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No super amazing home runs at the huge city wide yard sale, but plenty of solid items. The highlights from this week:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266370510967
Whirlpool Part# ECKMFEZ1 Automatic Refrigerator Ice Maker Kit 355962 New Sealed
Paid $1. new in box fridge parts always do well. This one should sell fairly quickly.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266370510740
RCA U1000 UNISON Phone System 4-Line Base Station DECT 6 Digital Receptionist
Paid $2. Executive phones can be really good money. Keep an eye out for them.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266370510295
Nike Elite Quad Zip System Max Air Hoops Backpack Bag – Black / White
Paid $5. Nike basketball backpacks have high STR and routinely go for $50+ used.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266370509775
SOC Sandpiper of California BUGOUT Backpack Coyote Brown Military Tactical
Paid $8. Good brand with good STR. Should sell quick.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266370525803
Jim Henson’s Bear In The Big Blue House What Will You Find Pop Up Game 1999 NEW
Paid $1. I love sealed older toys. This show was a fave of our oldest. Great show to nap to! Anyways, rare item with a rare buyer. I hope to sell at Christmas season.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266371173849
Louisville Slugger META 29/19 USSSA Composite Baseball Bat SLMTX10S-21
Paid $30 for this and one more bat. More paint wear than I would like but still valuable. Will likely sell for $150 offer. I bought the other bat to negotiate a better deal and hedge my buy cost. The other will sell for $30-40 and get me in the profit.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266371628742
Belleville 675 ST Gore-tex Boots Mens 12 R Cold Weather Waterproof Steel Toe
Paid $2. Combat boots are always plentiful at yard sales. These are really nice ones in a great size. Should sell pretty quickly.
I bought a TON of women’s shoes at one sale – 22 pair. All very nice. A bunch of Ralph Lauren leather driving shoes and other nicer brand shoes. Paid $3 a pair – many will sell for around $50. The cheapest will be $30-35.
24 pair listed sub $100
12 pair $100-$200
14 pair priced $200 and up.
I’ve listing all the used unboxed shoes and multiple of those have sold for $200+ which I did not anticipate when I bought them.
Everything left unlisted (about 50) is new in box and most of them will be $200+
So 60+ more will sell $200+. I’m being fairly aggressive with pricing and offers to keep things moving. Multiple pairs I’ve had listed for $300-400 I’ve ended up selling for $200-$300.
I crunched my numbers and in order to beat my total gross sales of 2020 I would need to average $1667 per week gross sales to match 2020. The weak first half of the year really put a damper on things. In the last 6 weeks my gross sales have exceeded the combined gross sales for the first 5 MONTHS of the year!
Is that doable at this point? I’m thinking yes. We shall see!
Also, I’m at 954 new listings for the summer. I’ll wrap up the last 46 to complete my 1000 listing summer goal this week – several weeks ahead of schedule.
Items in Store: 2571
Items Sold: 40
Total Sales: $2,352.00
COGS: $244.00
Total Profit: $2,108.00
Average profit: $52.70
Average sales price: $58.80
New Listings: 110
Items scavenged: Alot
Listing 2023 weekly Avg: 40Saturday was the big community yard sale in the city I live on the outskirts of. There were 120 listed yard sales in the same 10 mile stretch I normally scavenge, and in reality I bet it was 150+. On a normal yard sale Saturday it takes me about 2 hours to drive my route and see all the sales. Saturday we went for 5.5 hours to finish the route and did drive-bys or straight up skipped a TON of sales.
I’ve never seen this many sales in one day in this area. Unfortunately many of them were junk, overpriced, or a wall of generic clothing. There may have been good things at many of them early in the morning but you can only be the early bird at the first few sales wherever you start.
I didn’t buy anything I was super excited about – a few $100+ items mixed in there. This was my last hurrah of the summer with vacation coming up on the scavenging front. From here on out for the rest of the year my general scavenging will be pretty light*. Listing wise I have a pretty good system going and I think I’ll keep listing 50-80 items a week the rest of the year.
* Ah you saw that asterisk huh? Well my “general” scavenging will be light but in September there will be another round of premium hoarder acquisitions. I still don’t know how deep that rabbit hole will go long term.
Premium hoarder numbers for the week:
Shoes: 5 pair for $1200
Clothing: 10 items for $458
My running total so far is 56 items $5620 in sales. This week I will finally cross over into the profit. Making my money back before I do another big purchase is perfect. My solds are averaging $100 and my current listed premium hoarder listings average $100 (196 for $20633)
I still have a bin of clothes to list and about half the shoes.
I did a virtual thing one time. I made it about 10 minutes in and realized worthless seminars are a whole different thing when you realize you are wasting your own time vs your day job companies time. LOL!
I left the meeting and went and spent that hour listing instead.
The scam on facebook marketplace where the bots request your phone number is exhausting.
I don’t recall ever seeing the exception thing in any communication on the INFORM act. I found the exception thing in an unrelated google search.
The ebay for business person also gave me a link for some account settings I’ve don’t recall seeing before. I probably have but it has been revised or something.
Items in Store: 2501
Items Sold: 31
Total Sales: $1,872.00
COGS: $163.00
Total Profit: $1,709.00
Average profit: $55.13
Average sales price: $60.39
New Listings: 111
Items scavenged: 12
Listing 2023 weekly Avg: 38
Sourcing Allotment: 35Had a HUGE weekend to close out the week – $1200 in sales over the weekend. I made great strides in getting my ebay garage office cleaned up and organized. It is NOT easy to process 100+listings each week in a disorganized space.
I have 154 listings to go to hit my 1000 listings summer goal. I’ll finish that up in the next 2 weeks. The processes I’ve set up to maximize my listings this summer will really help me have a successful fall and Q4 as well.
Yard sales were absolutely dead this week again. That’s just how August sales go around here every year it seems. The sales that were out were all full of overpriced junk. I bought one single thing in 2 hours of hunting – a Lego friends boxed set. To be fair, there were things I could have bought and just didn’t. I had no interest in buying sub $50 items so I passed on several pair of shoes.
Premium hoarder numbers for the week:
Shoes – 4 pair for $400.
Clothes – 5 items for $360
I haven’t posted my kid’s ebay numbers in a while. Why? Because they did what teens do: lost interest.
Oh well, at least they are doing work for me. In total my daughter cleaned and/or photographed 100 items. I pay a flat rate for cleaning and photographing. It works out to $15/hr if they actually work.
Before we go on vacation I’ll buy out their listings and unlisted items and cash them out. Good thing I didn’t waste my time setting up their own store!
This week already has a great start – sold two pair of hoarder shoes this morning for $575 total.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266312115214
Marantz Headshell NOS Sealed with leads and screws
I bought some misc audio/video junk at a yard sale a few years ago and this was inside a random box. Gotta love free, unexpected home runs!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266317661810
Green Star GSE-5000 Elite Slow Masticating Juicer Jumbo Twin Gear Cold Press
Sold for full price. Paid $7 at goodwill. This is the kind of things you find after saying you “need to scavenge less”. LoL!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266297192092
Bass Sportocasin Shoes Leather Brown Mens 7 D Vintage V Nail
Hey I’m all for a $150 sale, but this one is….odd. I sent an “offer to buyers” on Friday. The kind where you don’t get to even know the buyer’s username. Saturday morning around 10:30 I get a phone call and the person addresses me by name. They start talking about the fact they have a pair of sportocasin’s and they want to send me a picture. I’m really freaking confused and then he tells me I sent him an offer of $150 on a pair. I asked him to send me the photo on ebay to steer the convo back there, but he sent it in a text…and now I have a penpal.
Long story short – it’s a harmless old man who just wants to chat shoes and life in general and get a matching pair to his for his son. He ended up buying them for my offer on ebay. What’s super concerning was how in the hell did he get my name and number from ebay? I went through all my settings with ebayforbusiness and they could not see any way he would have been sent my info. Even with the INFORM act, he should not have gotten this info and clearly isn’t internet savvy. I’m glad this guy is harmless (so far) but what about next time? This is the crap that was my concern when the government started this BS system.
What a wild random call!
On that note, go to this link and request an exception if you run your business from home:
https://www.ebay.com/sellercenter/resources/inform-consumers-act
Ebay says that the INFORM act info was not communicated to him on an offer to buyers, but it had to have been. My real name would not have been in this info, so maybe he looked up my name/number from the address? I think the simplest answer is probably correct – ebay gave the dude my real name/number even though it is turned off in settings and the ebayforbusiness rep was playing dumb.
Nothing good this week. Back down to earth it seems after a CRAZY scavenging summer! That’s ok, I needed this lull in order to catch up and organize. Instead of filling my van with new scavenges, I loaded my van up with death pile items to list on breaks and lunch at work this week.
The real nuts is that there is 10x more stuff that I haven’t seen yet. I may be able to go look at the real stash later this month.
Yard sales were dead. Nothing too special at Goodwill either. I did get one of these complete in box.
340% 90 day STR. Will sell for $125. Paid $11 at Goodwill
One other cool item I actually passed on was a vintage GI Joe Mobile Command center at goodwill.
I LOVE scavenging vintage 80’s toys! That is what got me in this game and I based my store name on.
Sadly it was pretty much stripped of parts and just wasn’t worth buying to sell for $40-50. It is HUGE. I left it for another scavenger to buy.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266197038755
Spectracide Bag A Bug Japanese Beetle Trap 16901 Lot of 3
Not a big deal on it’s own, but I completely sold out of these this week. 20 lots of 3 all gone at $20 a set. It must be june bug season! I bought out a clearance lot at Walmart last year at $1 a box. Research showed selling in lots of 3 would work out the best for me. 3 of them fit perfectly in an 8x6x4 box at 12oz. Super easy to ship.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266334306347
HARLEY DAVIDSON BLACK LEATHER SOFT TOE MOTORCYCL Engineer BOOTS MEN’S 9.5
A pair of premium hoarder boots, but not from the big shoe lot. I bought these in the normal sale prior to getting the big score for $10. I used leather cleaner/conditioner on them to make them look really nice.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266326376216
Firestone Ride-Rite Rear Air Helper Spring Kit for 94-04 F250 F350 Ram 2500 3500
A previous scavenge of the week a few weeks ago. Paid $40 – was happy to take a $200 offer.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266328717398
Ralph Lauren Purple Label Blue Polo Shirt Short Sleeve Men’s Size L
$80 offer on this one. I’ll be honest, there is nothing special about this shirt other than the label is purple on the inside. I’ve bought shirts just as nice at Walmart. Some of the Ralph Lauren stuff I’ve been listing has truly been amazing. This shirt…wasn’t. hey, I’ll take that $80 though! 🙂
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266335116899
RRL Ralph Lauren Shorts Indigo Wash Cotton Denim Look Sweats Men’s Size XL
Here’s another Ralph lauren item that is worth more because of the tag on this inside – not because the clothing is actually anything special. RRL is Ralph Lauren’s Personal label that he makes to induldge his own style and taste.
I took a $75 offer to keep sales happening. No need to get precious on this stuff – keep it moving and keep cash flow positive.
Items in Store: 2421
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $1,686.00
COGS: $246.00
Total Profit: $1,436.00
Average profit: $32.64
Average sales price: $38.32
New Listings: 65
Items scavenged: 16
Listing 2023 weekly Avg: 36
Sourcing Allotment: 25My my, how perspective can change on a dime. I feel DISAPPOINTED that I ONLY have $1700 in sales this week. How funny! In the last 4 weeks I’ve made as much in sales as the previous 15 weeks combined!!! I really was hoping to hit $2k 3 weeks in a row.
Ebay Sales this weekend were dead. I didn’t get a chance to photograph or finish listings until this weekend as it was a busy week. On top of that, we had a bug go through our house that finally made it to me. I felt like crap all weekend. My two oldest kids did plenty of shoe cleaning and photography so I still knocked out 65 items in two days. I still have 30 drafts that need photos. Not posting any new listings for 5 days likely hurt me. Well maybe I can get back on track this week with another $2k week.
Fun listing fact – in the last 9 weeks I’ve listed 733 new listings. This is as much as I’ve listed in the last 44 weeks combined!
Premium hoarder numbers for the week:
Shoes – 6 pair for $522
Clothing – 3 items for $189
I powered through and listed all the lower dollar hoarder shoes that were basically throw ins. Multiple pair of Sperrys. I also listed the lower dollar new in box shoes that are definitely real.
I got some more positive feedback from premium hoarder shoe buyers.
Specificially this one:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/266329021840
I had a gift receipt from a gucci store for this pair, but when I looked at online guides for fakes and compared photos this one was questionable. I didn’t have the shoes anymore so I was just going off memory and my listing photos. This was the weekend where I was freaking out thinking I had bought a ton of fake shoes. I’ve calmed down a bit since then and I think the amount of fakes is just a few pair.
I’ve made about half my investment back so far on only 33 sales – 15 clothing & 17 shoes.
I’m averaging $60 per item on clothing and $150 on shoes – though I’ve mainly only listed used lower dollar shoes. If these numbers continue trending I’ll end up around $50k in sales once everything sells.
Scavenging wise, it was a dead weekend. Yard sales were sparse and disappointing. even the big annual high school sale that I usually load up at was crappy. I did score a wireless pet fence system for $10 at goodwill that sells for $150. I’ve sold them before and it is always an insta-sale. The poor sourcing is ok though – I needed a break from sourcing so I can work on death pile listing this week. I already have my van loaded with plenty of death pile items as well as some more premium hoarder clothes and shoes.
I have my inventory building organized and made space for 14 bins of new items this weekend. I have 3 weeks to list 267 items to complete my 1000 listing summer goal. Let’s goooo!
