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A couple years ago I sold several arcade games on ebay. I listed as local pickup and in the listing I gave the contact information for a NAVL rep that specialized in arcade machine shipping. I specified that the buyer would be responsible for all shipping costs and arrangements. All I had to do was be present when the shipper came to my house.
To protect myself, I took a video of the item working and did a walkaround showing condition. The video ended with the shipper unplugging the item and starting to put shrink wrap on it. Once the shipper took it I was no longer responsible for the item. I never had a claim so I don’t know if that video would have helped me, but it made me feel better.
If you are exclusively an FBA seller, that email is meaningless. FBA is exempt from that policy because Amazon is doing the fulfillment.
Total Items in Store: 570
Items Sold: 7
Cost of Items Sold: $ 41
Total Sales: $232
Total Profit: $191
Highest Price Sold: $45 Dickies Boots (Retail Arbitrage from walmart clearance)
Average Price Sold: $33.14
Average Profit: $21.22Another slow week, but things appear to be picking up. I started a 10% off sale and have had a few sales from it. 6 of 7 sales were shoes. Yay for shoes!
Nothing much to say about amazon. One sale and made about $20 after COGS and fees. Still no motivation to send anything else in. The prices of all my arbitrage stuff is not going up to where I want them, and I think my amazon motivation is directly tied to those items. If that all sells before Christmas I’ll continue with amazon. If not I may just let it die and stick with ebay.
What an interesting topic! I can break my money learnings down into a few basics and then one detailed “ah-ha” moment.
1. My mom and wife are natural savers. I didn’t learn a thing from my mom because I was a kid, but I appreciate my wife’s abilities. My wife pinched every penny she ever got as a kid. If grandma gave her a dollar, she saved it. We were able to buy a house as 23 year old newlyweds due to her ability to save.2. My dad and sister are natural spenders. In debt waaayyy past their eyeballs. My mom had to bail both of them out multiple times. I did learn from their mistakes. I never even wanted a credit card! To this day I only have two cards, each with low limits and I pay them off regularly to get the free rewards. It irritates me quite a bit that I am punished on my credit rating for only having the credit limits I can afford.
3. My mother-in-law introduced me to the wonderful world of coupons. My mom couponed, but she just bought whatever had a coupon whether we wanted it or if it was even good. She wasted a lot of money getting stuff no one wanted. While dating my future wife, my mother-in-law started giving me coupons from this magical book called and “Entertainment book”. It isn’t as good now, but back then it had BOGO meals at all the best restaurants, bogo activities at all the best entertainment centers, and even cheap evening movies. I was able to take my future wife on very nice dates and spend next to nothing. Gents (and ladies), if you find a significant other who loves coupons and understands the value of a dollar while dating, then that is a keeper!
3. And now for the ah-ha moment! As a freshly giddy and engaged couple, my wife and I went to a bridal expo. We entered our name into a drawing for something, though it was really just putting us on a mailing list. We were soon contacted by someone who said we “won” a free cruise. We just had to come downtown to a hotel to claim it. We participated in a presentation on a line of cookware called Royal Prestige. It was a great presentation. We fell for it hook line n’ sinker. We were the proud new owners of $2300 in dishes and cookware… at 18% interest compounded monthly. I paid the payment a few months, then me and my fiancé had a heart to heart on what we had done. We also researched what the stuff sold for on ebay…ouch. We dipped into her savings and paid it off in full. It was a very painful lesson, but we learned a lot from it. I learned to love eating veggies because the presenter cooked a meal for us and the steamed broccoli & carrots were great. We learned all about interest rates and what the real cost of investment is. Most valuably, we learned to check ebay! As a bonus, we still have that cookware and it is indeed just as good as presented – it was just way overpriced. It will last our lifetime easily.
Oh, and we did use that cruise! I was able to upgrade the free “basic” cruise to the cruise we were already planning to take on our honeymoon. It saved me a few hundred dollars.
If you stick with a single shipping company,use a desktop, and a single software to print labels you can gain productivity with a thermal label. That is why every shipping department in the world sets up a contract with UPS or FedEx and ships exclusively with them. That is why UPS will give shipping companies a free label printer and labels.
The issues arise when you want to ship USPS, FedEx, & UPS. You use Ebay, paypal, Bonanza, Etsy, etc to create labels that aren’t always compatible or formatted the same. You use a PC or a mac, or you want to print wirelessly or from a mobile device. All of these issues require sacrifices in ease of use because there is no one stop shop to make all these things play nicely together.
That’s why I will chime in on any one of these threads to say I happily chose a wireless airprint laser printer and use adhesive label pouches. Print the label from any device on plain white paper from anywhere in the house. Fold label in half, place in pouch, and stick to package. Done. Easy, clean, professional looking, fast, and durable.
I had a return request last week for a pair of $70 shoes. I also have returns turned off. Normally I take all return requessts no problem, but the person went out of their way to lie. They said “ordered by mistake. It just arrived”. My BS meter went off so I checked their buying history. Sure enough they found and purchased a cheaper pair 20 minutes after buying mine. They could have written me then and cancelled. They could have also just been honest and said “found a cheaper pair”. I would have been cool with that.
In the end I just ignored the request. No further contact from buyer. Am I a jerk? Eh, probably. I don’t feel bad at all though. I am a robot…BEEP!
Check around with some Amish builders in your area. They can bring a team of Amish builders in and bang out your wood building in a day, and you may be pleasantlyt surprised with the cost if you get to the right people. You can insulate and wire it yourself after the fact.
Also, you can still run pipes in along the perimeter if need-be. It’s just more labor intensive and the concrete has to be repaired afterwards.
After reading this I ran over to Target to see if I could get one. I got there just in time to see all the disappointed empty handers leaving. They had 13 and handed out tickets for them around 7am.
This is a great opportunity for someone who has some spare time. If you can score one of these and a Hatchimal then you are doing well!
I think there is a perception issue on ebay that I compare to the issue of power vs. volume in cars, motorcycles, vacuums, etc. In that analogy, consumers assume a quiet vacuum, sports car, or motorcycle constitutes a lack of power. In reality, it is superior engineering to maintain power and reduce volume.
So back to your issue. Your photos in reality are amazing and professional, but your buyers are triggered to think the item is fake. I think the average ebay buyer expects to see some clue that the item is owned and loving used by the actual seller. They want good quality pictures, but in a “real” environment. By placing your used items in a sterile environment, it hits that uncanny valley that makes them appear to be fake listings. This is the main issue I have never been able to pull the trigger on a photo box.
If I were you , I would turn off the underneath lighting to go for a more natural, muted background. Yeah it will look a little less professional but that’s the point.
Can you provide some context as to what kind of inventory you have? Can you post a picture or two? I’d really like to see what you have to better understand your process.
I really don’t think filing cabinets will work with my kind of inventories.
When I started selling seriously, I did it on my own without the help of this or any other group or forum. I just did what naturally came to me.
My store was about 100 items at any one time. I priced competitively to completed listings. To gain a sense of packing and to make sure I had a box, I decided to pack as I listed. My listing got the actual box size and weight down to the ounce. Every box got a bright yellow label on the side of what the contents were. I created a “wall of boxes” in my storage room. When an item sold, I grabbed the box and printed a label.
Once I committed to building a full business and bought a real storage building, I abandoned the pack first method. It does not work efficiently past 100 or so items – maybe more if items are very small.
What this method did teach me was how to gauge the weight, packing requirements, and box sizes for many different items. I can now create accurate shipping details in listings with ever grabbing a tape measure, box, or weigh scale. Through experience, I simply just “know” what size and weight any item I have will be to the nearest pound. So yes, I highly recommend any new seller start their small store with the pack first method just to gain experience while paying close attention to the details. Just don’t keep that system once you scale up. That would be a monumental waste of storage space.
I think the issue of buying used goods for resale is very, very clear. Just ask any used car dealer!
Your COGS is just as it says, your “costs of goods sold”. At a basic level, you claim the price you paid and the cost of the shipping materials. If you have to buy missing parts, that becomes COGS. Any paid appraisals would become part of the COGS. If you pay to have it cleaned or repaired, that is COGS. Note that the time spent cleaning it yourself does not count unless you have a very specific business set up in which you are an hourly employee – your payment typically comes from the sale itself.If all of these items you speak of were free, then you remove the basic purchase price from COGS but you can still keep all of the other costs associated with goods sold. I wish all of my inventory was free!
Personally I would get another CPA immediately if one told me to claim 50% of my profit as COGS when he knows that I didn’t spend a dime. That is quite unethical and at the end of the day, your are the one that could go to prison or pay fines. A good way to check if a CPA is giving a half baked opinion or a documented fact is to ask him to put it in writing. I bet you lunch that there is no way that CPA will sign a document attesting to that flawed COGS reasoning.
It would be nice to have a years worth of data. It is invaluable to use camelcamelcamel on amazon. You can price to the peak period that way.
At this point I am pretty confident on my pricing and can generally expect I can price things 50% higher at the holidays or in season and use the best offer system to get to the real price. Researching with 90 days of data just gives me an idea if my item will sell year round rather than in season. Terrapeak would be nice, but I don’t truly need it.
