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Hi All
Thanks for the podcast R&J.Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3835
Items Sold: 69
Total Sales: $1342.03
Cost of Items Sold: $169
Average Price Sold: $19.45
Average Cost of Item: $2.46
Highest Price Item Sold: $43.96 Nikon Nikkor AI-S 50mm f1.8 Series E Lens
Number of items listed this week: 90 worth approx. $1995
YTD Sales: $16341
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +18%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 446
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 279
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 127
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.8%
Hats sold this week: 45 (65% of sales) worth $727.14 (54% of sales $)I had another good week of sales. Way up from this time last year.
I’ve been feeling like a real scavenger this week having sold 2 items I found from opportunistic dumpster diving. I’m not a intentional dumpster diver but I’ll look if I’m walking by one.
If anyone saw my comment last week about the sketchy $1000 / 1000 hat purchase, I have an update. Some boxes arrived this week but they only contained just under 500 hats. I knew that was about to happen when the seller sent my a photo of the post office receipt showing the weight of the shipment which was well-under my calculated weight. (The average hat weighs about 2.5oz so you can do the math). When I confronted the seller about it (in a nice way) he agreed to send another 200 hats, which I’m guessing he was too lazy too send in the first place, plus give me $200 back. (I was trying to cut him a break too get this resolved quickly – he really should be giving me $300 back assuming the extra 200 hats actually arrive). We’ll see what happens. The hats were much as expected, some destroyed, some fine, many covered in dark animal hair. Lots that have no value. I will still make make a profit eventually assuming I get the extra hats and money back.
Different topic: I thought I had a good handle on my dwindling death pile and I thought I only had a bunch of $20 items left to list but I found a small bag of pens that I’d bought at a family estate sale a year or two ago for a few dollars. After quite a lot of research it turns out they are very old, and somewhat desirable Parker, Waterman, Shaefer pens and should be worth several hundred dollars. That was a great surprise.
Hope everyone has a profitable and healthy week!
I don’t have any Amazon questions for you but your avatar takes me back to another time in my life where I’d regularly see B movies at a artsy movie theater in my hometown as teenager/twenty-something. I haven’t thought about for a long time.
My bag of Guatemalan Broad Porch Coffee arrived today and I’m enjoying my first cup now!
It seems like it could be an attempt to be equitable to all businesses. eg: toy shops must close but Walmarts that sells groceries (and also sell toys) are open. Nurseries are closed but home improvement stores, that sell gardening tools, are open. It must be awkward in some stores to close off sections but attempting to restrict walk-in stores to limit sales to essential items only seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Yes. That was an eBay purchase. If you want to see the gamble I’m taking, have a look at the ebay listing. The photos are horrible so I really have no idea what I’m getting : https://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-AROUND-1000-VINTAGE-TRUCKER-SNAP-CAPS-HAT-ADVERTISEMENT-SNAPBACK-HATS/164117498242
Hi R&J – Thanks for the podcast this week. Since I don’t have a commute at the moment (week 5 of working from home), I listened while I listed yesterday. I paused and ordered a bag of coffee. (I didn’t see a place in the checkout to mention that R&J sent me. )
Good luck with your new business I’ll be really interested to hear how that goes. Is there a new podcast in your future perhaps?….
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3815
Items Sold: 67
Total Sales: $1484.27
Cost of Items Sold: $170
Average Price Sold: $22.15
Average Cost of Item: $2.54
Highest Price Item Sold: $94.95 Sony Handycam Digital MiniDV DCR-TRV30
Number of items listed this week: 71
YTD Sales: $14964
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +15%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 445
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 352
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 287
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.76%
Hats sold this week: 40 (59% of sales) worth $630.19 (42% of sales $)I had a great week. I was just $12 short of beating my best week for the whole of 2019. I’ve been doing lots of listing while stuck at home. That has helped a bit but it seems like people are continuing to buy lowish-value items like hats which is surprising to me.
I made my biggest sourcing purchase ever this week 1000 preowned hats for $1000 ($700 plus $300 shipping). Fingers-crossed that they actually arrive. The seller has some challenges – no car and no printer. It wouldn’t surprise me if he finds it will cost well over $500 to ship that many hats. If the hats do show up I’m going to have a serious challenge finding a place to put them. I might have to get a storage unit so that my wife doesn’t leave me. 🙂
I hope everyone has a healthy (and profitable) week.
Very sorry to hear about your AirBnB rentals being shut down. That’s a tough blow on top of an already-bad situation. I hope you’re able to get those back on the market sooner than 2 months.
Total Items in Store: 3811
Items Sold: 48
Total Sales: $959.4
Cost of Items Sold: $183
Average Price Sold: $19.99
Average Cost of Item: $3.82
Highest Price Item Sold: $67 Lot of 40 vintage hats w/ bad foam
Number of items listed this week: 44 worth approx. $962
YTD Sales: $13424
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +11%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 446
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 276
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 106.5
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.26%eBay has been doing fairly well for me. I’m really surprised to see sales for the last week are higher than this time last year and my YTD sales are also tracking ahead of this time last year. Hope it continues.
I continue to plug away at my death piles and source on eBay for new inventory.
Stay healthy. Sell trash.
Thanks for the podcast. It’s great to have a few normal routines like listening to the show.
My numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3815
Items Sold: 52
Total Sales: $1037.91
Cost of Items Sold: $300
Average Price Sold: $19.96
Average Cost of Item: $5.78
Highest Price Item Sold: $85 MEMOREX MB2186A micro cassette recorder -new
Number of items listed this week: 89 worth approx. $2038
YTD Sales: $12434
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +10%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 441
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 154
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 45
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.36%Sales were good last week. They are very sporadic as someone else said. Sending Offers to Watchers really jump-starts my sales each week. The response to offers last week was back up to normal levels.
I’ve been cranking through my piles of unlisted stuff and sourcing through eBay. I miss garage sales and estate sales but I think I’ll be able to make it though OK. I’ve been working from home (on my day job) for a couple of weeks now and have at least a few more weeks to go. It’s great not having to commute. I’m still watching the stock market nervously. I expect we’ll see it tumble again before it really improves. There’s too much bad news that still needs to come (from company financial results). I’m not sure if it’s going to be sensible for me to retire in June if our retirement account balances are way down from where they were. We’ll see.
Hope everyone has a healthy and profitable week.
Yep. It’s going to be a challenging year for a lot of people. Missing out on a vacation is a pretty minor thing in comparison. I’m not sure if retiring is still going to be on my plans for this year. I was supposed to be 3 months away from doing that so we’ll see.
Thanks for the podcast
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3683
Items Sold: 31
Total Sales: $601.67
Cost of Items Sold: $70
Average Price Sold: $19.41
Average Cost of Item: $2.27
Highest Price Item Sold: $39.95 Wusthof Gourmet 8″ Cook’s Chef’s Knife
Number of items listed this week: 72 worth approx. $1416
YTD Sales: $10562
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +10%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 455
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 315
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 181
Sell-through rate (for the week): 0.84%
Hats sold this week: 23 (74% of sales) worth $405.06 (67% of sales $)Things seemed pretty normal till about mid-week and then there was an obvious slow down for me. For the past month or two I’ve been sending out lots of offers to watchers on Thursday and that has typically really kick-started sales each week. That didn’t happen last week. My offers only generated a few sales. I had no high-value sales either so that dampened my sales numbers too.
I had to cancel an overseas trip that was due to happen next week. It was going to a family reunion in Vietnam with my siblings coming from Australia. We haven’t been together as a group since 2007 so it was pretty disappointing.
Sell trash, stay healthy.
In general I don’t list hats where the foam is disintegrating. I’ve sold a couple in the past and I’ve pulled patches off some as well. These days I only try and sell hats that I’d be happy to receive and wear myself as a buyer. I currently have a pile of hats that I’ve collected that have bad foam (I have to keep them in isolation to avoid them contaminating my good hats). I’m planning on auctioning the bad pile off as a lot as some would be quite desirable if they didn’t have the foam problem. Experienced hat buyers might know what bad foam means. I don’t think the average person wouldn’t know what to expect if they bought one with that problem. They might think it’s a minor problem and be very disappointed.
Sorry about your travel. My extended family (from Australia) and my family from here ( U.S) have family reunion planned for later this month in Vietnam. I keep waiting for someone to suggest postponing it but so far I haven’t heard anything. My company has restricted international business trips but thankfully have been silent about personal vacations.
No. I haven’t told anyone at work about my plan. I have a count-down timer on my computer which I see every day. I decided on my retirement date about 2 and a half years ago.
I was planning on using the 4% withdrawal rule for my investments. Watching the market drop 8% is like seeing 2 years of my withdrawals disappear. I’ve been through market ups and downs before but having a big down market is not much fun when I’m so close to the point that I’m going to start using some of it. (Since I’m not yet at official retirement age I’ll actually be living off taxable investments for a while.)
Thanks for the podcast this week.
Here are my numbers
Total Items in Store: 3642
Items Sold: 56
Total Sales: $1163.85
Cost of Items Sold: $125
Average Price Sold: $20.78
Average Cost of Item: $2.25
Highest Price Item Sold: $94.95 ICOM/NAVICOM IC-A20 VHF Aircraft transceiver
Number of items listed this week: 62 worth approx. $1339
YTD Sales: $9960
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +21%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 447
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 261
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 66
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.54%
Hats sold this week: 41 (73% of sales) worth $714.33 (61% of sales $)It’s been another good week sales-wise this week. I’m still tracking 20% ahead of my YTD sale. I’d be surprised if it stays that way as I’m not doing anything differently this year.
The virus thing doesn’t seem to be impacting my sales but the impact on the stock market is concerning as I’m less than 4 months away from my planned retirement date and 65% of my retirement assets are in the stock market. I know it will come back up eventually but it’s hard to watch.
On the upside, my company has just told us we have to work from home the next 2 weeks which will eliminate my long commute. I’ll be on vacation after that so I wont be back in the office for a month which I’m not sad about.
On topic, I’ve done all the dumb things that resellers do at one time or another. I wonder if anyone else has ever bid against themselves. I have 2 ebay accounts. One day I put in a high advance bid on an auction from one account but forgot I’d done that and, as the auction was closing, I started bidding from my other account. Once the auction ended I realized that I’d been bidding against myself. doh!
> If they’re stagnant, I’m going to de-list them rather than pay the $40+ extra a month in listing fees.
At your level it’s probably time to get that anchor store subscription so that you can free yourself about worrying about insertion fees. I made the jump last year and my ebay fees went down.
