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I hope things are settling down at home @ChristineR. The teenage years can be a difficult time for everyone. My daughter was fine. My son had some extremely difficult years. (He moved away to college in September. He should be there for a couple of year. The house is much more peaceful for my wife and I now).
@catmom – your original post was a little confusing. You clarified things a bit with your last post. So PayPal is asking for your Social Security number because they may need to issue a 1099? That makes more sense.
In some states (VT, MA) they issue 1099s for sales above $600. For other states it is sent out using the rules others have mentioned above.
Create the best records you can and plan on filing taxes for your business for the 2019 tax year. If either you or your husband have regular job, consider having slightly more tax withheld for the rest of the year to cover the profit on your business (assuming there is some).
Maybe the value-add over direct international shipping is the guarantee:
Each purchase of the eBay Send International Standard service includes our shipping protection plan. You can be assured that your international shipments will arrive at their destinations, or we will protect you if there is an issue that is beyond your control.
Thanks for the link @ChristineR. I currently submit my sales tax receipts annually at the end of June so I guess I wont change anything till then. (I’ll be submitting sales tax for July-Sept of this year.) I still want to keep my reseller id for purchases so I’m not entirely sure what happens if I close my CDTFA account. It says you can still buy stuff for resale but if I don’t have a CDTFA account I would have thought it would be hard to prove my reseller id is legit.
I’ve been using that “Send offers to watchers” feature on a weekly basis for a few weeks now and it’s been doing very well for me. I usually end up with about 80 listings that are eligible each week and I in generally seem to get about 10% success rate with those. I send offers on Thursday mornings which aligns well with when many people get paid (thursday or friday).
When I posted my numbers I meant to ask @ryanne to explain why she thinks that cropping photos is a bad idea? I’ve never heard this before and I don’t understand the downside. Showing details clearly is very important and a cropped photo does that better than a photo with lots of white space. eBay already prevents us from providing photos that are smaller than their minimum dimensions.
Hello everyone,
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3403
Items Sold: 30
Total Sales: $671.83
Cost of Items Sold: $81
Average Price Sold: $22.39
Average Cost of Item: $2.73
Highest Price Item Sold: $75 Lot of 3 Knoxville Sprint Car Nationals belt buckles
Number of items listed this week: 99
YTD Sales: $43166
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +7%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 433
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 296
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 177
Sell-through rate (for the week): 0.88%
Hats sold this week: 24 (80% of sales) worth $402.08 (59% of sales $)It was a pretty quiet week but I notice that this week last year was one of the slowest for the whole year. Maybe this is the calm before the holiday storm.
Paypal fees on tax is annoying but since PayPal’s job is to process payments it’s not surprising that their fee applies to the tax and the purchase. They don’t care why the money is being collected and they don’t care where it is going. They just want their fee for completing the transaction.
Hope everyone has a better week this week!
I’ve been having the issue where we create a draft and then when I come back later and submit it to make it live, the draft gets left behind so I have delete the draft as a separate step. This probably happens about 60% of the time. I posted here on the S.L forums about this a while back.
By the way, this tool will still work to find duplicate listings (or near duplicates): http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/DuplicateListings.htm
Do you price your items on the low end? If comps come back between $20-$50, where do you price?
I bet that half the people who post here regularly could write pages on what goes through their heads when choosing prices. I have 2 approaches. One for hats and one for everything else.
For hats, I don’t have enough time in my life to research each one so I have a fixed price for most hats unless:
i) I think it’s special for some reason and I’ll use comps or a hunch to price it higher
ii) The hat has a tiny market (eg: “Joe W’s Painting Service, Someplace, IA”) in which case I start the price lower.
I reduce hat prices over the course of 3 years from the date it was first listedFor everything else (non-hats) I typically price slightly higher than the average sold price. I don’t aim for top dollar but I do want to get as much as I think I can reasonably get without waiting forever. (Non-hat items take up more space so I try not to sit on them as long as I sit on hats). If I saw a range of $20 – $50 I would look more closely to understand the average price for a comparable to whatever I’m listing. I wouldn’t automatically price at $20 or $50 without doing the extra research.
Thanks for the podcast R&J
Total Items in Store: 3334
Items Sold: 34
Total Sales: $953.57
Cost of Items Sold: $148
Average Price Sold: $28.05
Average Cost of Item: $4.36
Highest Price Item Sold: $107.95 KLM BOLS BLUE DELFT miniature HOUSE SET of 8
Number of items listed this week: 63 worth $1473
YTD Sales: $42494
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +7%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 426
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 304
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 110
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.02%
Hats sold this week: 22 (64% of sales) worth $362.17 (37% of sales $)Thanks for clarifying your “list and forget” strategy R&J. Though you don’t actually forget about your listings because you run sales, relist old items, send offers to watchers etc. Completely forgetting about old listings would be a mistake for most sellers I think.
I was interested to hear about the results of your price-reduction experiment. Too bad it didn’t work out. For obscure items, there isn’t always someone looking for them so reducing the price for a week or two wont necessarily get a sale if nobody is looking for your item during that period of course.
I dont use the list-really-high-but-add-best-offer approach because unless items are truly unique (ie: no other sellers) price is important. Best-offer is good for sophisticated buyers but plenty of people wont use it. I generally just price based on similar sales. I think it’s unusual for me to have something I think is truly unique.
I am in California also and I’ve been collecting sales tax for a couple of years. I didn’t change my listings due to the sale tax change and everything seemed to be working normally. I am on California Dept of Tax and Fee Administration (cdtfa) mailing list and I remember seeing one of their email newsletters saying that with the recent change (with Marketplace facilitators, like ebay, collecting tax) you can just put your Californian already-taxed sales amount in the “Other” field when you submit your Sales Tax return. Sounds like a pretty hokey solution. I’ll see if I can find that email with the exact quote. I couldn’t find it on their website. I only submit sales tax returns once a year (in July) so it will be while before I do that. Btw, I don’t recall ever entering “Sales in Interstate or Foreign Commerce”. The tax return that I’ve submitted only ever cared about the amount of my sales to California. I haven’t entered total sales on my sale tax returns.
Thanks for the comments / suggestions everyone.
My power came back on and didn’t go off again as they had threatened which was a relief. Of course it was too late to save things in our freezer so that all got thrown out.
Solar companies, large-battery retailers and generator manufacturers will certainly benefit from recent events here.
We don’t plan to living in this house long enough to make a solar investment worthwhile but I probably would already have done a while back it if we were going to stay. We have a big roof and get lots of sunshine.
Lots have people have been talking about generators here but I’m reluctant to invest in one until I see that this is becoming a pattern. I imagine everyone will own one before long if it does become a frequent occurrence.
I’m a little late to the party but here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3305
Items Sold: 46
Total Sales: $1005.96
Cost of Items Sold: $126
Average Price Sold: $21.87
Average Cost of Item: $2.75
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 KLM BOLS BLUE DELFT miniature HOUSE SET of 6
Number of items listed this week: 46 worth $1050
YTD Sales: $41541
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +7%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 435
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 237
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 161
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.39%
Hats sold this week: 29 (63% of sales) worth $539.68 (53% of sales $)Not a bad week overall on the ebay front. Mainly lots of small sales that added up.
Outside of eBay, my power was cut off on Saturday night due to the danger of wildfires (I’m in California) and hasn’t returned as of now (Tuesday afternoon). Some people in town got power back yesterday but they plan to shut it down again for another couple of days. Dark evenings are pretty miserable. I’ve had to print shipping labels at work and have done no listing of any kind this week. Fortunately we’re not actually threatened by the big fire which is about 45 minutes north of us at present so it could be much worse.
Hope everyone has a great week.
On more than one occasion I’ve named a person / real or fictitious who I’m buying for. eg: “my father-in-law” “brother-in-law” etc. Youtubers often say you should tell people that you’re a reseller to build contacts but at garage sales I think the majority of sellers don’t want to hear that you’re buying something to resell for more money. Sometimes that also seem to want to hear that an item will be treasured and is going to a good home and will price accordingly. “I’m buying this bundle of Wii U games for my kids” sounds a whole lot better than “I expect to be able to resell these games and make at least $100 from them”.
I have tossed around the idea of telling people that I’m reselling to make money to pay for my kids college which isn’t strictly false and might be more palatable but I still dont see much upside in admitting to reselling other than I can avoid outright lies.
