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Do yourself a favor and figure it out now, especially if you use godaddy bookkeeping. Don’t put it off until the end of the year.
It has been a real pain for me. I had to gather every scrap of data ebay has and use Vlookup formulas in excel to reconcile all my data. On top of that, I found many gaps in the data godaddy has. There were several hours of panic where I thought I wouldn’t have enough data to finish my COGS for the last 5 months of the year since godaddy no longer includes the item description or item number.
Also a major annoyance, all ebay reports do not have the date formatted in an excel friendly way so you can’t sort by date. I have not found a way to make them function as a date rather than text yet. If anyone has figured this out, I’d greatly appreciate any tips!
That is more of an isolated picky buyer most likely. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it unless the smell was REALLY bad. Most buyers understand that vintage clothing just has that certain vintage smell. Some buyers may even prefer that vintage smell. Now if the smell is anything like cat urine or really strong moth balls, then that is a problem for sure. Vintage smell? Not an issue. I’ve never had a single complaint and I know I’ve had vintage items with that certain vintage storage smell.
Maybe you could just edit all the listings to add a quick line in the description to say “this item is true vintage and may have a slight odor due to long term storage.”
I have often thought of this business as a money tree. The perceived effort is very low since I love doing most of the aspects for fun anyways. The best weeks are when you are on vacation and the sales keep rolling in.
Back in the stone ages pre-covid I also liked going to the movies, then turning back on my phone 2 hours later to see how I made while in the movie. I sure hope we get back to things like that again someday…
So those ugg sandals specifically, how long did it take you to list them?
Maybe we can give you some feedback to speed up your process if you go into detail about how you listed it.
I think you’d be better served to metric your time to list per item rather than a certain amount of listings. Say, dedicate 30 minutes to an hour a week to ebay. How many listings can you get done in that hour? Drive that number to a higher amount, then you can scale your store much quicker when you have more time.
Hmmm, I’d probably at least try it out if it was offered to me. I could see me answering some questions in my downtime just for fun. Basically treat it like a game. Why play a time suck game on your phone when you could game-ify something else and get paid? That’s my outlook and basically how I approach my ebay business anyways.
Items in Store 1545
Items Sold 28
Total Sales $1,254.00
COGS $122.00
Total Profit $1,132.00
Average profit $40.43
Average sales price $44.79
New Listings 46
Items scavenged 8
Sourcing Allotment 19Sales were rocking all week long and then the weekend happened. I had no sales or offers from late Friday night until 10pm on Sunday. The weird thing about it was that I had very few offers to send to buyers as well, which seems to indicate I had very low page views. I have the occasional day without sales, but that 48 hour period was abnormally quiet all around.
Yard sales were terrible this weekend. I bought 3 small things – that’s it. My Sunday Goodwill run netted another of those collapsible golf bag carrier things that I’ll sell for $300. It’s the second one I’ve got from that Goodwill. There was another reseller couple there that used the “grab anything/everything of value and then sit back in a corner and research it all” method. Good for them. I’ve done that many times. Seeing it from outside it is pretty interesting to witness. I decided not to engage them in conversation since my family was ready to go.
On Thursday I went through my old listings. In a store of 1500+ listings, I had just under 250 listings that were older than 1/1/2019. I decided to slash the prices of all the non-special commodity listings older than 1/1/2019, which was pretty much all of them. Anything truly special that old has already sold. That resulted in a few sales already, so yay!
Dodged another bullet by checking buyer feedback. Buyer messaged me about some shoes. Insulted my item, insulted my price, then asked if I take offers. I responded that they can make an offer. I got another message from them demanding that I thoroughly wash the shoes and take new pictures before they consider an offer. This was at about 10:30pm Friday night. By the time I woke up, they had sent another message upset that I had not responded to their request yet. Yep, that’s alot of red flags, time to check feedback. Sure enough, numerous negatives. I was able to piece together through their neg feedbacks and the seller responses that this is an overseas buyer who uses a shipping service out of Portland and they regularly try to extort sellers. They also apparently ask a bunch of these weird questions and try to negotiate after the sale as they had left multiple negatives stating that the seller had cancelled the sale.
I blocked the buyer and sent them this reponse:
I don’t think you’ll be happy with these shoes. You should probably buy a new pair since they are similarly priced.
BTW, they aren’t similarly priced as the buyer claimed they were in his first message. My BIN price is 1/3 of retail and is in alignment with similar solds. I have ignored all further messages from this buyer.
The simplest white background for small things I’ve ever used is a sheet of paper taped to a backing so it is half on a wall and half on the table/ground so you get that nice smooth transition and solid background.
8.5×11 for really small things like lego minifigs.
11×17 for slightly bigger things
poster board for larger things.All you need is a wall, floor (or wall and table) and good lighting (outdoor is ideal for color balance).
https://freshstitches.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/white-poster.jpg
I’ve also been with them for years now. It’s definitely not perfect with the auto trip functionality, but it is definitely ‘good enough’.
There has been times I’ve went a month without categorizing my trips. Since every trip is logged with a map and addresses it is easy to know which trip is business and which are personal. Being able to not think about mileage 99% of the time is more than worth the price of admission.
Yes it is broken but sporadically. Many searches it appears to work fine. Others I get nothing with the matching listings in the similar section below as you said.
The ironic part of me being an ebay scavenger is that unlike my target buyer, I have now lost almost all value for material things.
My wife tells me I’m super hard to shop for now. I don’t want for anything. Things I think would be neat to own eventually end up in my ebay inventory, I’ll tinker with them a bit to have some fun, then they go right back out the door for profit.
I could not imagine paying big money for some random trinket that I’m just going to sit on the shelf. I’m glad there are people out there that do this though, as they put money in my pocket. After all, I got 5 kids to feed man!
Walmart also sells boxes. 14″ cubed, 16″ cubed, and a 22x18x18. They also have wardrobe boxes.
Home Depot has even bigger boxes for sale, TV packing boxes, etc.
Board game parts can be big business!
If a game is 100%, I prefer to keep it intact. If it is 99% and is a desirable game with lots of parts, then I may part it out.
I parted out a nearly complete copy of Heroquest a couple years ago. I made WAY more on parts than I did if I would have sold it whole. I think I cleared $300 in profit on parts. I had sole a 100% copy a year before that for about $180 I think.
Items in Store 1527
Items Sold 22
Total Sales $857.00
COGS $103.00
Total Profit $754.00
Average profit $34.27
Average sales price $38.95
New Listings 46
Items scavenged 18
Sourcing Allotment 15I listed alot of big bulky items this week. I need space so I’m focusing on those kind of listings right now. It feels good to move big bulky things out the door!
The person I work with at my day job the closest tested positive for covid this past week. His 4 year old got it from his teacher at day care. I had to quarantine and get tested – thankfully negative. We wear masks and try to stay socially distanced at work, but in a loud foundry environment, social distancing isn’t always possible in order to hear each other talk.
This week I’m gonna keep on focusing on the bulky listings. Hopefully that reflects in my numbers as alot of these items are $100+ listings.
Have a great week everyone!
Ah, but it’s not the shoes that they’re paying for. It’s the story behind them. If you’re willing to play the game and describe in detail how you don’t wear socks and you are really sweaty when you’re playing tennis in the shoes and such, yes you can make bank on these people. Oh and don’t forget the photos of your feet in the listing with the shoes. That’s the money shot.
Wants examples, search “well worn shoes”.
As for me, I’m willing to stick with my $30 ASP dealing with normal people who just want a quality pair of shoes.
