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To get Engineering geeky, respond by asking them to provide the applicable inspection code and/or international standard that they would like you to inspect the smell to.
02/14/2017 at 2:06 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 297: Being Frugal vs Running A Business #12541I could absolutely flip the switch and go back to the model I used before. FredsPremiumOutlet has a very hands on, quick sale store and does extremely well – $1200-1500 a week.
Sourcing for a quick turn store is very different than sourcing for a long tail store. I like to buy 80’s and 90’s vintage jackets, windbreakers, & clothing. Many of these items have to sit and wait for the perfect buyer. There is no way I can price these things for them to fly out the door at the prices I want.
I would have to go back to selling toys and electronics to have a quick sale store. In those categories, research is easy to show if the item will sell quickly and for how much. There are no alternate sizes, styles, etc. Your research is apples to apples and all buyers are competing for the exact same product. For instance, a talking Barney plush from the mid-90’s can easily be sold in 30 days. An 80’s transformer is a very quick sale. Vintage NES games are a quick sale. A vintage Sony discman is a quick sale. Of course my researched price controls how quickly I will sell.
I highly encourage you to keep branching out and trying to sell new things and in different ways. You’ll identify your weaknesses & strengths. You’ll learn what you like selling and shipping, and what you LOATH selling and shipping. In the process, you’ll learn your potential.
02/14/2017 at 11:50 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 297: Being Frugal vs Running A Business #12518You should write them a thank you message. As in “thank you for identifying yourself as someone I don’t want to do business with.” 🙂
02/14/2017 at 11:47 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 297: Being Frugal vs Running A Business #12517I did $3k in a month with a running inventory of 70-80 items back when I started. I was unemployed and had LOTS of free time and pretty much every waking minute was packing, listing, shipping, and researching. I thoroughly researched every single item to guarantee a sale. I scavenged every day obsessively looking for the perfect items to sell. My goal was to sell within 30 days. Also it was summer so we weren’t homeschooling the kids. I did all that before I ever found Scavenger life – just figured it out as I went.
Now I have a 600 item running inventory balance and I am doing 1500-2000 a month. I haven’t listed in over a month, and I only ship 2-3 times a week. I have a full time job, an additional child I didn’t have then (we have 4 kids all 10 & under), and school is in session. I adjusted the items I sell to slow dime, which lets me make more money with drastically less work. I have honed my scavenging skill to the point I can go through a thrift store in 30 minutes or less and fill a cart with high quality merch. I always shoot for the highest price now rather than the best price. I pass over many of the things I used to buy with a small quick turnover store – they aren’t worth my precious time now.
Two very different stores, two very different situations. Everyone’s situation is very different. You know what your system is and you know what your potential is. Currently I am quite happy with my ebay situation. I also know what my potential is, but that will be saved for a day when I go full time.
No need to run with Dick & Jane down the street – just keep doing what works for you. And by the looks of it, you are doing a pretty darn good job. Keep learning and listing!
Honestly, once you do the math the LTSF exemption thing is not a deal killer. So you may not be able to list an unknown book for $1000k and just let it sit in a warehouse for years. Times that by millions and millions – that’s the hole amazon dug for themselves. I’m surprised they took this long.
I cut my prices on the books I was going to trash anyway, and in the last 2 weeks I’ve made enough to cover my LTSF’s. I’ll keep any book I feel I can make a minimum of $20 on within the next year. You can adapt to this.
As for the INAD issue, I agree you are likely getting scammed for buyer’s remorse. Any reasonable buyer would accept you sending them the replacement parts. It goes both ways though. If even one single piece is missing when they return it, file a claim against the buyer.
In the end you just take stock of your loss, and realize it is a drop in the bucket. I lost $100 on an INAD for a GSP order to Canada on an item I paid $50 for. I let it go. I got scammed on amazon on a NIB puzzle – the buyer did the puzzle over a few weeks and then returned it stating it “didn’t meet their expectations”. I let it go immediately. Keep moving forward.Above all, don’t seek out others who are frustrated like you are. That just compounds the problem and leads you to dwell on negativity for longer than you need to.
Keep on listing and this will just be a blip on the past radar very soon!
In the past I have outright told a couple of these “special” customers that my item is probably not what they are wanting and I don’t want them to be disappointed. I have been thanked for my honesty twice. The others just go away.
02/13/2017 at 3:38 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 297: Being Frugal vs Running A Business #12441Total Items in Store: 596
Items Sold: 8
Cost of Items Sold: $19
Total Sales: $221
Profit: $202
Highest Price Sold: $75 Johnston & Murphy Golf cleats
Average Price Sold: $27.64
Average Profit: $25.25
FBA items sold: 9
Total FBA sales: $138.38
FBA COGS: $18.20
FBA Fees: $66.05
FBA Profit: $54.13
FBA Average profit: $6.01Still not listing, but I am getting ready to hit the listing wagon hard here soon. I am still waiting on my photo box for shoes and smalls, and I’ve also ordered a photography backdrop/lighting kit for larges and clothing. A couple weeks ago I got two mannequins for free from a mall store that shut down. We’re going to try mannequin photography for all of our clothes. With two mannequins and two people, we’re hoping we can crank through a lot of items very quickly for the photographing portion. On person can be photographing while the other strips and dresses the next mannequin.
Another reason we wanted to photography backdrop/lighting kit was so we could start taking professional photos of our family ourselves.
I also had a great scavenging weekend. It was our daughters ten year old birthday, so we took her to Columbus for the weekend. There is a nice Holiday Inn Express there with a really awesome indoor pool that is basically a small waterpark. MUCH cheaper than Great Wolf Lodge. Since we were going, I decided to go ahead and make this my OFFICIAL first travel scavenging trip. I logged all the miles and hotel costs for deduction, but not meals. In total I bought $400 worth of merch and I shopped each day. It filled 6 totes when I got back home.
02/13/2017 at 3:27 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 297: Being Frugal vs Running A Business #12438Man I am glad Ryanne was able to bail Jay out on the hilarious scavenging story. It was wading WAAAYYYY into creeper territory the way Jay was telling it. Lol!
You guys crack me up every week. I love that even after all these years of selling you still thoroughly enjoy what you do.I got a Fed Ex account and they said they could set me up with Smart post. It didn’t work and I called back to get it resolved. Again they said I was good to go…but I wasn’t. I can only spend so much time on the phone to resolve something that is such a small part of my business, so I gave up on them and their crappy service.
The main reason I needed a dedicated smart post shipping option was because of Bonanza. If I had smart post on the item on ebay, then that shipping cost is also associated with the item if purchased on bonanza. That can suck.
My final solution was to just do away with smart post. It is a crappy service anyway.
02/08/2017 at 4:24 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #12078I’m not too concerned with google eventually dropping my listings. I have very few listings over a year old. If they get over a year old I can drop the price further to encourage a sale. I have 604 active listings and only 43 listings older than a year. They’re not still around due to google, it’s due to my non-competitive price and a general lack of demand for the item. Many items just need the right buyer to finally come along.
Having said that, I’m going to go ahead and put those listings on a 30% clearance sale to see how many I can sell through this weekend. I’ll report back the results in a dedicated thread next week. If they start selling then that should show that customers can definitely find and buy stale listings, and that price is the governing factor more-so than any listing trick.
02/08/2017 at 3:55 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #12076Yay, got it for $80. Once I get it and spend some time with it, I’ll post a review in the photography section.
It sucks to have to get one of these, but it was either this or I had to invest in some studio lighting. Hopefully the sharpness of all my photos improves.
02/08/2017 at 3:00 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #12072I put in an offer for $80 that went through for review. 24″ should do pretty much everything I need.
02/06/2017 at 3:35 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11905I am in the camp that ending and relisting sell similar is a waste of time. In my experience Using markdown manager to put your items on short sales repeatedly is far more effective then doing the sell similar thing. It also won’t jack up your long term listing history (start date, google search results, etc.
If you have months and months of sales data with ending/sell similar, do an experiment and leave everything GTC and just do 3-4 day sales constantly to see how your metrics compare. I bet you will be quite similar and sell just as many older listings.
02/06/2017 at 2:44 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11892I have a fireplace in the main living room but I’ve never tried this. I really don’t want to work down on the ground. I’ve seen your pictures and the effect is quite striking.
02/06/2017 at 11:02 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11854Total Items in Store: 604
Items Sold: 15
Cost of Items Sold: $38.55
Total Sales: $392
Profit: $353.45
Highest Price Sold: $50 (Transformers Hoodie)
Average Price Sold: $26.13
Average Profit: $23.56
FBA items sold: 4
Total FBA sales: $90.85
FBA COGS: $22
FBA Fees: $35.22
FBA Profit: $33.63
FBA Average profit: $8.41And thus ends my January no scavenge, no list month. It is good to know that I can take a whole month off and still make about $400 a week. I was able to take all that saved time and invest it into myself. I am much healthier and I’m also down a shocking 34lb when I weighed in this morning. I am not dieting or doing anything other than eating well, eating enough (not starving myself) , walking a lot, and getting adequate sleep.
I finally shopped for the first time this weekend at the local Goodwill. I was definitely a shop-addict. I will be thrifting much less from here on out until I start listing more regularly.As for Amazon FBA, I went through and competitively priced every item I had. Items have started selling slowly but surely. I’m just trying to sell off as much as I can before the LTSF this month. I will pull any item I have priced at $9.99 or less on the 14th.
A while back I had mentioned that we converted our dining room into our homeschool room, and the old school room/den was going to become the dedicated place for ebay listing. Well I experimented with listing yesterday. Wow, the lighting is very, very bad out there! I tried daylight shooting with natural light, daytime room only lighting (there are 6 60w led bulbs in the room), and night time room only lighting. I either had harsh highlights from the window or harsh shadows from the light placement or both! My phone (iphone 7) does not take sharp enough photos due to the inadequate light density at my table.
I’m either going to get a light box with some softbox lighting, or switch to using my DSLR to photograph.
Have a great week everyone!
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Retro Treasures WV.
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