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[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast!

I was away last weekend so I didn’t post my numbers but here they are for this week:

Total Items in Store: 3137
Items Sold: 30
Total Sales: $708
Cost of Items Sold: $67
Average Price Sold: $23.61
Average Cost of Item: $2.26
Highest Price Item Sold: $64.95 Hewlett Packard HP41C HP 41C Vintage Calculator for parts
Number of items listed this week: 72
YTD Sales: $24862
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +14%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 383
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 180
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 72
Sell-through rate (for the week): 0.96%

Sales were a bit down this week. It’s my first sub $1000 week since April. This was at least partly due to not being able to go garage-sale-ing and doing less listing last weekend.

When you were talking about the woman on Youtube selling tchotchkies were you referring to the Crazy Lamp Lady? I like watching that because those are things I would never think to buy. Speaking of YouTube, I stumbled across Spinach Eaters postcard YT channel. I didn’t know he had a channel and I watched it for a couple of hours while listing on the weekend. My own experiment with postcards didn’t go well and I don’t think I’d try it again.

Moving to Reddit: Have you thought about asking for volunteers to help moderate / administer the current forums instead? Maybe that would take some of the load off the two of you?

Package size restrictions. I saw the issue with various shipping options being hidden based package sizes at shipping time. (If you adjust the dimensions, those options re-appear. In addition, over the last day or two I noticed that eBay now wont let you list an item where the package size is bigger than the method chosen. eg: I tried to list a game console today. I know it will fit in a medium flat rate box but the rough dimensions I entered were bigger than the medium flat rate box so it stopped me listing until I fixed them. This is an annoying “feature” for me but probably helpful for new sellers.

Hope everyone has a great week!

[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast

Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3087
Items Sold: 38
Total Sales: $1112
Cost of Items Sold: $127
Average Price Sold: $29.25
Average Cost of Item: $3.35
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 Magnavox Freetimer D8040 Vintage Boombox
Number of items listed this week: 78
YTD Sales: $23046
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +16%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 373
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 203
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 87
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.23%
Hats sold this week: 20 (52% of sales) worth $365.48 (32% of sales $)

Another decent week for me especially for this time of year.

Regarding eBay returns, I started my own return on eBay this week (June 12). It was a relatively cheap item that was defective. The seller must have had the RMA option switched on because as of today (June 17) I still haven’t received a shipping label. Ebay has given the seller until today to provide a shipping label. The seller has been messaging me telling me that If I close the return (as “changed mind”) they will refund me. Obviously trying to skirt the INAD defect. Super annoying that they aren’t forced to resolve this more quickly.

My find of the week this week was a toy that reminded me of something that Frank from American Pickers would find. It’s a 1960s Japanese robot. Like new in the box. Apparently worth around $200. I found it at a garage sale.

Hope everyone has a great week!

[Simon]

I’ve been using my own wording as I felt it was important to make this offer seem personal to distinguish it from the usual eBay junk messaging. I avoid mentioning the specific item in the text so that I can just re-use this same text over and over. I have no way of knowing if customizing this text improves the conversion rate of my offers.

Hi There,

I saw that you were watching this item so I wanted to send you this offer in case you were waiting for a lower price.

Thanks very much.
Simon

[Simon]

I didn’t do my Monday morning commute this morning so I haven’t listened to the show yet but here are my numbers for last week:

Total Items in Store: 3047
Items Sold: 40
Total Sales: $1042
Cost of Items Sold: $137
Average Price Sold: $26.06
Average Cost of Item: $3.43
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 Apple AirPort Express 802.11n
Number of items listed this week: 53
YTD Sales: $21935
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +14%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 379
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 225
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 89
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.31%
Hats sold this week: 26 (65% of sales) worth $454.03 (43% of sales $)

Nothing new here. Sales continue to be strong and I had a good day of sourcing at Saturday’s yard sales so I should be posting some more good items this week.

I might have made one bad buy on the weekend. There was an estate sale for a Levis executive. On of the things I bought from there was a dozen Levis branded new-in-box vintage transistor radios. For the life of me, I can’t get regular AA batteries to fit in them. Either batteries are slightly longer now or these weren’t made very well. It feels like a dumb problem to have.

I hope everyone has a fun and profitable week.

[Simon]

@Theresa – when you’re on a computer, the feature to send offers is a little different. Go to your active listings page and look for the “Send Offers” quick filter. Click that button to select the listings that are eligible to send offers for. You can send one offer at a time on the list that you’re shown. You’ll probably get a completely different list to anything you saw on your phone.

https://imgur.com/a/yIjg7mA

[Simon]

I use YSTM too. I find it funny that you use those different colors to identify sales to avoid. I’d never thought of doing that. I have different colors for things that I’m particularly interested in finding : “estate” (to identify estate sales), “cameras” and “electronics” among others.

[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast!

Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 3034
Items Sold: 49
Total Sales: $1203
Cost of Items Sold: $149
Average Price Sold: $24.56
Average Cost of Item: $3.05
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 Apple AirPort Express 802.11n
Number of items listed this week: 84
YTD Sales: $20892
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +13%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 386
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 228
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 50
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.62%
Hats sold this week: 30 (61% of sales) worth $521.13 (43% of sales $)

Great to hear Shampoo & Booze is coming back. Even though I don’t ever plan to have an AirBnB I used to enjoy hearing about the process of setting up and running one. Congrats on the big sign sale. That’s a fun sale. I see there are a lot of similar smaller signs on eBay and even some repops so you did really well price-wise. I would never have thought to ask for some much.

Another very good week for my store. This is my fourth week in a row with sales over $1100 which is historically a pretty good weekly total for me. My monthly gross sales in May topped $5000 for the first time ever since I started selling in early 2015.

After Jay asked a few more questions last week, I switched off Web Interpret. I really didn’t have a very good idea how it was going to work (long term) and I got concerned that I was going to get slammed with insertion fees. As I mentioned the other day, they actually create additional localized listings for each country. The free plan I had signed up for created 500 extra listings in 8 (I believe) countries so I had 4000 extra listings. I wasn’t certain that I wasn’t just in a temporary promotion period so I ended up shutting it off completely. I didn’t wanted to get a bill for $400 dollars of extra insertion fees. I did get a few extra sales to the UK in GBP from the program but didn’t see sales in any other country. I’ll be interested to hear if anyone else tries that same Web Interpret offer.

In regard to my area (north of San Francisco), we don’t currently have any auctions that I attend. There are a few very high-end art auctions but nothing where I can get box lots of lower value stuff. On the other hand, garage sales are plentiful and there are usually a number of estates sales within driving distance every weekend. (Estate sales are my favorite place to find buried treasure).

Hope everyone has a good week!

[Simon]

Thanks for the heads-up Jay. I watch Terminal99 on Youtube regularly. I probably saw that video but didn’t pay much attention to it because I wasn’t using Web Interpret at that time. I can’t think of anything that I sell that should be banned overseas.

In answer to your questions:
– I’ve only sold 2 items through it so far – both hats to the UK. I was shipping direct already and the Web Interpret orders shipped direct as well so I don’t yet know what would happen if I only GSP enabled. I suspect that nothing changes with shipping methods.
– Web Interpret says there is no fee
– the exchange rate seemed pretty poor but I don’t know if that’s just PayPal being greedy.
– yes, when it sells overseas, all the other listings are ended. Same thing happens if I manually end the US listing. (I haven’t just ended a foreign listing to see what happens in that situation).

[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast. I saved the show for my first commute of the week so I’m delayed in posting my numbers:

Total Items in Store: 3014
Items Sold: 52
Total Sales: $1183
Cost of Items Sold: $108
Average Price Sold: $22.74
Average Cost of Item: $2.08
Highest Price Item Sold: $94.95 Garmin GPS 12
Number of items listed this week: 50
YTD Sales: $19689
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +11%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 380
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 216
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 130
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.73%
Hats sold this week: 38 (73% of sales) worth $687.32 (58% of sales $)

I had a pretty busy week. I guess it’s hat season. I seemed to sell more hats this week than normal.

I saw some advertising or a promotion or something on eBay from WebInterpret last week so I signed up (free service). They localize and post your listings on a handful of overseas ebay sites in local currency. I got my first sale from that. There’s no way to know whether I would have just made that sale anyway. The weird thing about WebInterpret is that your listings get duplicated and localized so when you look at your listing (without using any filters) you can see 5x the number of listings (one for each country my items are listed).

Here’s my gripe for the week. A buyer return a remote control that they said didn’t work. They took the first-class return shipping label and stuck it on a priority mail express envelope so when it was delivered my mail carrier ask for $25 extra shipping charges. (I didn’t know what was in the envelope so I couldn’t reject it as I was also expecting to get an expensive camera returned).

Hope everyone has a good week!

[Simon]

I had heard that there was a way to create a scan sheet at the end of the day and here are the instructions that I located. (I dont use this myself so post an update if these aren’t quite right). For some dumb reason you can only create scan sheets from labels printed from the bulk shipping page during the day:

Go to your “sold orders” and click the ones to go on the scan sheet. Next, under shipping action, click “print shipping labels or invoices”. Then select : US Postage Service or FedEx shipping label and click continue.

Don’t repurchase the labels!..Instead, look at the top right hand corner and you’ll see this:
Buy labels | SCAN forms | Go back to classic label printing

Click on SCAN FORMS and it will take you to a page that shows the labels that have been purchased through bulk shipping page during the day that you can generate a scan form from.

[Simon]

The situation you described are probably why Shipping Rate Tables exist. I don’t use them myself I can’t guarantee they will solve your problem but it might be worth taking a look: https://www.ebay.com/pages/br/help/pay/shipping-costs.html#tables

[Simon]

Welcome Sam. There are at least a couple of us from Northern California around here. I live in Marin (just north of SF) and there’s someone from Richmond (East Bay of SF) that also posts here.

[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast. Sorry to hear that sales were slow for you this week.

My numbers for this week:

Total Items in Store: 3026
Items Sold: 44
Total Sales: $1143
Cost of Items Sold: $126
Average Price Sold: $25.98
Average Cost of Item: $2.87
Highest Price Item Sold: $126.61 Sony RDR-VX525 DVD / VHS Player Recorder
Number of items listed this week: 71
YTD Sales: $18506
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +8%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 375
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 227
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 146
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.45%
Hats sold this week: 30 (68% of sales) worth $558.45 (48% of sales $)

I had another good week and my YTD sales are creeping up past my total sales from this time last year which I’m happy about. The average age of my sales (227 days) was surprisingly high. I had a lot of things sell after being listed for almost another year.

We had another rainy Saturday which killed garage sales so I focused on listing. I spent almost the entire weekend working on my eBay biz. I was working on some Quimper listings. Guess where I heard about Quimper. 🙂

I hope everyone has a profitable week.

[Simon]

Thanks again for the help with this item which gave me enough info to list. As a follow-up, it ended up selling for $76 plus shipping which I was happy about after it had been sitting unlisted for so long.

[Simon]

Thanks for the podcast!

Here are my numbers for the week:

Total Items in Store: 2999
Items Sold: 52
Total Sales: $1496
Cost of Items Sold: $136
Average Price Sold: $28.76
Average Cost of Item: $2.63
Highest Price Item Sold: $279.95 Sony A5000 Alpha 20.1MP Digital Camera (paid $10 at an estate sale)
Number of items listed this week: 89
YTD Sales: $17363
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +6%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 377
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 202
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 68
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.73%
Hats sold this week: 36 (69% of sales) worth $641.37 (42% of sales $)

We had a great week with the most number of sales and the highest total sales $ that we’ve had this year. The sales $ figure was buoyed by a fewer higher-value items that I’d picked up at estate sales and garage sales.

At estate sales I tend to focus on stuff that other people aren’t interested in. I generally pick up several items and make sure at least one or two of them look like junk so that people don’t think I’m picking up valuable items. When I take my pile up to the register to pay I always hold my breath while I find out what I have to pay. I rarely walk away completely though I did do it the other day when I was quoted $15 for a few small books which was triple what I was expecting to pay.

On the topic of frugal vs cheap, I don’t think the average person makes a distinction. I sometimes call myself frugal to my wife but she thinks I’m just using a different word to avoid calling myself cheap.

On the topic of paying for quality, the problem I have with that is that you often don’t know if the cheap thing you’re buying will last or not. It’s only with hindsight that you find the answer to that. I think people use the “quality” argument to spend more than they need to sometimes. If I buy an expensive “quality” car, will it last longer than cheap car? Maybe. Maybe not. If I buy an expensive pair of shoes, will they always last longer than cheap shoes? Sometimes. Sometimes not.

[Author]

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