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Items in Store 1898
Items Sold 28
Total Sales $840.00
COGS $87.00
Total Profit $753.00
Average profit $26.89
Average sales price $30.00
New Listings 5
Items scavenged 35
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 47Nearly identical numbers to last week. Looking at year over year for May and June, I’ve made $1000 more this year. That is phenomenal for the dead part of the year!
Last week was absurdly busy for me outside ebay. I had consultants in from the UK all week at my day job. I learned alot regarding the processes I wanted to improve, and I learned alot of great new UK slang – most not repeatable among pleasant company. Lol!
The only repeatable one is when I told them my email address, which has a period in it. They have no idea what a period is. I thought they were messing with me, but in England a period is called a “full stop” or “dot”.
Lots of long days and I was mentally wiped once it got to the weekend, so very little listing.
I did (finally) finish proof reading my wife’s novel this weekend, which I’m sure she appreciates much more than doing some listing. It only took me about a year. We also watched alot of Stranger Things 4 this past week. Good lord the episodes are TOO LONG this season!!! We keep sitting down expecting a riveting 40 minute experience, then the last half of every episode has been spent thinking “how much longer is this gonna go on?!?” We finished ep 6 last night and I checked the episode lengths of 7-9. Holy moly – Episode 9 is 2.5 HOURS!!! I think they forgot how TV shows are supposed to work.
Nothing much of note from yard sales. I did come across one that had a bunch of nice clothes my size for $1 per bag.
I did have one frustrating experience. I went to a yard sale at the end of the day – after 1pm. The tables were still mostly still full of stuff. They had a car radio that said Sony Marine. I hadn’t seen one of these before. I enquired about it and started to get a long winded story and the lady did a google search and said the dreaded words “These go for like $175.” Oh boy…
So I asked “what do you want for it”. “Uhh, you’ll have to ask my husband”…who wasn’t there. He had just pulled up across the street so I finished looking around as he slowly made his way to the house. I asked him, “What do you want for the radio?” Again got a long winded story that alluded to the fact it might be broken but “not to worry, because there was a wiring issue in the motorcycle they pulled it from so it wasn’t a radio issue”.
“Yeah ok…so what do you want for it?”
“Ohh… I don’t know. Make me an offer?”
“$10.”
“Ehhhh….oooohhhh… (In the background the wife saying again that they could do FBMP and that they go for $175) How about $50?”
I think I broke the sound barrier as I exited the yard sale.
Why put stuff out on tables for a yard sale, sit there all freaking day, then have absolutely no idea what you want for things? I don’t want a long winded story. I just want sellers to be prepared with a price. If it is fair I pay. If there is negotiating room, I make an offer. Why is this so hard for some people?
Now as for that radio – I researched it after the fact. No it does NOT go for $175. A Modern Sony Marine radio with bluetooth and XM absolutely goes for $200-300. This one was old without those features and doesn’t even sell for $50 with free shipping. I did not research it at the sale but my gut said $10 was being generous on my part for an untested unit that was pulled due to issues. I was correct.
I was hoping that there was some actual photography equipment – bodies and lenses. The lady said that they hadn’t found anything.
Oh I wanted to share two items that sold that were great scavenger reaffirming sales.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265202635124
POGS – the gift that keeps giving. I was already WAY into the profit on a big purchase of pogs, but this is the first of these star trek pogs sets to sell. I priced high and finally sold a set on offer for $25. I have 19 more of them and they’ll sell eventually.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265693717432
Vintage ugly sheets new in package – Who knew they would be gold? Trick question – THIS GUY knew! I’ve sold 6 of these vintage sheets for $170 so far. I tell ya, vintage Laura Ashley has been good to me. Prior to this I bought vintage wallpaper and made $175 on that.
And scavenging this week I went big and spent $150 on a photography equipment lot. Initially I was looking at one box that had some flash equipment right by the cash register. I saw the $150 price tag and audibly laughed and started to walk away. Then the cashier lady said the box behind it was included too. It was a Novatron studio flash set. I’ve sold that before and knew it was money…but still not at $150. So looked closer at the flash equipment, added ballpark values up for everything and came to about $300-350. I even tested the novatron set – mint and fully working. Still, I was on the fence. As I started to step away the lady said “Oh yeah, the laundry basket is included too.” Inside the laundry basket was a new in package $100 light filter and a Vintage Linhof West Germany Tripod, as well as a bunch of filter odds/ends. The Linhof tripod is big bucks too. So yeah, at that point I handed over my credit card for the $150. LoL!
Well to be honest, This really was a poor use of my time. Poor sell thru rates and low sales prices. It will take years to sell everything.
I wanted to challenge myself and I was hoping there were some gems in there. Also, it was kinda fun. Will I take another huge lot of cd’s? Nope.for removing price stickers, on hard goods ad most boxed items a heat gun is awesome. Heat up the sticker until the thermal surface changes color and then peel right off with no residue.
Vhs cardboard sleeves will deform a bit and dvd/game cases the plastic insert cover will distort and/or melt.
Items in Store 1921
Items Sold 28
Total Sales $835.00
COGS $88.00
Total Profit $747.00
Average profit $26.68
Average sales price $29.82
New Listings 57
Items scavenged 38
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 49A much better week and an excellent week compared to previous Junes. I spent alot of time this week peeling non-removable price stickers off of anime DVD’s. Due to the thin plastic cover, I can’t use my heat gun. Ugh…is that really necessary to put a HUGE sticker like that on a dvd that is gonna be generically priced??? Special note – packing tape works amazingly at removing residual adhesive from DVD cases. Quicker and easier than goo-gone or alcohol.
At yard sales this weekend I bought a huge Box of CD’s. Normally I don’t buy this kind of stuff but…
1: This was my era – 90’s pop/rock/rap. The good stuff.
2: They were CHEAP.
about 120 CD’s and I paid $7. Now the problem with CD’s is that most are not worth much. So how do I tackle this pile to maximize value and minimize my time? I started by creating a generic template that had all of my basic info and my generic $3.99 price. I am charging for shipping, which will greatly slow my STR BUT people do still buy games/cd’s and pay for shipping.
I started by doing a high level scan for valuable or rare cd’s. I scanned all the bar codes – if it is a common cd with alot of listings it went in my generic $3.99 pile. If it could be priced higher than that for any reason I put it in my research pile. Then I had about 25 BMG subscription CD’s that irritatingly did not have barcodes. I set those aside to research and list individually. It took about 30 minutes to sort out all the generic junk.
Next I researched and listed all the BMG cd’s. I timed myself and I average 1 minute per cd. Most were generic but there were a few I priced at $10- 20. Same for the higher priced CD’s – about a minute a listing. I still need to do the generic barcode cd’s, but with the template it is crazy fast – less than 20 seconds per cd. I just have to scan the barcode and the listing auto fills the title & item specifics and all my other stuff is already filled out.
Photography is very fast – about 10 seconds per cd. The uploading again is the bottleneck. I wish there was a bulk upload photography tool. The only benefit is that I plan for my uploading to be done in my idle time (watching TV, in line at restaurant, bedtime wind down instead of games, etc)
So far I’ve listed 53 CD’s for a total of $334 and an average list price of $6.30. I charge for shipping and my discount will pretty much cover all my fees. I’m using the buy more save more percentage discount at 5%,10%,15%.
So once I am finished I’ll have 4 hours invested and I’ll make around $530. Not a bad investment of my time at all – will just take time to sell the pipeline. I’m hoping the added bonus of extra sales movement on my store will positively affect my search rank.
Phew this place died as expected during a holiday week.
Figured I’d add this. One of the local Goodwill chains just took the next step to the darkside – individually pricing ALL clothes. They have been pulling the “specialty” brands and pricing them in a special section for several years. Now they are putting a physical price tag on every single item and are authorized to price up whenever on whatever.
That’s ok – I’ll just keep getting pickier and spending less at their stores. Still plenty of meat on the bone, I just don’t buy the cheap junk anymore.
If the trip is business related, you can count it. You are also allowed to do non-business related activity on a business trip.
So let’s say you have to run packages to the post office, but on the way back you stop by the store to pick up some supplies to cook dinner. That’s still a business trip.
The art of business deductions is finding ways to deduct your normal everyday life. Reselling makes this really easy because pretty much any trip can turn into a business trip. Don’t go hog wild though and don’t lie. If you’re ever audited you’ll still need to defend your data. I used everlance app to log my miles. If they audit my miles I can clearly show on the GPS trip map for every trip where I went and why it was business.
One of my bigger mileage deductions each year is a few trips to a big city a few hours away. I use my business credit card hilton honors points to get my hotel for free (in the past when I actually paid for the hotel it was deductible too). I scavenge each day. Then the rest of the time is family time. That is 100% a valid business trip even though I still do alot of fun family things over the 2-3 days.
On the flipside, I never deduct a true vacation such as a beach vacation or trip to Orlando. Could I find a way to do this? Yes. Could I do the same thing I do with my weekend city trips and just source each day? Yes. Ethically though, the trip is not business related. I have no true business purpose for driving all the way to the beach or orlando.
If I decide to make a scavenging trip while there I’ll count the miles for that specific trip. If I had a legitimate reason to make a trip to Florida for business and decided to make a vacation out of it, I would deduct the mileage but would not deduct the hotel stay for the actual vacation.
I hope this helps you make decisions that work for you. If in doubt, talk to an accountant. Mark Tew is great and you should follow him:
I sold one of the rainbow brite dolls I listed a couple weeks ago.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/265685117758
The buyer was local to me in the same vicinity of the thrift I got it from. I actually got to talk to the person who donated them. The lady was cleaning out all of her 3 daughters toys from the 80’s. When I saw the address of the buyer I thought to myself “oh this person is gonna be PISSED when they show their mom the doll they bought on ebay and find out it is the same one. Lol!
Items in Store 1892
Items Sold 24
Total Sales $675.00
COGS $66.00
Total Profit $609.00
Average profit $25.38
Average sales price $28.13
New Listings 118
Items scavenged 46
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 49
Sourcing Allotment 26I was a listing machine last week. I had to get a bunch of stuff listed and out of my garage because one of my gifts to my wife for our anniversary was dedicating some space in the garage to set up an area for her to do her pottery again. I had to make things modular and portable to make it work. I’m making a folding wedge table, using a foldable stool, and I ordered folding legs for her wheel. I emptied out two shelves of storage to store her pottery and her supplies. The wash sink is still a portable situation running on garden hoses because I’m not sure how or where I want to permanently place it.
Regarding sales, it was still a slow week. 8 of my sold items were new listings so it would have been MUCH slower if I didn’t list so much.
Last week I talked about my year over year sales. Now that the month is done I can compare directly my year over year sales:
2019 May : 83 sold for $2263. Average items in store – 1123
2021 May: 83 sold for $2662. Average items in store – 1480
2022 May: 84 sold for $2554. Average items in store – 1798
Just for giggles since it was an absurd pandemic anomaly:
2020 May: 199 sold for $6450. Average items in store – 1512
I don’t count 2020 metrics when I consider year over year numbers, obviously!
So lessons learned – May sucks no matter how big my store is…unless there is a global pandemic lockdown. I’ll take poor sales over going through that again any year!
2019 monthly average: 91 items for $3399. Average store size 1177
2021 monthly average: 91 items for $3553. Average store size 1517*
2022 monthly average: 116 items for $4237. Average store size 1695
I’m seeing growth this year and my consistent listing will hopefully set me up for a great second half of the year. I’m outpacing my listing goals so far and I’m on track to meet the sales goals I set out for the year. I just gotta keep on swimming and trust the process. The summer slowdown is PART of the plan, no matter how much I don’t want it to be.
He sold his eBay inventory by the box on whatnot. It came out to about $7/ item.
Unless I am missing something, Wave does not integrate ebay transactions.
Items in Store 1798
Items Sold 17
Total Sales $533.00
COGS $50.00
Total Profit $483.00
Average profit $28.41
Average sales price $31.35
New Listings 49
Items scavenged 5
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 46
Sourcing Allotment 17Sales stunk this week. In sales it is easy to have short term memory and automatically think the sky is falling. So what do I do in these doom/gloom times – look at data!!
The last 3 weeks of May apparently always suck. I keep thinking due to the growth of my store that my numbers should just keep going up.
This month so far I’ve sold 60 items for $1879.
The same 3 weeks last year was 67 items for $2336.
That’s not the whole story though – those numbers were bolstered by a very good first week. The second two weeks were $500 weeks with only around 16 sales. Looking forward, the last week of May last year was an abysmal 16 items for $326. The first few weeks of June sucked too.
While I would expect somewhat better numbers considering I have close to 1800 items now compared to 1490 last year, there’s always a bit of variation.
So what do I do this week to help out? I think I’m going to list clothing. I’ve been listing alot of toys lately and they just aren’t selling. They’ll be ready to rock in the fall though. I also listed some golf clubs that will hopefully sell quickly.
Just keep listing and when in doubt, look at your historical trends – you may be doing better than you thought.
