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01/15/2018 at 11:03 am in reply to: Pick my Poison! (Poll for choosing what dreaded death pile items to work) #30480
The poll says coats – so I did coats. I listed 11 coats. Several of them were $100+ listings.
My wife was ill this weekend so I was really busy with her and the kids so I couldn’t list more. I’ll finish up the wardrobe of coats this week though.Feels good to tackle something I’ve put off for a long time, and valuable items at that!
I had one the other day on a remote control toy. He made a low offer and wrote a novel in the “terms” section. Basically told me how crappy my item was and how he was doing me a favor. DECLINE. Next offer $1 higher, same speech – “You’ll have this forever, doing you a favor, take it or leave it”. DECLINE again. Basically at this point he has set off enough flags that even if he uses Buy it Now, I would not sell to him.
Yet another offer $1 higher, a little more desperate in the notes, same “take it or leave it” closer. I decline again and couldn’t resist putting in the notes “I don’t know how to make it clearer that I’m “leaving it”.He burns through all 5 of his offers being incredibly insulting the whole time. As expected, he sent me a long winded message still going on and saying how he already found another for less, and that I should “Enjoy my paperweight because no one will ever buy it”.
I responded thus:
“I will. Currently have it holding down some papers on my desk as we speak. Works great. Have a great day.”I suppose the bully route works on some sellers, but what a crappy way to go through life. I pity this poor person.
Just remember that it is a blessing when a potential buyer does this. They out themselves as someone you DO NOT want to do business with before the transaction is final. Just decline, block, and move on with life….and maybe have a little fun in the process. 😉
01/11/2018 at 8:39 am in reply to: Pick my Poison! (Poll for choosing what dreaded death pile items to work) #30296I just list them. Once I’ve went through the effort of getting it to the listing table and inspecting/researching it, I might as well finish it to at least get something for my effort.
Oddly enough, these “throw away” items always sell. The best one I had was a pair of womens pants. They were not a great brand, and they had been badly hemmed. Add to that they were an ugly green that had color fading from bleach damage!
They sold in like a week for $10. I fully expected to get a return request. Nope! Positive feedback. Just goes to show you never truly know what will or won’t sell on ebay.
Most people are grossed out by this, but this is my Nurtribullet breakfast of choice shake:
Anti-inflammatory Power Shake:1 Handful of Blueberries
As much spinach and/or kale as I can stuff in my nutribullet
1 raw egg
1 Scoop of Chocolate Protein Powder
A Splash of pure cherry juice
A Splash of Beet Juice
1 cup of unsweetened Almond Milk.I suppose it is just because I got really used to it when I was very active and motivated this past year, but I still love this shake.
As for the raw egg, my coworker/pseudo trainer recommended it once upon a time when I was eating hard boiled eggs every morning. I thought “Gross!!!”, and he said “keep eating those hard boiled eggs for a while and you’ll understand”. About a month later after I had to resist gagging on my latest hard boiled egg, I bit the bullet and cracked a raw egg directly into my blender. It was…freaking delicious! It added a creaminess to the shake and enhanced the chocolate flavor.
So just as he told me, don’t knock it till you try it…but you probably have to get thoroughly sick of eggs before you can try it.
01/10/2018 at 2:07 pm in reply to: Pick my Poison! (Poll for choosing what dreaded death pile items to work) #302504 votes for coats and 1 for A/V equipment. I’m already feeling quite motivated. Maybe I’ll go ahead and pull the entire wardrobe of coats and dump them in my ebay room to get started this evening. I know I can easily list the entire lot this weekend.
If I make so much on top of my day job, then at some point my extra income will push me into a higher tax bracket. With the 20% deduction on business income, I can effectively increase my business income 20% without any personal income tax implications. The higher tax bracket is really more of a “mind game”. Yes I understand that only the amount in the next tax bracket is taxed at the higher rate. It’s the old “If I make more I gotta pay more so maybe I should just not make more to avoid that small penalty” faulty logic argument. It’s an illogical internal reasoning yes, but that kind of thinking affects most people in one aspect of their lives or another.
As for kids, I have 4, so $8000 in tax credits. Personally I think $2k credit per child is excessively too much, but I’m not gonna turn it down!
Does this bill affect my decision to stay at my job? I’m not really sure. It does inspire me to expand my business, which in turn could lead to me eventually deciding to go full time and abandon my day job. I’ve already commited to the idea that if my day job ends I will immediately switch to full time ebay. That’s what I’ve been building to for 2.5 years. I’m definitely not at the level where I think I could earn enough on ebay to simply walk away though. I am quite comfortable now having my HSA contribution set to the legal maximum since I will be paying several thousand less in Federal Tax.
01/10/2018 at 11:32 am in reply to: Pick my Poison! (Poll for choosing what dreaded death pile items to work) #30229I have coats/jackets listed and they simply aren’t selling for me. I sell more coats in the summer than I do in the winter! But if that’s the winner of the poll then so be it.
Yes I read it that way for our simple, low overhead ebay business style – knock 20% off of your net business income as it comes through to your personal income taxes. It get complicated for businesses with major equipment, lots of income etc. It’s really not that complicated though because the tax laws for a complicated high expense business was already way more complicated.
In my case it really doesn’t matter. The child tax credits alone wipe out my federal tax bill for my day job and ebay business. These law changes encourage me to grow my business faster while maintaining my day job since the tax implications are greatly reduced.
When the seller inputs the weight, size, and shipping carrier information into the listing, the buyer will be told exactly what the shipping cost will be based on their own zip code through the ebay shipping calculator. If you guesstimate these numbers, that is what the buyer pays. If you were wrong and it ends up costing more, that is on you as the seller and you have to eat the loss. If you overestimated and the buyer paid too much, well you can either keep the difference or refund it back to the customer.
The best way to learn is to prebox when you first start seriously selling. Always be willing to learn new techniques, try new tools and supplies, etc.
When I list items now I just “know” what size box I will use and how much it will weigh. That is purely learned from experience – there is no shortcut. Many times I don’t even need to weigh or measure the item – I just know size/weight just by looking and handling the item.
There is a lot of slack in the shipping calculator. The dimensions really don’t matter until you cross the dimensional weight threshold. You also only need to know to the nearest pound, rounded up, for the calculator. Always error on the heavy/large side by a bit and then try to beat that when you actually pack. The reward for beating your estimate is an extra dollar or two savings on shipping.
Ah well since this thread has been resurrected, I have an update. I am now fully team Dymo 450 Turbo with the long skinny 99019 labels. I love that printer and those labels. So fast, cheap, and easy. The skinny labels are about 5 cents each. A pack of $150 is less than $8 shipped on amazon.
If I sell something on bonanza or have to print out FedEx I’ll still use a laser printer for those. 99% of my labels are USPS on ebay though.
When I first started selling for real on ebay, I prepackaged everything. Once I got over 100 items in inventory I started the bins system and quit prepacking. Two years later I still have 3-4 things still prepacked from those days in a deep dark corner of my storage building.
I still have some hard goods that I’ve been putting off listing forever. I need to bite the bullet and get them listed, but also prepacked so I don’t ever have to dread the shipping part.
The USPS Tyvek mailers are my go-to shipper if the item is more than a pound and won’t fit into a padded flat rate mailer. I ship most of my men’s shoes and medium weight jackets in the tyvek mailers. They are great and are usually in stock at the post office in their priority supplies shelf. You can also ask the postmaster and they usually have a supply in the back.
It is a Area51/Maximum Force combo game. I have a couple more shooting games I swap out. Currently I have Police Trainer in there. I also have Sharpshooter (a more kiddie version of Police Trainer), and Area 51 Site 4.
If you sell clothes or shoes, then mailers are great. And yes you can go through a TON of them. I bet R&J go through between 200-300 a month in polymailers.
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