill stuff and priced very high. I can say that many of your clothing and shoes items I would not source even if they had the 99 cent tag of the week. Generic clothing items need something really, really special to pull that high dollar price tag.
– Improve your lighting. You can never have enough lighting. I just improved mine. I now have 6 60W photography CFL lamps and 6 45W CFL photography lamps shining down on my photo table. Invest in your setup – it pays dividends.
– You are missing the name brand in your title on many items. You should also put the shoe model number in the title if applicable. It is my belief that most folks buy used clothes on ebay not because of the color/style/etc, but because of that little name brand emblem that appears somewhere on the clothing item. For instance a Lacoste sweater. They are a guaranteed $25-50 sale just because they have a dumb little alligator on them.My recommendation to you for sourcing for a while is to apply the active/sold ratio method of sourcing for a while to get your sales up. WHen you find something you want to source, do a search on the basic sales terms for it. Stay fairly high level – Brand, Style, and material at most. Take note of how many current used active listings there are. Now take note of how many SOLD listings are on ebay at the moment (90 days worth is default). Only buy the item if the amount of solds is equal to or greater than the amount of current active listings. That means the ENTIRE inventory on ebay has turned over in 90 days or less. That is a great item to source at any sales price.
Good luck!
App was acting very weird last night when I was doing photos. Some drafts were missing a TON of information. I had to go into the desktop version of the site and open/save the draft before it would show up right in the app. Things looked normal in the desktop version.
I’ve been seeing a lot of bugs/quirks the last couple weeks in the app and even on the desktop.
As for sales, yeah they have slowed down in volume the last couple days.
There are soooo many variables that go into a decision for me. Just through sheer experience I make pretty good buying decisions.
A handful of decision making criteria I consider:
-Price: I think holding to simply a “10x” profit margin is very short sighted. You have a trinket that weighs 2 ounces and fits in your pocket you buy for $1 and can sell for $10. You have a speaker you can buy for $3 and sell for $30 but it takes up 2 cubic feet of space. Are those the same in your book? For me the cost is irrelevant. What is the total profit compared to its size and estimated time to sale? If you consider those three at once, you’ll keep yourself from buying a bunch of stuff you’ll regret.-Size: I constantly consider my “profit per cubic foot”. This also ties directly into Shipping complexity most of the time. In the past I bought a lot of large items that may net me $50 at most. Many of these mostly electronics items also require special testing. Nowadays, any large items have to net me $100+ for me to even consider it. Breaking down to a smaller level, I store everything in totes. I often look at my storage and consider the inventory value in each tote. I can store 20+ shirts/pants in a tote. I can store 12-15 pair of shoes in a tote. So, I can afford to sell shirts/pants at a lower profit margin and still have a higher profit/storage space ratio.
-Shipping complexity: There is a big difference between shipping a tshirt and a record player or a strangely shaped large toy. Some items will require a special size box, may require the box to be resized, a lot of packing dunnage, etc. These kind of items better be netting me significantly more profit. A Tshirt on the other hand I can ship in 1 minute. Fold, put in polymailer, label, and done. A complicated shipping job can take 15 minutes or more.
-Is there a market: The old slow dime fast nickel argument. If I know I can flip an item quickly, I’m more inclined to accept a smaller profit margin.
-Personal interest: FACT – I’m more inclined to list items I’m interested in. I’ve passed up $30-50 items many times because I simply don’t want to fool with them. Don’t feel obligated to buy every single thing you can make a buck on. You just might find you have surrounded yourself by miserable death piles you wish you hadn’t bought.
Hopefully these random musings help you develop your own sense of buy/skip logic while you are out scavenging. Good luck!
Diversify, diversify, diversify!
You have some awesome stuff in your store for sure. I don’t know how you find so much super interesting stuff. Having said that, it’s time to branch out into other sections of the thrift stores my friend.
When I started selling I was all vintage electronics and toys, hence my user name. Now I’m basically Al Bundy, pedaling women’s shoes and I love every moment of it. Don’t limit yourself to being the kitschy vintage guy.
I’d also recommend promoted listings and putting best offer on everything – even your cheap stuff. Some people just want to get a deal, so they’ll offer you $7 on an $8 item. Whatever it takes to make the sale.
I have 4 kids.
I don’t want 100% coverage. I want healthcare cost reform so I can pay reasonable routine care costs out of pocket and have insurance in case of something major. As T-satt says, insurance and health care costs are different….but the market costs were set due to insurance companies only paying a fraction of the billed rate. Now the bloated billed rate is being passed directly to the patient. The mere fact I can be billed $250 through insurance, and at the same time pay straight cash for $100 and cut the insurance company completely out of the transaction shows how broken the system is.
I was hoping things would line out eventually pricing wise as cost reform should have naturally adjusted once insurance was no longer paying for routine costs. Unfortunately, the high deductible health savings is not fixing things. For a while I was able to get good discounts asking for cash rates. Healthcare providers now know they have us over a barrel and we have to pay it either way, so those discounts are disappearing. I asked for cash rates at my wife’s last dermatologist appointment and they wanted $400 cash up front, with the option to charge me more after they finished depending on what the dermatologist did. This was just for the office visit – no lab costs.
Before High deductible HSA my dermatologist cost was $40 Copay a visit, plus 20% of the lab fees.
Now my wife’s yearly dermatologist visit costs me about $1300 out of pocket after lab fees if she has a few moles removed and/or biopsied.
Because of these high costs, I choose to no longer go to dermatologist myself. I have to save that money in case any of my kids get sick.
I don’t know how to fix the system but I can tell you my health care costs are ASTRONOMICALLY higher now than they were just a few years ago.
The possibility of coverage with health sharing is better than the guarantee of no coverage I have with a high deductible HSA plan. I have a $5k deductible. Basically I pay $3000 in premiums a year for the privilege of paying all of my own healthcare costs. Awesome. And my $3k a year in premiums is pretty low compared to other folks it seems.
Unless someone in my family gets catastrophically injured or sick, I’ll never get actual coverage from insurance.
Sorry for ranting…it’s just damn frustrating to have “insurance” but still have to ask my doctors for cash rates and not even use the “insurance” just to keep my costs down.
Yeah you guys definitely need to talk to a CPA. You definitely can’t just deduct a percentage of your whole mortgage payment. You can do repairs, utility bills, mortgage interest, stuff like that.
How happy are you with that plan. We have friends who are on it who are very happy. If we go full time it will definitely be the way we go for insurance.
Issues like this is why I put every dollar I legally can every year into my HSA fund. For a family plan, my max contribution is $6900. $1800 of that is a company match, so I put $5100 of my money in there every year. My out of pocket maximum on insurance is $9000 a year, so protecting myself from that huge potential bill is TOP priority.
It is a pre-tax contribution, so it lowers your tax bill as well. If you or your significant other is not contributing to your HSA, I cannot recommend enough that you put every dollar you can afford into it.
There are tons of little quirks in the ebay app on the iphone.
Occasionally I experience what you are experiencing with photos not uploading. Usually it is because the app hangs during the upload process.
It is very rare now. The solution is to take photos in the camera and then upload from the photo stream. Now if it loses your photos you can just upload again. Another benefit is that even when you delete photos from the photo folder on your phone they are store for 30 days in the recently deleted folder. Plenty of time to get them back if something goes wrong. -
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