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08/13/2018 at 7:00 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 373: Should Running A Business Be Complicated? #47429
Thanks for the podcast Ryanne & Jay – Glad you guys are enjoying New York. Sounds like a fun break from the usual.
eBay is a fickle animal.
The previous week I had the best week of the year for me with 50 sales totaling over $1500.
For the week that has just ended, I had my worst week of the year with 16 sales totaling just $368
I hadn’t made any material changes to my store or listings. (In fact about the only think I did of note was to update 3/4 of my listings to have free returns. ). I did the usual amount of listing last week.Hopefully things have turned around. Today alone, I’ve made 9 sales worth $256 so in one day I’ve made almost 2/3rds of what I made all last week. Go figure.
Glad you guys got InkFrog figured out. I can certainly appreciate the concern and risk involved in moving large quantities of listings from one store to another. You have to have a lot of faith in a tool to do that.
I got very lucky today. An ebay seller offered me a big lot of hats (about 450) and I used the coupon to save $75 I think that’s the first time I’ve ever redeemed an eBay coupon so the timing was perfect.
Great work @MMVI. What kind of walkie talkies did you find that sell for that much money? Pretty impressive.
Thanks Jay. It’s certainly nice to see a few quick decent-value sales. I’m so used to a 3 month wait on my sales that I sometimes forget what it’s like to see a quick sale.
@ChristineR – me too. Maybe I’d just sell ephemera if I could find enough of it to make a business. I suspect that many estate sales (especially family-run) toss a lot of interesting ephemera into the trash.08/06/2018 at 12:21 pm in reply to: Foam for shipping large items? What's it called? Any recommendations? #46929Thanks for the suggestions everyone. It’s been a long time since I’ve just browsed in a Home Depot so I’ll make a plan to do that next week and see what they have. That sounds like what I need. I shipped a Bose Wave Radio and an old Atari computer this weekend and used up the remainder of the foam that I had so I’ll need to replenish.
@auntbea – do you really sell empty boxes on eBay? That’s amazing I would never thought of that. I would have assume that shipping costs would be prohibitive.Hi R&J
Thanks for the podocast, as always. Fun and interesting. I enjoyed hearing about the new building project. I hope you continue to give us updates on that.Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 2409
Items Sold: 49
Total Sales: $1514
Cost of Items Sold: $182
Average Price Sold: $30.9
Average Cost of Item: $3.72
Highest Price Item Sold: $199.95 Eichler Homes 1950 or 60s Sales Brochure for Terra Linda (Bay Area)
Number of items listed this week: 47
YTD Sales: $27373
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +20%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 314
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 140
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 57
Sell-through rate (for the week): 2.03%
# of Hats Sold: 34 (69% of sales)One of my best weeks ever!
I sold a bunch of higher-priced electronics items that I’d picked up at estate sales and yard sales recently (including a non-working Atari computer from the 80s) but my biggest sale was a sales brochure for a local housing development that I picked up at an estate sale for a dollar or two which sold for $199. (I had seen a single similar sale so I shot for the moon and got it).
Jay’s comment about feeling like the Beverly Hill Billys after the auction made me laugh. That’s what the photo you posted reminded me of.
Hope everyone has a great week.
07/31/2018 at 11:25 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 371: T-Satt (Troy) Reports on eBay Open #46519Thanks for the podcast. I really enjoyed the eBay Open insights from Tony. That was lot of good information.
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 2480
Items Sold: 38
Total Sales: $877
Cost of Items Sold: $109
Average Price Sold: $23.09
Average Cost of Item: $2.88
Highest Price Item Sold: $69.95 Garmin Foretrex 201 GPS Wrist Navigator
Number of items listed this week: 59
YTD Sales: $25858
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +19%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 323
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 114
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 50
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.53%
# of Hats Sold: 25 (65% of sales)It was a pretty unremarkable week. It started off busy and ended quiet but the numbers prove that overall it was a decent week.
Regarding stale listings: Jay mentioned Griff from eBay Radio. I bet that Griff says to list as GTC because he doesn’t want to encourage people to game the system. It’s better for eBay if they can tune their search algorithm to bury poor-performing listings so Griff is going to want to discourage anything that works against their algorithm.
I hope we see some stability from eBay for a while. Innovation is important but they have experienced a lot of resentment from sellers and I hope that pushes them to invest a little more on fixing their existing infrastructure.
Looks like you’ve really grown into selling yard sale stuff. Old Apple Mac stuff always sells well. You may be able to find a lot it in your area.
I really enjoy garage and estate sales year-round but at this time of year, in my area, garage sales are abundant which increases the odds of finding something decent. Value-wise, my garage sales hauls account for a bigger piece of my overall sales at this time of year. By volume, hats still account for more sales. On an average Saturday I’ll probably visit 10 to 15 sales before I start to run out of enthusiasm. In the Bay Area there are only a couple of remaining auction houses that I know of and those cater to the fine art, fancy jewelry and antiques crowd which doesn’t interest me at all.
Hi Ryanne & Jay… Thanks for the podcast
Here are my numbers for the week:
Total Items in Store: 2459
Items Sold: 32
Total Sales: $997
Cost of Items Sold: $139
Average Price Sold: $31.15
Average Cost of Item: $4.35
Highest Price Item Sold: $199.5 Apple Macintosh Keyboard Mouse Keypad M0110 M0100 M0120
Number of items listed this week: 72
YTD Sales: $24981
YTD sales compared to this time last year: +19%
Average age of items in store (in days since listing): 321
Average number of days between listing and selling this week: 178
Median age of sales (in days, between listing and selling): 96
Sell-through rate (for the week): 1.3%
# of Hats Sold: 21 (65% of sales)I had another good week. My garage/estate sale purchases have been making a big difference the last few weeks.
My high-priced sale of the week was an old set of Apple keyboard/keypad/mouse that I found in a dusty box at an estate sale on Saturday. I bought a pile of stuff and probably paid just a few dollars for the Apple stuff. I listed it Saturday night and it sold on Sunday morning. I would never have priced it that high except that there was a similar sale in the last few months.
I haven’t seen that new shipping page yet. I wonder what the justification for changing that is. Maybe they are simplifying it on the backend (while doing a UI upgrade). We forget that eBay has been building their site for 20 years. It wasn’t designed the way it is now. Rather, it grew bit by bit with things tacked on here and there and it probably has a lot of horrible legacy hacks, work-arounds and ugliness. Even websites that are only 5 years old will have a lot of technical debt that makes them extremely hard to maintain. The last 4 companies that I’ve worked for over the last 10 years have been battling the issues with maintain their original legacy site. Most of the technology that tech companies build with today, didn’t exist 10 years ago.
I’ve looked at Ouija boards before as I heard that have value but I’ve only ever seen recent ones that dont seem to do much better than your average board game. I’d definitely buy one if it was the kind that had value. I’m not superstitious at all. On a related note, I sold a deck of tarot cards today. I always buy them when I see them. They see to bring good money (for a deck of cards).
Hope everyone has a good week!
I do the most boring thing possible with credit card rewards and rely on cash back only rather than fiddling around for points that I might never redeem or trips I wouldn’t have taken without rewards
6% back on groceries – Amex Blue Cash Preferred (w/ annual fee)
5% back on Amazon purchases – Amazon store card
4% back on gas – Costco Visa (the Amex card above gives 3% cash back on gas)
2% back on everything else – Citibank Double Cash cardYep. I saw them appearing and disappearing again last night. Try refreshing the page a couple of times and see if they come back. It seems intermittent.
In case it’s helpful for anyone else, with that photoscanning site provided by Ryanne, do a Fast Scan. It will summarize how many listings have only one photo. Then scroll down to the report section and run a report using the “tab” and “csv photo count” as options. It will produce a report you can copy and paste into google sheets or Excel with links directly to your listings that need more photos. (I still have 89 with only 1 photo).
Thanks for the link Ryanne. That looks very useful. I’m running a scan right now.
Btw, I’ve had reasonable success using direct messages through the eBay for Business facebook group. They agreed to give me a second month store credit so I should end up with about $150 in credits (2 x $59 store fees + about $30 in insertion fee credits). I’d rather have all my photos but this is better than nothing.
I definitely encourage you to try and grab your photos as soon as you can from whatever source you have available eg: Google cache. The longer you wait, the less-likely they are to exist.
> Do you do free shipping on top of competitive pricing and discounts?
Nope. I charge for shipping.
My regular pricing is actually on the high side. (I know yours is higher.) I’ve spent a lot of time playing with my pricing so I think I have a pretty good idea where the market is at.
I could put all my hats at $24.95 but my sales would fall off a cliff and that additional $5 per sale wouldn’t come close to making up for all the lost sales. I think hat sales are much more sensitive on price than say art or mid-century decor.
Hi Jay,
>>Did the DVD/VHS combo have a tv too? Those also sell well. The big issue is shipping.
Nope. This one was one of those regular-looking VHS players with a slot for single VHS tape and a tray for a single DVD.
>> On your hats, can you remind me how much you buy and sell them for?
I think hat prices have come down (just like all clothing) due to all the new sellers. My cost averages around $1.5 per hat. My average hat sale for this year is $18.36 (665 hat sales this year). Last year my average hat sale was $18.72.
When I list, I start at $19.79 for anything that has a reasonably large potential pool of buyers and $14.95 for anything that just has a very small number of potential buyers (eg: Joe’s neighborhood paint shop) or anything that has lots of identical competition. Once in a great while I’ll find something very special and I put a higher price but that’s rare.
After being listed for about 4 months I’ll add hats to the pool of hats that I include in 15%-off markdown sales. I start dropping prices dramatically around the 2-year mark.
On ebay, I think the average used hat probably sells around $12. Maybe less.
Keep in mind that you can buy many types of brand new hats from retail stores for around $15 so to command a premium price it generally has to be something vintage or unusual.
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