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Items in Store 1222
Items Sold 20
Total Sales $725.00
COGS $71.00
Total Profit $654.00
Average profit $32.70
Average sales price $36.25
New Listings 3Had a great week with extended handling time…until the weekend. Saturday was 2 small sales and none on Sunday. I was so hoping to crack $1k this week.
I averaged over $1k per week in August. In Sept and October I’m average $655 in sales. Very disappointing to say the least.
I’m way off target for my fall sales goal. I was listing 50 items a week in September and it had no positive impact on my sales (well, I supposed it would have been significantly worse without those items.)
In other news, no new listings this week. I was hoping to get a bunch done this weekend after being out of town most of the week, but a virus knocked me out of commission all weekend.
And for a weight loss update – I am officially down more than 80lb since the beginning of June! I can wear XL shirts and 38 waist pants comfortably. I track and forecast my weight loss and I’m on track to hit 100 lbs loss by thanksgiving. Woot! Woot!
Yeah I got lucky on the first few it seems. On most run of the mill items the price the same as ebay. Never higher though. Still, I get 100 insurance so it is technically better even when the price is the same.
I’ll be checking both for a while to get a good feel for when pirateship should be my go-to. I could have swore pirateship did FedEx too, but I never see any fedex quotes there.
I’ve done some experiments and pirateship will mainly save me money on heavier shoes.
10/11/2019 at 9:19 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #68905Items in Store 1239
Items Sold 24
Total Sales $690.00
COGS $65.00
Total Profit $625.00
Average profit $26.04
Average sales price $28.75
New Listings 4Just got back in town from a day job business trip this week. I scheduled some training in a city we normally go to for weekend getaways and ebay sourcing trips, so it was a multi-faceted trip. We also homeschool, so my wife and children came along (as well as grandma to watch kids for date night). It is so much fun to be able to bring my family on work trips.
Had a great time. Took my wife to an authentic hot pot restaurant and milk tea shop for the first time (my wife is obsessed with asian tv shows on Netflix).
I did some sourcing too – the highlight was a brooks brothers fur lined trench coat.
Still sold plenty of stuff with extended handling time. Now I’m looking forward to getting back to listing
10/11/2019 at 9:05 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #689042000 gross on sub 500 item store – You’re doing great!
Keep on keepin on!
10/11/2019 at 9:03 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #68903Leather has many legitimate uses and is usually actually used for those purposes.
Furs can be very useful as well, but it is more regularly associated with the “status symbol” fur coats that harvest animals having no business being used as furs.
I venture a guess as to this is why you are conflicted.
Me personally, I always find it quite ironic when I sell a pair of VEGAN shoes on ebay. The person buying them is so proud of their activism of not wearing leather that they are blinded to the environmental damage the production of all the plastics and synthetics used in the shoes does to the environment said animal lives in.
10/11/2019 at 8:41 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #68898Once she has a couple racks inventoried, start training her to ship items that have the custom SKU only. Then she don’t need to waste time learning how you all store things. Her efficiency will be very high as “thinking” is taken out of the equation.
I tell you, your plan is going to cost you time (and money) in the long run. She’ll be slow. She’ll forget bits n pieces of how the system works. She’ll need to ask you questions constantly. There will be things she can’t find.
10/11/2019 at 8:35 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #68897It seems like you are putting the cart before the horse. You already have the shipping resource, so why not just pay her to build your inventory system before training her to ship. If all your stuff is already on shelves or in tubs just create a numbers system to label tubs/shelves and have her start adding custom SKU’s to all the items.
I built my inventory system one tote at a time over time. You can have concurrent systems.
10/02/2019 at 4:09 pm in reply to: Interesting Promoted Listing "Trending Rate" Inconsistency #68524This is…disturbing.
I checked my own store and I was not able to reproduce this issue. My identical or similar listings all seemed to have the same trending rate.You are in Texas so this is likely a historical building in your state. It looks like a courthouse so I searched image results based on that.
I did find one that is very, very similar: Tom Green County Courthouse.So you might stay on this track. I really think this is a courthouse somewhere.
A reverse image search came up bumpkus.
Here’s another resource you could peruse: http://courthousehistory.com/gallery/states/texasIn the end, even if you do find out what building it is it is still only worth $10-20. Don’t spend too much time on it!
What is up with ebay and them wanting to automatically change things for sellers lately? That is messed up!
The 9 year old is VERY money savvy. Like, scary savvy. He outsmarted his older sister and manipulated an auction with play money when he was 4 years old so he could win all the auctions by bidding her up on one item until her money was low and he had enough to win all the rest. She bawled and cried and he laughed maniacally.
A couple weeks ago I didn’t have dollar bills so I asked to borrow one of his so the little ones could ride the merry-go-round at the mall. He loaned me a dollar, but set up interest terms. He enforced them to the T. When I finally paid up a couple days later he said “ok, everything seems to be in order here”. Where did he get that?!?
My wife and I joke that he’s going to grow up to be the prototypical sleazy bank owner bad guy like in movies. Well at least he’ll be successful!
I might need to start calling him Alex P. Keaton.
Items in Store 1259
Items Sold 15
Total Sales $614.00
COGS $38.00
Total Profit $576.00
Average profit $38.40
Average sales price $40.93
New Listings 55September is looking to be very soft for me, which is disappointing. This week was scary dead until yesterday – I had $402 in sales on Sunday. $235 of that was a single item.
The $235 item was a musical instrument called an Omnichord. I picked it up 2 weeks ago at a yard sale for $3. Sold it to a buyer in Sweden.
My kids are really becoming interested in ebay work so they can make money. My 12 year old is doing excellent with photos. Now my 9 year old sees her making cold hard cash so he wants in too! He is learning how to clean shoes.
With all this new help I want to push this fall to hit 2000 active listings. Once we hit our groove we should be able to put out 100 listings a week.
I see this as a positive. They do need a new CEO and they do need to sell off those assets. Use that capital to invest in new growth acquisitions and to speed up the improvement of their main site.
So I checked this out compared to Fed Ex for me for an item shipping from WV to Los Angeles CA.
For an 18x12x6 or 12x12x12 box (deemed XL by UPS) the break point is 17 lb. Anything 16 lb or less in that box would still be cheaper via Fed Ex.The price difference would have to be significant for me to go through the effort of creating a label on UPS and then logging the info on ebay. I don’t ship many 50lb things that can fit in a 12x12x12 box, but if I ever do this will definitely be worth checking out.
So now let’s check my more common items for west coast shipping – large boxes. Typically for me this would be a 12x12x6 box at a weight of 5-10lb. The break point on this rate is 13 lb. 12 and under is a better deal with FedEx.
Oh and one last note, that box you used in the original post was oversize for what you can ship in the simple rate program. Odds are high they are going to hit your buyer up for a COD charge.
In my experience they absolutely check those dimensions like a hawk. One of the reasons I avoid UPS like the plague. They lied about the dimensions on one of my packages and tried to charge my customer. I called their bullcrap and won. -
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