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How has turnover been for you? I know you were paying pretty good wages. I’m curious if that has resulted in better job satisfaction and retention for employees.
I’d venture this is a much bigger deal for you since you probably do alot of business with Germany. For most of us Americans, writing off Germany is no big deal. I have no intentions of jumping through their hoops.
Items in Store 2001
Items Sold 32
Total Sales $1,171.00
COGS $134.00
Total Profit $1,037.00
Average profit $32.41
Average sales price $36.59
New Listings 92
Items scavenged 45
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 50Now this was a great week.
I’ve been eyeballing my wardrobe storage in my inventory shed this week. Coats/jackets have my worst STR and also have the worst value per sqft of storage rating in my inventory. I plan on being aggressive with my coat pricing this fall and eventually liquidate with $9.99 auctions at the end of the year. The space my coat/jacket inventory takes up would be better served to hold 32 more of my standard bins. How bad is it? My listed coats/jackets are about $50/sq ft inventory space. My average for bins is almost $400/sq ft!!
So…I explained all this to my wife. It was her idea to wait to liquidate until Christmas. So immediately after this conversation where I said I’m getting out of the coat game….I leave a yard sale with 7 coats!!! LOL! Why did I do this? Because this person had 7 Harley Davidson leather riding jackets for $5 each. These are a special exception because they have a great STR year round and sell for more than $100 each. I just sold a fabric harley davidson pea coat last week that was listed less than 1 week. I’ve sold similar jackets for $200+ before.
So now it is time for the mid-year round up.
First things first, I hit 2k listings! Yay!
Items listed so far 2022: 1294 ( 93.5% increase Year over year)
Items sold: 688 ( 13.5% increase Year over year)
Total Sales: $24611( 8.5% increase Year over year)
It seems my listing is helping and hopefully will compound in Q4. It will be a real stretch, but I’d love to beat my 2020 abnormally high sales due to my listing push.
I still have a goal to shut down listing and scavenging on Thanksgiving for the year. I’ve done well so far and I think I can push my listing rate to get to 2500 new listings by then. I’ll need to average 60 listings/week from here on out because I also want to take a 2 week vacation in the fall. 20 work weeks left in the year. Let’s do this!!!
Yes, yard sales are the way to go now. The thrift store experience is VASTLY different than it was a few years ago. The really fun stuff rarely hits the storeroom floor now and if it does, it is priced high.
I’ve really enjoyed the eclectic selection of stuff I’ve been finding at yard sales this summer. I’m still at capacity even with my prolific listing, so I figure once yard sale season is over I’ll shut down sourcing for a while to get caught up.
I don’t fault auctions or thrift stores for maximizing their income. That’s their job. It’s my job as a scavenger to adapt. If you can’t adapt then might as well exit the game.
It basically had a note like this:
“buyer has already selected a payment method and payment will automatically be made if accepted. “
I don’t remember the exact verbiage and didn’t think to take a screen shot.
FYI, I had two offers today that showed on the offer that the buyer had already selected a payment method and would automatically be paid if accepted.
I accepted both offers and they showed up as paid about 5 minutes later.
NICE!!!!
The last time I did a big lot of records I played every single record that I listed. This time I only had to play a couple, and then the ones that were in more questionable condition or had a flaw I would play those sections.
Once you’ve seen enough of these records from the same person that are all in pretty much the same very good to excellent condition, you know what they’re gonna sound like.
And regarding Godaddy bookkeeping, I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do. I have no clue why ebay didn’t swoop in and buy the service. It was a no-brainer! Instant $10-15 per month fee for sellers they could collect. With the new laws tightening down on tax evasion, ebay should ABSOLUTELY have a fully integrated book keeping service.
I signed up for Waze, but it kinda sucks. None of the other softwares really fit what I want. My amex card did have an app called Amex business, but they removed that product/service. Lame! in 2020 and a large part of 2021 I used that app to store my receipts and now all that is gone!
I’m thinking I’ll just use ebay’s reporting for all my sales and fees. Then I’ll just manually fill out a spreadsheet from my credit card transaction history. The only pain is developing the discipline to do my book keeping either weekly or monthly to keep things straight. I really should just go ahead and do it weekly. The other thing I’m going to have to do is stop using my business card for non-business purposes. I really like getting all the hotel points, but I’m gonna have to settle for getting amazon points on my non-business card.
Items in Store 1941
Items Sold 20
Total Sales $579.00
COGS $51.00
Total Profit $528.00
Average profit $26.40
Average sales price $28.95
New Listings 63
Items scavenged 104
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 48I don’t know why I’ve never really noticed the summer slowdown before, but it is really jumping out at me this year. Maybe it’s because I’m listing so much more this year? I built up this flawed belief that I would have $1k+ weeks every week of the year. WRONG!
Still, looking at the past months data I’m up 40% year over year on items sold and total sales.
This week I stumbled on a rare find – GOOD records at a goodwill! I ended up with 65 records. I didn’t bother researching anything at the store because they were just $1 each (I paid 85 cents because I used a frequent shopper card for 15% off). At that price it is easier to just get em all then research/price/list at the same time. Sure some will just sell for $3, but if I have to put some effort into finding out which are worth money I might as well get paid that $3 each time I look one up. I got all the 70’s & 80’s rock albums. I put them to the front of the listing line and listed them all this week. The total list price was $980. Yesterday I sold 3 of the records for $79 so I’m already into the profit with a ton more to sell.
The main reason I didn’t really research at the store is because unless you REALLY know your stuff, it can be hard to tell what is valuable when it comes to media. Take this album for instance:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265743364464
I’ve never heard of them. This could have easily been an undesirable $4 record – I had no clue. It sold within hours for $40.
Now on the flip side:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265743936679
Whoah, classic Billy Joel vinyl! Must be some big money there! Nope. I lotted them up to encourage them to sell faster.
I don’t know why, but I’ve really become interested in scavenging media lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve come across some nice scores, or maybe it’s because clothing/shoe/toy/electronics scavenging has died down for me due to rising costs and lower quality stock at thrifts. I’m super into sealed new stuff, even if it is pretty much worthless….for now. It seems like grading media is the next wave of collecting idiocy and hopefully I can make some money. Still waiting for this one to sell:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265493082815
I missed the high price wave from August/sept 21 since I was in the hospital. Here’s to hoping the price wave comes again – I’ll be ready!
I also picked up something on my scavenger “Not really a grail but I want to find one” list – a betamax player. Unfortunately I sold my only Betamax tape a while back (a good thing at that price!):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265493055410
So now I need a betamax tape to test it out. Anyone have a dirt cheap betamax tape listed that I can buy?
It’s still coming and I bet it is coming soon. On the mobile app they’ve made alot of changes to the offer screen. It is now VERY busy and wordy! Specifically it details how payment will be received and when I can expect it. All the offers so far with this new screen have detailed that I will get paid within 4 days. I’m so excited to finally see an offer where it says I’ll get paid immediately.
I sold a pair of shoes for less than half price last week. I had them priced at 90. Buyer sent me an offer of $40 and included a message that explained that Danner had put the brand new version of the same shoe on blow out clearance at $50.
I checked their website and it was true. I happily accepted their offer.
on the flipside, this evening I got an offer on a rare cassette well below half price that I declined. Then a message from the bidder saying “what‘s the least you’ll take.”
I replied by saying “an offer less than half price does not get you in the ballpark to engage in negotiation. Asking “what’s the least you’ll take”will never result in the “least” offer. Keep these facts in mind for your next negotiation.I only add new items to promoted listings after they’ve been listed a while. Gotta give google search a chance to catch up. About once a quarter I add all my remaining new listings to promoted listings.
Since you have the message from the buyer that they were confused and they also closed the case on their own, you could try facebook ebay for business.
It seems Ebay for business kind of sucks now though, so may not work.
Does that ever result in a sale? In my experience the people that say that lame line rarely turn into a buyer no matter what offer I give. Now I usually respond either with my asking price or an offer 10% or less off of my asking price.
I asume it is a low effort blanket coverage style buying method which is why the response rate is low even if you send a reasonable offer.
