Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.
I take all my pictures with an iphone 5s. You can simply swipe right at the bottom of the camera to switch to square on the fly. It’s very handy.
Every state is a little different. It also depends on personal preferences on how you set up your eBay business.
Technically, in many areas you need absolutely none of those things and you’d still be legal and fine.Uh, you ABSOLUTELY call them on this! That is beyond unacceptable and typically amazon is very receptive to making this right.
If you enclose the space, you can use cedar. The power of cedar is pretty limited, but it does somewhat work. I put cedar discs on hangers in my enclosed wardrobes. You just have to sand them every once in a while to restore the smell.
Its much more pleasant than mothballs. I also don’t have much in the form of wool items.
Do you add some form of walls to the sides so that you can fill them to the top?
I don’t see them. There is a link that says “view post on imgur.com”. Many sites do not like hot linking. Some sites will actually change the link to something not cool if they get too much traffic.
I can’t bring myself to do this mainly because I would be upset if I saw someone going through my trash can. Trash is still personal property until it is claimed by the waste management company.
Yeah eventually I got one to post on an edit.
Image button + direct image link (one that ends in *.jpg or similar) = success.Photobucket image links were *.jpg.html and that didn’t work until I removed the .html
Yes, using the img button and using a straight website link ending in the actual image name worked.
Every other known way of posting an image failed miserably.
Having said that, I just tried to post an image on mobile (iPhone safari browser) and the browser crashes as soon as I press the img button.
