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So I listened to Episode 60 this morning. Technsports made a bold statement that “pricing high and waiting for offers is dead”. His reasoning and discussion was pretty detailed. Basically, due to left hand navigation and the rise of item specifics your price is likely to get you omitted from search results due to filters.
There is also a drive towards feed based interfaces on ebay to be more like poshmark and depop.
Now keep in mind, they are heavily tilted towards clothing and maybe all this is not as relevant to specialized hard goods and other items that are still highly likely to be search based sales with few search results.
Overall an eye opening discussion that definitely makes me think about my clothing strategy as I gear up to attack my clothing backlog.
Back when I did it I shipped ammo and gun parts. I had to use ups and label the box with a special code.
actual guns have to go through an ffl.
I made a good amount of coin reselling ammo on gunbroker back during the Obama years. That started with me just being in the right place/right time at Walmart on a day they got some .223 ammo cans in stock. I bought my alotted 3 and had my wife buy 3 as well.
Before it was all said & done I ended up with a nice cache of ammo and guns that were basically free.
I followed their podcast and will give it a shot. I do like listening to Chris on Youtube, but the clickbait nature of his titles…ewww. I get why he does it, but it is a disservice to his high quality content.
Sometimes…you do have to just grind. I can fiddle fart around my office and accomplish very little, or I can grab a random tub of unlisted stuff, dial myself in, and just create listings. Specializing like they do makes it easier to stay in the dialed in mindset. Not everyone can pivot and maintain an efficient pace, but if you can more power to you. Me personally, I do like to do like items when I list to make it faster. I will do clothes in a batch, shoes in a batch. For random items such as collectibles, toys, games, and small electronics – I can do all those in a batch process quite efficiently as well. Now I don’t mix my main batching processes though. I guess you could say I batch by the tools I need to measure/fix/clean. I’ve also farmed out my shoe cleaning/ photography to my kids so I can concentrate purely on creating listings.
I also understand why they say scaling with an everything store is not recommended. The space requirements become very cumbersome once you get up in the thousands. I have to be pretty picky with my larger items. I try to stick with $100+ and 6 month of less turnaround sales if I’m going to commit to large items.
Now regarding clothing items, they are SUPER efficient with their space. Their boxes match their shelving perfectly. Mine…do not. I occasionally run a report on my inventory to check what my profit per Sq ft of storage is. I ran it again today since I did a pretty good inventory consolidation about 2 weeks ago. Some bins are still not close to full…but good enough.
What I found is that my bins vs the actual shelf space available per bin means my storage efficiency is only around 50-70%. Just going by bin size, it is 50% because the bins are tapered, and not as deep or tall as the shelf space. Some bins I fill over the top, such as with shoes. With those bins my efficiency is closer to 70%. My coats are stored in wardrobes with a bunch of space wasted in the bottom so my storage efficiency is only 38%. My large Misc items are not stored in bins and are about 40% storage efficient.
Here is how my Cash per Sq ft of USED storage space breaks down:
Item Type Average $/sq ft tub Used Space
Craft RA $2,397.20
Manga Books $693.37
Video Games $622.99
Clothing $377.13
Small Misc $364.53
Hats $297.46
Shoes $270.51
Large Misc $151.31
Coats $83.45Shoes and clothing averages were dragged down by some bins being only partially full.
So let’s resort the data using only the MAX values (Fullest and most valuable bins) and take efficiency into consideration by using the ACTUAL space available to calculate my price per sqft of actual space:Item Type Max $/sq ft tub Used Space Max $/SQFT Actual space
Craft RA $2,397.20 $1,164.61
Small Misc $838.38 $407.30
Manga Books $693.37 $336.85
Clothing $658.59 $319.95
Video Games $622.99 $302.66
Large Misc $514.89 $250.14
Shoes $463.94 $225.39
Hats $297.46 $144.51
Coats $87.59 $54.75The craft retail Arbitrage stuff is a single bin of small items. Takes up little space and is multi quantity items. You could definitely build a pipeline business out of this if you can find enough stuff. I can’t find enough to focus here.
Same with Manga books. That’s a single bin from a lucky yard sale score. Very long tail at the prices I’ve listed at. You could build a business out of it though by buying low selling high.
My big 5 categories by volume and ease of sourcing are: Shoes, Video Games, Small Miscellaneous, Clothing, and large miscellaneous. I do have alot of Large miscellaneous, but as you will see I get crushed on storage efficiency. I have ALOT of space dedicated to those items.
Item Type Max $/SQFT Actual space Average $/sq ft tub Used Space
Small Misc $407.30 $364.53
Clothing $319.95 $377.13
Video Games $302.66 $622.99
Large Misc $250.14 $151.31
Shoes $225.39 $270.51So based off of my data, I really should focus on small miscellaneous toys, electronics, & collectibles. Follow that up with clothing and video games. These are the most storage efficient items which means I can fit alot of value of inventory in a smaller space.
Small miscellaneous can be very efficient as you can fit smaller items in the cracks/crevices created by the bigger items.
The daily refinement guys have proven a highly efficient clothing store is great, but you can do the same thing with small miscellaneous.
As for shoes…well… I just really like selling shoes! One thing I should look into is buying or making better storage boxes for them so I can fully use the space to increase my $/sqft average. I don’t want to exit that category. I am much more picky now with what I buy so I may naturally reduce the amount of shoes I sell.
And regarding coats. I REALLY need to get out of that field. They are super long tail & take up a TON of space. $54/ sq ft and VERY seasonal sales. Ugh… Time to have a blowout sale and convert that space to shelving for more clothing and misc items!
Whew, that really took a HARD turn into detailed tangent territory!
Items in Store 1733
Items Sold 20
Total Sales $841.00
COGS $85.00
Total Profit $756.00
Average profit $37.80
Average sales price $42.05
New Listings 43
Items scavenged 8
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 58
Sourcing Allotment 16Yeesh that was a SLOOOOWWW week! I even had a day with no sales on Tuesday – no sales, no offers, and weirdly barely any “send offers to buyers”. I checked my traffic and it appeared normal, but it sure didn’t feel normal.
On a positive note, how cool is it to have an $800+ week and be disappointed. Progress! 😀
Nothing else of importance in ebay world. Just plugging along shipping stuff, listing stuff, and organizing my ebay space. I did list a bunch of large items, so hopefully they sell soon. I love the satisfying feeling of clearing the space in storage from a large item.
I sell bats all the time with paint chips. The key being they are ONLY cosmetic chips of the paint.
I clean the bats with magic eraser and cleaner then use a polish compound to restore the luster.
My father-in-law every month orders a bunch of comic books from the big monthly catalog. He makes a special 45 minute drive to his favorite comic shop to pick them up. He gets home, brings the bag of comics to a huge closet he built for just this occasion, and throws it on a pile of the rest of the bags he’s been buying for over 30 years. He does not read a single one.
He’s “saving them for when he has time to read” (he’s retired and STILL doesn’t have time). and “They’ll be worth a fortune one day”.
This kind of sight unseen collecting is NOT for me…but I’ll happily sell crap to the vault for people who are into it. LoL!
You’re only option is to add a handling fee to the item.
Me personally, I never make the buyer pay insurance. That insurance is a CYA for me. The buyer is already protected. If the item arrives broken they file and INAD and they are good – you are SOL if you don’t have insurance though.
I’m curious, how do you handle the issue that you are taking on the liability of returns and INAD’s with your commision sales? Do you wait until after 30 days to pay out your commission?
Have you discussed that scenario with your neighbor and how it will be handled?
Just for giggles you should write the person who bought it with a message thanking them for their purchase, and remind them that if they are unhappy for any reason you are now offering free returns.
Items in Store 1710
Items Sold 39
Total Sales $1,310.00
COGS $112.00
Total Profit $1,198.00
Average profit $30.72
Average sales price $33.59
New Listings 148
Items scavenged 7
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 59
Sourcing Allotment 47Whew, what a productive week! I completely reorganized my ebay office, installed a new hot tub in the office (everyone should have a hot tub in their office for listing and team meetings – lol!), cleaned out my non-ebay storage shed (and listed/sold a bunch of stuff on FB Marketplace), and made 148 new listings (lots of multi-quantity, so new listings was over 500 actual items) . I’m blowing my 40 listings/week average out of the water.
The bulk of the new listings was that massive craft haul from last weekend. 84 of the listings were the variations I made for the markers. I’ve never done variations before, so it was time to learn. Normally I would have made separate listings for every single UPC but in this case it made more sense to list them all together in order to drive multiple item sales.
I had 4 sales for $65 from the craft haul pipeline this week. If I can get about $50 in sales a week for the rest of the year from that pipeline I consider it a great success.
Since I’ve been busting my butt so hard to list a bunch, I figure it’s a good time to review year over year results for February. I really started to see the results in February from the work since the beginning of the year.
February 2021:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â February 2022:
Items sold: 87Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Items sold: 133
Total Sales: $3528Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Total Sales: $4546
Average Price: $40.55Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Average Price: $34.18
New listings since 1/1/21: 270Â Â Â Â Â Â Â New listings since 1/1/22: 592
YoY Increases: 53% more items sold and 29% more total sales.
So CLEARLY that massive increase in listing volume resulted in the increase in sales. Let’s keep that ball rolling all year and see where I land. This is exciting! Not bad for a part time gig.
The app is broken right now. You have to use the browser website to add photos or edit drafts.
surprisingly, the browser site works faster than the app. I may just adopt this as my usual process.For me personally, if I would have done that earlier in my business it wouldn’t have helped me because I already pretty much deducted away my whole business. I was buying more than I was selling too as a strategic plan to build my backlog in case I lost my day job.
Now I am selling more than I am buying so my cogs would be LESS if I just deducted what I was buying instead of selling.
