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I did a quick check and found my listings that have caps for keywords in the title appear in Google’s regular search results and Google Shopping. Not all my listings appear in Google Shopping but I didn’t discern a pattern based on the limited searching that I did.
I generally put my main keywords in caps. I have no compelling reason for doing that other than I think that those words will stand out when skimming down a page of similar items.
Thanks for the show. I’ll admit I had to rewind and listen to parts a second time as I took a little snooze on the way to my day job while I was listening. (Fortunately I ride a bus to work and dont drive :).
Here are my numbers:
Total Items in Store: 2760
Items Sold: 46
Total Sales: $1278
Cost of Items Sold: $169
Average Price Sold: $27.78
Average Cost of Item: $3.68
Highest Price Item Sold: $119.95 Canon PowerShot SX620 HS
Number of items listed this week: 57
YTD Sales: $9534
YTD sales compared to this time last year: -3%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 373
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 115
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 28
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.67%
Hats sold this week: 21 (45% of sales count) – $361.02 (28% of sales value)I had a great week – the best for 5 months. I have to look back to October last year to find a week with higher sales. This was mainly due to selling a bunch of higher-priced items that I’d scavenged recently. (The median selling age above indicates that I sold a lot of recently-listed items.) Apart from the camera mentioned above, I also sold a set of flatware for $100 and a slide rule for $80.
On your podcast topic, I think it’s a fine line between FOMO and jealously. The best example of FOMO that I can think of recently is the craziness around bitcoin towards the end of last year. Everyone was talking about it and people were jumping into due to FOMO. I remember having to tell my daughter to be careful about the hype.
R&J – I hope you have a much better week sales-wise this week!
Thanks so much for identifying this piece Hausfrau. That helps a lot. Originally I thought maybe it was a sconce or something but the weight of the piece makes perfect sense as a table lamp. It would be fun to see it restored but even as a rusty piece of iron I like this a lot as a decorative piece. Thanks to both of you for responding.
Thanks Jay! I googled Art Nouveau and that definitely seems to fit this piece. That’s very helpful. I hadn’t considered that it might have had a paper backing but that certainly seems possible based on what i can see on the reverse.
> I love that you sold a bunch of empty laptop boxes that you got for free. How did you ship them all in one box?
I thought you’d like that. I’ve been getting the empty boxes for free from one of the guys in the IT department for a couple of years. I normally sell them individually but they dont move quickly and they’ve been filling up my garage so I lotted them up and filled a single big box full of them. It was supposed to be a lot of 9 but I accidentally put a quantity of 2 on the listing so I had to scramble to find a second lot of 9 when the buyer bought both lots.
Thanks for the show R&J.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 2749
Items Sold: 39
Total Sales: $1018
Cost of Items Sold: $106
Average Price Sold: $26.09
Average Cost of Item: $2.73
Highest Price Item Sold: $129.9 Lot of 18 Apple Macbook Pro empty boxes – free from my work
Number of items listed this week: 68
YTD Sales: $8257
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: 205
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 105
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.42%
Number of hats sold this week: 25 (64% of sales)I added hat sales back in to my numbers since Jay asked about them last week.
I’m happy with my sales this week. I credit people spending their tax refunds for my bump but I have absolutely no evidence to support this. I noticed a similar bump in sales around this time last year.
For those that dont use GoDaddy, you could download your transactions from PayPal and sort (or use a pivot table) using the email address to look for repeat buyers. I’d imagine I probably only have a few repeats each year. (I had one this week by chance).
I hope everyone has a great week!
Unfortunately that Financial Review article is gated for me. (“You have reached an article available exclusively to subscribers”)
Congrats on getting in the press. I had an article published in a tech journal last week and I got a few quotes picked up in another article. That was a first for me. I don’t actively seek to get published but my company has a pretty active PR department and they pushed an internal blog post I had written.
I’ll try another reply:
> You dont list number of hats sold. What percentage of your inventory or sales are now hard goods you find at yard sales?
Hat sales are consistently 45% – 65% of my sales so they make a good foundation even if they are very slow movers. Everything else I sell comes from yard sales and estate sales (mainly estate sales while the weather is bad).
> Your time between listing and selling has grown. I find this completely normal, but have you gotten over being worried about holding into inventory? Most new sellers would freak out to hold items for an average of 8 months before selling.
My week average sale seems to be around 150 – 250 days (5 – 8 months) this year. It gets longer as my inventory ages. The median sale is a better indicator 50 – 150 days. The bulk of my really old inventory is hats which doesn’t take much room.
> Also when you first started, I sensed you were buying large lots of hats online and reselling. Now it sounds like you hit the garage sales on the San Francisco peninsula. Much different way of scavenging. Going from a fancy software engineer by day to scavenging into people’s juk by weekend! If true, are you enjoying the hunt?
Almost all my hats come from bulk online purchases. Garage sales and estate sales are fun. Much more fun than my day job. (Although I was a software engineer in my earlier days, I’m a technical project manager now.)
One thing I meant to ask – Did anyone else notice that the Android eBay app has changed in the last week. Taking and uploading lots of photos in one go now seems much quicker however I seemed to have lost the ability to zoom in which is annoying. Is it just me?
Hi Everyone,
Here are my numbers for the week:Total Items in Store: 2738
Items Sold: 38
Total Sales: $987
Cost of Items Sold: $120
Average Price Sold: $25.98
Average Cost of Item: $3.18
Highest Price Item Sold: $169.95 Roland TR-606 Drumatix Drum Machine TR606 – for parts/repair
Number of items listed this week: 47
YTD Sales: $7214
YTD sales compared to this time last year: -12%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 368
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 223
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 146
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.39%I had a pretty decent week which ended with the sale mentioned above which was a lucky garage sale find. (It would have been worth $400+ if it had been working).
My sales would be quite a bit better if the weather would just cooperate. I think it has rained on almost every Saturday this year which has severely limited my garage sale buying. (I know that much of the country is dealing with snow but in our area, there are typical some yard sales all year round – except when it rains.
Regarding the retirement account discussion, it’s not too late to open a SEP IRA for 2018 contributions. The formula for the maximum contribution is confusing but I believe it comes out to be about 25% of your profit. The Solo 401K account has a higher max but it’s too late to open one of those for your 2018 taxes.
Have a great week!
Here’s a link to some info about the update with the main change being that all fixed-price listings will now become Good till Cancelled listings: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2019/2/1551194482.html
Same here. As soon as I got the error I popped over here to see if anyone else was able to view the update because I’m always curious about (and often horrified by) what they are rolling out.
Hi R&J
Congrats on the milestone episode. Very few podcasters ever produce as many episodes. It’s the same on Youtube. Most people seem to tire of it over time and disappear. My Monday mornings wouldn’t be the same without an episode to listen to on my way to my day job.
My numbers for the week
Total Items in Store: 2729
Items Sold: 34
Total Sales: $816
Cost of Items Sold: $118
Average Price Sold: $24.01
Average Cost of Item: $3.47
Highest Price Item Sold: $94.95 Osborne 1 OCC-1 Vintage Portable Computer System (for parts)
Number of items listed this week: 60
YTD Sales: $6212
YTD sales compared to this time last year: -11%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 368
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 151
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 47
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.25%This was an unremarkable week but I’m happy with the volume and value of the sales.
I’m just about done with my taxes but I haven’t submitted yet. I’ve been using TurboTax to do my own taxes since the mid 1990s and I’ve had a small business before so I don’t find the process too difficult but and I’m happy not to have to deal with sche; dule of a tax preparer. A couple of notes regarding tax things you mentioned in the podcast. The w2 form is actually the one an employee gets at the end of the year with their total earnings, deductions etc. (The one you fill out when you join a company is a W4). Also, PayPal sends 1099s to residents of MA and VT when they exceed $600. (It is reported to the State government for those residents).
Being in the “donut hole” between Premium and Anchor isn’t fun. I’m currently paying insertion fees for about 1700 extra listings. I guess the break-even point for an upgrade is around from Premium to Anchor is about 3300 listing. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get there while I’m doing this part time.
