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I’ve tried to get the eBay shipping to be recognized but because it is filtered through PayPal it isn’t recognized. Pirateship works correctly so I use pirateship for everything that is equal to or better price than eBay.
so 1st class, ups, and priority cubic all go through pirateship.
you have to keep your PayPal empty and pay via PayPal on eBay to use credit card.
If you download the Hilton honors app, you can see how much hotels are via points. Just look up the typical hotels you would stay at in places you would go and pick “search with points”.
The typical hotel costs are:
embassy suites: 30-45k points for one night.
hampton inn: 25-30k/ night.
both of those are $150 a night (plus tax fees) hotels.
I tend to stay in these brands. You can find 20k rooms regularly but I’ve never stayed in them – I want the bigger rooms and better amenities.
Items in Store 2145
Items Sold 12
Total Sales $380.00
COGS $34.00
Total Profit $346.00
Average profit $28.83
Average sales price $31.67
New Listings 6
Items scavenged 1
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 46
Sourcing Allotment 2I’ve been on vacation for the last week and a half. I DEFINITELY had a better labor day than J&R. That sucks! Glad to hear you were able to get it all fixed and I hope the financial hit wasn’t too bad.
Having time away turned on definitely impacted my sales the last two weeks. Once I turned it on 9/1 my store died. Fortunately, before I left I listed a bunch of copier Toner cartridges and almost all of them sold quickly. Bought them for $10 each and sold for $100+ each. Twas a very nice boost prior to going on vacation so the first week of September was still close to an $800 week.
Speaking of vacation, my entire stay was provided free of charge via my business credit card. Several years ago I got a hilton honors Amex because they have 9x points for shipping purchases. I’ve been racking up quite a bit of points over the years. I haven’t paid for a hotel since I got the card. I typically use the points for weekend getaways to Columbus.
I was able to cleverly use my points and award nights at this embassy suites oceanfront.
This is where we stayed using all points and reward nights for 8 nights: https://www.kingstonresorts.com/coming-soon/
Needless to say my $ per point value on this trip was through the roof! They opened all the new pools the week before we arrived.
While there they asked me to do a timeshare presentation. I normally say no to these, but they offered me 100k hilton honors points. That’s worth about $600, so sure I’m game to take 2 hours for that!
I have alot of non-ebay work to do this week. Now that my health is improved and the weather is going to get milder, I have alot of home improvement projects I want to finish.
Have a great week everyone!
Bringing in the high value collectibles to eBay is MEGA important and brilliant for all of us. Like it or not, eBay has the (incorrect and out dated) reputation for being a scammy place selling face shaped potatoes.
bringing in these high value markets brings trust to the marketplace overall. eBay becomes THE place for high value items. eBay also becomes a trusted market for All transactions.
amazon is in decline and frankly, sucks with poor shipping habits and fake products.
I’m so glad eBay abandoned the “be like amazon” plan.
Items in Store 2147
Items Sold 30
Total Sales $948.00
COGS $148.00
Total Profit $800.00
Average profit $26.67
Average sales price $31.60
New Listings 20
Items scavenged 0
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 48
Sourcing Allotment 15Busy week this week outside of ebay. I was able to create a bunch of draft listings but only got 20 photographed and listed. I’m really surprised I didn’t crack $1000 this week as I had 3 $100+ sales. 12 clothing items sold this week for $362. One of them was a Baseball jersey for $140. Must be some back to school shopping going on as that is alot of clothing in one week for me.
Ya gotta throw 2020 out of your analytics. You can’t forecast anything from that anomaly. My sales increased an astonishing 50% in 2020!
You have some cool stuff but it is all very long tail. And if you don’t list much then many of your listings are the stuff that is VERY long tail.
in my experience no amount of sales or relisting makes the very long tail stuff sell faster. I’ve done 50% off sales on my really old listings many times and it has never sold a single item. Like J&R, you just have to have ALOT of it available for sale to achieve consistent sales. 250 is a very small store for long tail inentory.
I don’t know anything about challenge coins so couldn’t tell you why yours aren’t selling.
It seems the really valuable ones are of very special events or issued by certain individuals in quite limited amounts.it looks like challenge coin lots have a very high 90 day sell through rate (almost 100%) compared to individual coins. Individual coins looks like a very flooded market.
I’d recommend you lot them up in sets to sell them if the ones you have are only worth $10-20.my recommendation for you would be to prioritize listing items with a good 90 day sell through rate. Lot things if you have to in order to improve your STR.
Also recommend selling things that people need right now. Clothes, useful electronics or tools, or replacement parts. Price competitively to improve sell through rate.
it’s been a long time since my store was only 250 items, but back then a $300 week would have been great and I would dream of a $1000 week.
10-12 clothing items per sq foot and I sell them for $25-35 on average. $25 is my typical price but the heavy hitters bring my average sales price to $35.
I have dedicated sealed wardrobes for coats. They’re just too long tail, too seasonal, and take up too much space for the income they bring. I assessed all my inventory back in march and assigned a value per sq ft rating to every type of item as well as a storage efficiency value.
(forgive the fact that the forum butchered my spacing formatting.)
Coats have a high ASP, but storage efficiency was terrible at 38% and my profit/sq ft in even the best case scenario was less than $90 and only around $50/sq ft in reality.
Combine that with the fact I don’t sell coats for 7 months out of the year and it’s not great all around.
While coats have an abysmal $50/sq ft rating, shoes are $250/sq ft, clothing is $325/sq ft, and small misc is over $400/sq ft.
In the space I store my coats I could put over $20,000 worth of inventory in small miscellaneous items, games/media, and clothing or shoes. My average storage efficiency on those items is 51%. If I improve that efficiency with more efficient shelving and bins or with file cabinets, I could fit $30000+ worth of inventory in that space.
Now don’t get me wrong – I’ll still keep my eye out for the big bucks coats. They’ll just go in storage with my normal clothes (possibly in vaccum sealed bags) at that point and be priced to sell.
Have you ever had issues with counterfeit cards? I remember buying a Bo Jackson card as a kid at a card show in a plastic holder. I took it out and it was fake – not even close to being a good fake either.
My brother in law has gotten into collecting 1950’s topps and spends a TON of money on them. Prior to buying on ebay he’s bought cards at a local show and several were clearly fake even to my untrained eye. He’s had good luck on ebay buying graded cards it seems.
The fact that this is a hot category and ripe for counterfeiting keeps me from getting into it. I don’t have the time (or desire) to develop the knowledge base you have on cards.
I do see that ebay has an authentication process that protects buyers and sellers:
https://pages.ebay.com/authenticity-guarantee-tradingcards/
How has your experience been with that program?
Depends on where you get your doom/gloom information from.
I find that typically the doom & gloom comes from those unwilling to embrace change and/or unwilling to accept personal accountability. I grew up in a household full of this type of person and distanced myself from that mindset as FAR as possible early on (Thanks for the indriect life lessons, family!)
I mean even for an example we talked about on here – Daily Refinement. Dude got permabanned from ebay and still had nothing but nice things to say about the platform. He could have been a doom/gloomer but he accepted his personal responsibility and still encourages people to sell on ebay because it is a great place to do business.
Now back to your example – DON”T spare us the details!!! What were your sales last summer? How much has your store grown or shrank? Is your inventory diversified? Are you actively listing? How old are your listings?
Share your store if you don’t mind. I’ll take a look at it and give contructive feedback.
You just gotta do what works for you. I carve out time to ship during weekdays and that’s about it. I don’t list every day because I don’t have that kind of free time every day. My listing has to be done on the weekends. I also would prefer to just get things listed rather than pace them out through the week. I’d rather they be available to sell all week rather than waiting a week to trick some algorithm that may (or may not) care.
If 20 a day listing and shipping is your “reseller nirvana” then that’s your sustainable model. If you need to dial it back, do that. Improve your efficiency in listing and shipping frees up more time. If you need to develop better sourcing routes to “feed the beast” then work on that. Most people that get to the point of listing 20+ items a day end up with suppliers that bring them inventory. 240 quality items is ALOT of items!
Side note, if you are big into trains then you’ll love this:
I’ve done some arbitrage at TJ Maxx before. They can have some gems in the clearance section. The best item I ever got there was a pair of Ralph Lauren streetwear graffiti jeans I paid $10 and sold for $120.
I’ve had some luck with shoes at TJ Maxx and Marshalls too.
Also this morning I ended and relisted all of my coats. I have 47 coats listed and most of them were greater than 18 months old. Ending and relisting has some great tools now. It was really easy to bulk sell similar and I could edit titles and prices right on the bulk screen. MAJOR time saver! It took 10 minutes to edit all titles and prices. I’ll have to do that with more old items. Here’s to hoping that leads to some sales now that we are heading into coat selling season.
I still have about 75 coats I need to list over the next month. Price to sell and then blow them all out on auction in January. I want to get out of the coat business for the most part – too long tail and too much space taken up. I can put in 32 more bins in the space I dedicate to coats.
