Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
01/09/2017 at 2:27 pm in reply to: Need help from shipping nerds. How should I ship a large model plane? #9842
For the props, use some small boxes and cut out a hole in one end to close around them so you can completely encapsulate them. Wrap everything thoroughly in bubble wrap. Leave several inches around every surface for dunnage.
This is also an item I would highly suggest the use of packing peanuts.
Total Items in Store: 643
Items Sold: 12
Cost of Items Sold: $29
Total Sales: $442
Profit: $413
Highest Price Sold: $185 (Marantz Recorder – Resold after a false return)
Average Price Sold: $36.83
Average Profit: $34.42
FBA items sold: 4
Total FBA sales: $98.55
FBA COGS: $9
FBA Fees: $34.06
FBA Profit: $55.49
FBA Average profit: $13.87These are the weeks that are pretty cool. Yes my numbers are a little low, but I did almost ZERO work for ebay. What other job can you take a week off and still make money!
Our School Room is almost complete, and I have one half of the new ebay room set up. Still a TON of work to do to get the ebay room finished. I’m not going to have much spare time for ebay for maybe two more weeks. There is so much other more important work to do to get our house in order. After all that is done though, I’m going to attack my death piles like a mad-man.
As for Amazon FBA, I have not sent anything in for several months it seems. I’m still making between $50-100 a week. I am going to go through and delete some of the long-tail low value items before the Feb deadline. I’ll keep long tail items that I’m confident will eventually sell for $29.99 or higher. I will wait until the day after the LTSF deadline and then send in a new shipment of items I have accumulated. If you wait till the day after, you get a year before LTSF will be applied. I’m sure amazon will come up with a way to take care of that loophole as well…
I’ve changed my mind – no more buying for January for me. I have too much to do and too much stuff already.
01/09/2017 at 9:45 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 290: Experimenting with your eBay Store #9793Yes, a lot of times I find items with Prime cheaper than elsewhere. I just bought 5 wall cabinet kits with Prime last night at $54 each for our homeschool room. The same thing at Lowes was gonna be $89 each.
I buy a lot on Amazon and I always price check.Oh and one last Prime benefit – the A-Z returns policy may suck as a seller, but it is the absolute BEST as a buyer. I’ll buy the Prime option over the merchant fulfilled any day of the week as long as they are in the same ballpark price-wise. There are some real scumbag merchant fulfilled vendors on amazon.
I could see dumping the low price inventory as a motivational tool to keep you on task. I cannot think of a more direct way to say “We’re NOT doing low priced items any more!” than that.
Sometimes you have to take drastic action to force yourself into a new process.
01/08/2017 at 2:14 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 290: Experimenting with your eBay Store #9751Sometimes Amazon Prime is cheaper. For instance, just before Thanksgiving the bottom element in our Oven went out. I had to get a replacement and fast. I look on Amazon and I also check a few more websites. Other websites were going to be $30-40 shipped. I was able to get an element on amazon for $14 shipped prime! I don’t know why it was so cheap – there were tons of 5 star reviews.
Everything I buy on Prime I price check elsewhere. Also, sometimes that fast prime shipping is a lifesaver as well.
One more thing, Amazon Prime is faaarrr more than just free shipping. We use Prime video regularly – Man in the High Castle is worth the price itself. They have some very high quality exclusive kids shows on there as well. Prime music is even better than Prime Video. I stream music all the time in my car. There music catalog is quite impressive. Now there is Prime reading – free kindle books and you do not need a kindle device. The kindle app on your phone or tablet works.
You can also download the video and music for offline use. Shoot they even let you burn cd’s of prime music for free.
Amazon Prime is the ultimate one-stop shop Scavenger media outlet.
Great tip! When I first started I did this. Back then I was mainly selling vintage toys and electronics. Another way to look at it is to look at the completed listings as a heat map. Unsold listings are red, sold listings are green. If you do a quick scroll down through completed listings you should see a lot of green. If not, then the item is not selling well and you should probably pass. If you see a lot of green and there are only a few active listings, then you could be pretty certain the item will sell within a month.
Since I’m growing my store and I’ve adopted the list and forget philosophy, I don’t do this much anymore. I mainly check to see if there is a market. If there is any type of market, then I know I am likely to sell the item within a year.
Lol, that is such a early 00’s ebay listing. I remember the days of $10k Elvis shaped potatoes, used gum, possessed video games, etc.
That’s actually pretty clever. The bag protects your shoes AND is the dunnage.
I use Everlance on my iphone. It used to be 100% free, but they switched to pay service now to use the automatic trip tracker. I wrote them to complain and say I was switching to another service and they gave me a free year of premium service.
It is a pretty good app. If you have the awareness to open the app immediately before driving it is pretty accurate. If you have this good of awareness, then you also would be just fine without the premium service. If you are like me and TOTALLY forget to do mileage, or a trip changed to a business trip spontaneously while en route then the Premium is a must.The auto trip tracker is not perfectly accurate. It will drop a mile or two here and there due to the way it works. To minimize battery drainage the app just occasionally checks in on your gps to see if you are moving. You can always make manual adjustments if needed.
Definitely give the free version a try as a minimum. Their customer service is pretty good.
01/04/2017 at 8:19 am in reply to: Any way the ebay breeze blows (Letting your inventory influence your interests) #9531They’re really in a bad mood. Got two offers in the $30-40 range after the game. Maybe if they can actually win a playoff game they’ll feel better and pay more. Win a playoff game…in Seattle…the Lions….Bwahahahahaha!!!
Weekly numbers:
Total Items in Store: 646
Items Sold: 15
Cost of Items Sold: $52
Total Sales: $446
Profit: $394
Highest Price Sold: $50 Kalso Sandals
Average Price Sold: $29.73
Average Profit: $26.26
FBA items sold: 2
Total FBA sales: $80
FBA COGS: $4
FBA Fees: $20
FBA Profit: $56
FBA Average profit: $28Steady week without much effort put in. Our house is a total wreck right now and is taking up a lot of my time. We’re converting our dining room to our homeschool room, and the former school room (originally a den) will become my temporary dedicated ebay room. I think it will really help me focus to have a dedicated space, kill some death piles, and get a better feel for what I need space wise if I ever go full-time.
On the scavenger/DIY front, I rebuilt our dryer yesterday. I sounded like a tank was rolling through the house while it ran! I replaced all the moving wear parts and it ran like a new machine…until it quit heating. Doh! I think I may have smashed the dryer duct so hopefully I don’t have to replace the element also. Side not, if your dryer has some years on it and you’ve never done a thorough, disassembled cleaning – DO IT! I have no clue how that dryer still worked. The entire duct was filled with compacted lint. In the end I’ll have a like new dryer and I’ll be out less than $50 even if I have to get a new element.
With board game parts, I can easily photograph and list 30 parts within an hour. 30 parts that bring $3-8 each in profit is very much worth my time. No COGS, minimal storage, etc. It is a fun experiment and I could see how it could easily become a niche store in and of itself.
Always be experimenting and diversifying!
Sometimes the price stickers can be far more damaging than marker on the soles. I’ve had stickers peel away parts of the shoe before.
I have several Nintendo NES systems I WILL NOT sell on ebay for this specific reason. I sold one two Christmas’s ago and the lady created an item not as described case. That was shortly after ebay changed the system so the seller has to pay return shipping. I even supplied the lady with a video of me powering on the system and inserting and starting 10 different carts to show how well it worked before the sale – the system had distinctive markings on the top to prove it really was the system I sent. I think it was buyers remorse, but the lady may have had an HDTV that wasn’t compatible.
I also recently refunded an incompetent buyer on a high end audio recorder ($200) that the buyer said it didn’t work. Sure enough I was able to pop in a freshly formatted SD card and it worked perfectly. I explained to the lady how to format her memory cards so they would work. I could have sent it back (the customer wanted it back) but I chose to refund and relist so hopefully a better customer purchases it. As the title of this thread states, I do not want to be technical support for incompetent customers.
-
AuthorPosts