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When I say that I estimate the weight of the box and packaging plus the item, I meant that I weigh the item and then add in an estimate of box plus packaging.
You do not have to calculate shipping costs. eBay will do that for you. For media mail and first class postage, the box size really doesn’t matter. The important part is the weight. You just have to factor in the weight of the box and any packaging and add it to the weight of the item. eBay does the rest.
For larger and heavier items, the size might be a factor in cost if the box gets beyond a certain size. I have standard size boxes, and I can now estimate the weight of the box and packaging plus the item, which I put into the listing. eBay again will calculate the shipping cost based on my inputs.
Don’t worry about fractions of the weight. If something is 1.5 pounds, use 2 pounds, etc.
Week of Jan 6-12
* Total Items in Store: 1300 eBay, 10 Mercari
* Items Sold: 25 eBay
* Cost of Items Sold: $24.65+ $39 Commission
* Total Sales: $681.72
* Highest Price Sold: $125 vintage David Palumbo brutalist iron menorah
* Average Price Sold: $27.27
* Returns: 0
* Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
* Number of items listed this week: 8I actually had a really good week, but sales have slowed down since the weekend. The discussion about the government shutdown does make sense.
Between my end of year trip and a last minute trip I made last week, I didn’t list much, and I haven’t purchased any new inventory. I still have a backlog of items to list.
I think that some of my comments below are redundant because other people answered by the time I was ready, but I’ll post it anyway. Hopefully, I’m adding something additional to the conversation:
You should purchase your shipping labels through eBay. They will automatically add tracking, which they upload for you and your buyer to see. You can print out the labels on plain paper and then tape them to the box, or you can buy 8×11.5 pages with two stickers per sheet.
eBay doesn’t provide a discount on Media mail, but they do for priority, FedEx, and UPS.
The books that you are listing are long tail. There are book collectors out there, but not in quantity. I sell lots of books, and most don’t sell for months, even years. Jay & Ryanne’s motto is “list it and forget it”. You create your listing, put in the price that is reasonable, and just let it sit until it is sold.
You can also check out the prices occasionally just to see if something has gone down or up in price. But, as long as you have storage space, keep listing other stuff and don’t sweat the things that are still listed.
When a listing is 16 months old or so, eBay will flag it as stale. You can just end it and relist it, or perhaps take a look and adjust the listing as needed.
Just a couple of suggestions:
I signed up my kids for PJ library books when they were young. The books came free to the house. They are worth something, but I think that your price is a bit high considering. There are reflections in your photographs, but I understand you need to use the lighting & set up that you already have. In the future, play around with the position of the books and your camera to try to reduce that.
The general consensus on the forum is that Google search engine will truncate titles with any kind of punctuation. That means that when someone is searching for something specific, Google will match the first five or so words in your title and end at any punctuation. So, if you need to use punctuation, use it only at the end. Don’t worry about small words such as the, and, etc. No commas, no parentheses, etc.
Otherwise, you are doing a great job – you just need to keep up with it and not lose patience. Books are very interesting (at least to me), but they require time to sell. Watch the What Sold videos that come out Wednesday evening / Thursday morning and read the forum comments to get a better idea of what kind of inventory sells. Many of us have a variety of items so that our sales don’t get stuck when one kind of item falls out of favor.
Consider these boxes (free from USPS) for golf clubs and similar long but skinny items:
There is a shorter version as well. I will sometimes tape two together as long as the item is not easily breakable.
Of course, you have to ship them priority or express.
I only listed 8 items.
I got a call on Wednesday that a family friend had passed away (it was expected), so I hopped on a plane Thursday and came back Saturday. It was sad, but nice to see some people that I wasn’t able to see at our end of year trip (only a week and a half earlier).
I did sell quite a lot while I was gone, and now I have 11 items to pack and ship this morning!
01/11/2019 at 11:04 pm in reply to: What Sells On eBay: Models, Doc Martens, Books, Akai Tape Deck, Lane Black Panther TV Lamp #54964I’m currently out of town for a funeral, but I still made time to watch the What Sold video. Here’s a few highlights for last week:
I purchased a number of vintage-looking wood signs that must have been the remainders from someone’s business. I thought that they were cool, but the first one sold after being listed since June. I think I paid about $2, and it sold for $32.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/183287823280I overpaid for a lot of Chinese carved snuff bottles because I thought that they were very collectible. I think that these are a very common design and just not very unusual. This was the second one to sell. I paid about $4 each, and this one sold for $19.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/182831773184Last week, I showed a cooking book that I bought dirt cheap. Here is the second one to sell from that lot. This was the one in roughest shape. It’s a cookbook from a White Plains, NY organization, but the buyer’s address is in Texas. Maybe she lived there at one time. I paid maybe $0.25, and it sold for $16.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/183596654031I bought this 50s Webcore record player in an auction lot for hardly anything, about $0.50. It didn’t work, and I thought about trying to fix it up. After watching a few videos, I realized that this was not like when Steve talks about replacing a belt on a more modern unit, so I listed it as non-working. I also did local pickup because it would have been a bear to pack safely. The guy who bought it fixes them as a hobby. He has bought similar units before online, but they would arrive damaged in some way. He was thrilled with finding one where it wouldn’t be shipped. It sold for best offer of $40.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/183593072590The photos still disappear after about a month, though. I had 2 packs of cards that I had to research more, and, by the time I got back to them, the photos were gone. I had to re-photograph them anyway, so it was no big deal. Just something to watch out for.
hum, the link didn’t end up as the same thing after I pasted it in, but there are listings of just empty frames, no glass.
I haven’t done it yet, but I’m thinking to do something like this with unused frames:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/vintage-OLD-picture-frame-gold-old-frames-SIX-frame-LOT/303012242916?hash=item468cefe5e4:g:jBoAAOSw~xtcJ8m4Yes, It’s been a great week for me as well, selling up to 6 items a day! Except that I sold nothing on Monday, the 7th. Huh?
01/08/2019 at 5:38 pm in reply to: This company pays $25 a piece for old Polaroid 600 cameras #54803I heard about them and gave them a call, but, yeh, the camera I had is not worth much. It’s still up for sale for all of $13.
01/08/2019 at 12:10 pm in reply to: Dictionary of literary biography, Japanese fiction writers since world war II #54778I thought you couldn’t edit a post after about an hour had gone by?
Previously, I said that I would be coming back from being away and that I wasn’t expecting anything crazy for for the first week of the year. In the end, though, I listed 25 items. Much better than I expected!
Welcome back, everyone! Let’s make this a great year!
So, other than knowing your numbers, are there other things that you going to do differently?
And how are you going to use your numbers to make it work this time around?
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