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02/12/2019 at 9:51 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 398: How To Buy or Not To Buy on eBay #56837
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
The power of FU money helps another used/abused employee!The confidence you can find in yourself you didn’t know you had when running your own business is so rewarding. I look forward to seeing your store grow with you dedicating 100% of your time to it.
From my experience, I recently had my performance review. For the first time in my career, I felt like I was in control of that meeting.
Walmart merch deal is the final death of anything popular.
I remember way back when Monster Garage and West Coast Choppers was a big thing. You had to buy the merch from specialized vendors. Then one day I saw West Coast Choppers merch at Walmart. Jesse James was instantly not popular.
The most recent is bedazzled jeans. Miss Me and Buckle Jeans were great sellers for a long time. As soon as you could buy jeans at walmart with bedazzled back pockets that looked similar to Buckle Jeans the market collapsed. Now Buckle Jeans sell for $25 if I’m lucky.
So my advice to anyone is to keep an eye on walmart. As soon as you see popular trends show up there abandon the market ASAP.
02/11/2019 at 10:36 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 398: How To Buy or Not To Buy on eBay #56725I’m surprised people can still find items to do Retail Arbitrage with in any consistent volume. Even though I quit selling on amazon, I’m always on the lookout for arbitrage to sell on ebay. I do still check amazon to see how it would fare over there, but I always stick with ebay.
There just doesn’t seem to be as much arbitrage inventory out there as there used to be.
I’m also heavily restricted on amazon. Toys and other items they used to let me sell are all restricted now. Boooo!
02/11/2019 at 10:31 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 398: How To Buy or Not To Buy on eBay #56724Items in Store 1075
Items Sold 26
Total Sales $821.00
COGS $79.00
Total Profit $742.00
Average profit $28.54
Average sales price $31.58
New Listings 13A solid week without much listing. My oldest turned 12 this week so we spent the weekend spoiling her instead of doing ebay.
A good solid week even without much listing. I do have 24 drafts finished just awaiting pictures. I just didn’t have time to do that part, so I should be able to do easily have 50 listings this week.
Yesterday I did my weekly trip to the “Gucci goodwill”. I only bought 3 items, but as I was checking out a worker was setting up a display of used designer cologne bottles at the other end of the counter. My interest was piqued, so after checkout I took a look. Much of it was run of the mill stuff but after research I picked out 3 fairly valuable bottles. One of them has routinely sold for over $100 half full. The three I got were all around 60-75% full.
They were charging $6 a bottle, so I couldn’t justify buying everything.
I also got a confirmation and thanks from a buyer I sold two arcade games to. That was a relief – I always get nervous that something will go wrong when shipping a 400lb machine full of delicate vintage electronics across the country.
My home depot refuses to give away boxes or packing materials because they sell packing/shipping materials. Booo!
That’s the basic setup I started with.
Here’s another option to really crank up your lighting on the cheap:
https://www.amazon.com/LimoStudio-AGG813-Splitter-Approved-Lighting/dp/B005TIDDLG/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1549564368&sr=1-4&keywords=4+lamp+photography+head
put 4 of the 75w LED daylight lamps in there and you’re pushing some serious light and still keeping the actual wattage below 60 watts.I used a Dymo 450 Turbo (long skinny labels) for a long time and really liked it. I happened upon a zebra label printer with a pile of labels when the local K-mart closed for $70 so I jumped on that. Fed Ex labels are still not zebra friendly on ebay, so I still use the laser printer for those rare labels.
My garage is a dedicated space to ebay now, so my photography area is kid-free with dedicated table and lighting. Before I had that, I used the kids table in our school room with a trifold cardboard background and replaced the standard lighting in the room with daylight LED bulbs.
Here’s an example of that setup:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262391433571
It got the job done.So if you can’t do dedicated photography lighting, at least replace every light in the room you use with daylight LED bulbs – preferably 75 watt equivalent or better.
I’ve photographed a lot of my items at work either at my desk or on the conference room table with whatever room lighting I had. This worked okay, but the iphone struggles with blue colors in bad fluorescent lighting.
Examples:
Office Cubicle Desk https://www.ebay.com/itm/262694390998
Conference room table https://www.ebay.com/itm/262695636933For smalls I have used two options.
For super cheap setup, I simply used a sheet of 11×17 paper taped to the wall and draped down onto the table right on my office desk. Worked surprisingly well even with crappy office lighting.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262754297404Then I broke down and bought a 24″ cube LED light box. My thoughts were that this would make it easier to set up and break down so I could photograph anywhere at anytime.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262863373497
Honestly I really don’t like the light box. I currently have it under my cubicle at work and occasionally crack it out. It does not play well with the wide angle lens of my iphone 7. I can’t really photograph things larger than say 8x8x8 or else the foil sides of the box come into view.Other creative “photograph when I can” iterations of my photography include
A white plastic table at church in the gymnasium after Wednesday dinner while kids are in youth program
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262722345250A blanket covering the trunk of my hatchback car outdoors while my kids are at soccer practice
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262486817640A white painted piece of plywood sitting on carboard boxes in my driveway
https://www.ebay.com/itm/262279300905For backdrops I’ve used felt, blankets, blackout cloth, sheets, carboard, plywood, and the wall itself. I can tell you after years of experimentation that the absolute best backdrop is White Marine Vinyl: https://www.joann.com/marine-vinyl/4789087.html
It is very durable, doesn’t wrinkle, and is washable. You can keep this stuff mounted on a roll on the wall above your dining table and roll it down just to do pictures then roll it back up.Replace your dining light with a 5 light dining chandelier such as this
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Hampton-Bay-Halophane-5-Light-Brushed-Nickel-Chandelier-with-Frosted-Ribbed-Glass-Shades-WB0390-SC-1/202022622
and you would be in business for sure. That was my set up with a very similar light for a long time. Use all 75w Daylight LED’s and rotate the lights to point upward to flood the room with light to kill the harshness.I can tell you this from experience. If you truly want to take this to the next level you need a dedicated photo area that is adaptable to everything you sell with excellent lighting that provides true to color photos with no adjustment needed.
This really seems like a redundant system UNLESS you are selling across multiple platforms without an inventory software like Sixbit.
I label all totes like this A11, A12, A21, A22. This tells me which shelving unit (A,B,C), which row (*1*, *2*, etc), and which box along the row. Once I put a listed item in a tote I put the tote label in the custom label field in ebay.
If I ever want to know the contents of any tote, I just search by custom label on ebay by that tote number. Voila – a list of all items in that tote. Ebay automatically updates it for me when items are sold. I don’t pull items until they are paid, so if an item is cancelled or goes through unpaid item assistant, relisting the item automatically keeps the custom label information – don’t have to put the item back.
Ours are 12, 8, 5, and 2 and a 5th will be here in April.
My dirty secret…. let the house go to pot. We homeschool too, so they pretty much never leave. Lol! We absolutely hate the state of disarray in our house on most days, but it is WAAAAYYYY too much effort to keep a nice house with 4 tornados constantly swirling around destroying. Not to mention the sheer volume of clothes and dishes – just dishes and clothes is literally a full time job! You either have hobbies/interest or a clean house and well kept yard when you have kids. I’m convinced you can’t have both. My wife and I have many hobbies and interests, so….Also in many cases, sleep is the item I have to sacrifice.
I strive for peak efficiency in every ebay task I have. Scavenging I can scour an entire thrift store in 30-60 minutes and that includes researching most items before committing to purchase. I’m an efficient machine when I am in scavenge mode – don’t try and talk to me in that state because I won’t hear you. Listing I process in batches. Clean a tote of shoes, then next time create the listings, then next time shoot all the photos. Then I will upload the photos in mobile in spare minutes throughout the day. I have a very specific method of photographing for every style of item to keep the time to a minimum. I have good lighting and do not have to edit any of my photos except an occasional crop or rotate.
With shipping I have constantly evolved to speed up the process. I have standardized on mostly priority mail boxes and mailers. I have a zebra label printer. I’m already packaging the next item while waiting on the label to process and print for the last item because that 10-20 seconds of dead time adds up to 5-10 minutes if packing/shipping 15+ items. Speaking of that, I also save time by have 2-3 day handling time. This minimizes the amount of trips I make to my inventory shed as I only ship 2-3 times a week. It is more efficient to fit all my shipping into 2-3 sessions.
My entire ebay business has been built in 15 – 30 minute increments. Occasionally I’ll get a 2-3 hour power session but they are few and far between.
The other two she can check out combined. You can pack the items and determine what the actual cost will be to ship it by pretending to ship on the already paid item and changing the package dimensions.
Then you can send her an invoice for the other two items and modify the shipping cost to be the actual cost minus what she already paid for shipping.When you actually ship the items, you can copy the tracking number and add it to the other items. If they are all going to the same address ebay will allow you to do that.
Is there something wrong with your laptop, or are you thinking it is just outdated? The guy may just be trying to sell you a new one.
My main home desktop is a 2010 HP all in one. It runs like a champ on windows 10 for basic needs.
My ebay computer is a 2011 MacBook pro 13″ that I LOVE listing on. The only thing I’d like to do to it is add a SSD harddrive to speed things up a bit.02/04/2019 at 3:25 pm in reply to: Regional Rate A is now more expensive to ship than a 2lb priority package???!?? #56406This item was 3 lb, so I put it in a Regional A box.
Ebay does not allow sellers to choose regional A boxes as a shipping option for listings, so I always put in 2lb as the shipping weight.I ended up shipping this item as 2 lb priority instead of choosing the regional A selection. We’ll see if it encounters any issues.
This is probably the best reporting of numbers I’ve seen on here. That’s ALOT of information presented in a clear and concise fashion.
Well done!Have you considered doing any experiments?
Flat $5 shipping per item?
Trending rates in promoted listings?Oh and I forgot to add that the BEAUTIFUL weather this weekend gave me time to get some “false spring” cleaning done in my inventory building. I was able to condense and pull 11 totes! That’s an incredible amount of wasted space. I could have done 1-2 more, but that would have been clothes – not worth the time investment. I’ll get them next time.
I’ll get those 11 totes filled with new inventory and back out there in no time.
Wow, you got the “Cadillac” of CSR reps on that second call!
Congrats on the great resolution. -
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