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Anyway, we took the opportunity to fill our chest freezer, which we had wanted to do anyway, and stock up on basic meds, carbs, toiletries etc.
I am telling my coworkers to work from home if they are feeling at all unwell. We’re done here at end of March anyway, so no sense being heroes.
Luckily all my savings are in gold which is looking really good right now. I think I might buy index funds in a month or two though if things keep getting worse.
I don’t think this is going to be like the flu. Looks like an order of magnitude higher death rate, & very transmissible. My wife works in emergency ward. There is minimal surge capacity of people or beds. Nobody has made any plans or protocols. She thinks hospitals will be a huge source of new infections too, but nobody is educating the public to stay home & self-quarantine unless they have breathing problems.
It’s true young healthy people will be OK but I’m worried for people like my dad, older whose health is not great.
You can see a flip in the media/public health messaging too. We went from “it won’t spread here at all, big nothingburger” to “you’re inevitably going to get it, but it won’t be too bad” in like 1 day.
I remember reading about ancient Egypt, how you could tell when the pharaohs were losing a war because their “victories” kept getting closer to their own capital each time…
But I think the China situation, plus people turtling up at home, probably helps e-commerce.
Thanks Mike, that is an awesome bunch of ideas. For myself, I would sooner pay for some storage as my wife is already a little miffed that our basement has a box infestation. Also, it being very cold here in the winter I need my garage for the cars. But I like your creative options. 🙂
On how to blow stuff out: a new thing I’m doing is, I am NOT going to have sales. Reason being – sales selectively get rid of GOOD stuff, while the bad goes back into your store at full price after the sale. AKA you’re making your store even MORE longtail.
Instead, I am working my way through inventory from oldest to newest, repricing (kudos to ebay for making this a LOT easier recently, only a click and you’re there).
I am dropping prices on big old stuff by eyeballing it (usually ~30% off), AND I am using the cents to track my changes – so $X.01 means I repriced it once in 2020, $X.13 will mean I dropped the price 3 times in 2021. Otherwise I lose track of how long an item has been sitting around at its current price.
I also have plans to collect a lot of marginal stuff – especially lights and lightbulbs, which I have TONS of, and blow them out to a local electrician for some nominal amount, say $100 or so. They take up way to much space and nobody seems to want to buy them on ebay. Every time I go into storage I’m actively looking for a thing or two to purge/give away.
“How longtail are you willing to go?” and “what do you do with old inventory?” are questions for the ages.
I have an answer, which may also help explain a phenomenon Jay has mentioned, whereby resellers/forum-goers seem to be doing fine and then drop off the face of the earth.
In short, I think the key factor is storage costs (and secondarily, the logistical hassle of storage).
I am willing to go as longtail as I need to on a very small item. A large item needs to justify its existence much more, and in fact I am currently in the process of blowing out a lot of big, old, not very high dollar items. The annoying thing is that, as we all know, they aren’t even that price sensitive, so I may just have to take them to the dump come spring. The alternative is getting another $150-200/mo storage unit (I’m already at $365 for 2) and I don’t want that monthly drag on my business, especially with layoffs coming soon.
Why does this dynamic maybe explain the missing resellers? When you first start reselling, it feels like free money, so much that a lot of us can’t believe everybody isn’t doing it. That’s because something in that equation IS in fact free at the margin – storage space.
Most North Americans have excess storage capacity in their homes, that is not being used for anything productive. Resellable stuff being essentially free, you can use that space for ebay! And it’s practically free money. Until the space is gone. THEN you start having to actually pay the market rate for storage, at which point a business that was doing OK with free storage may not be worth it anymore. If you’re paying $150/mo for storage and your part time ebay store is making $300/mo, it starts looking less and less attractive. And the more longtail stuff piles up, the more storage you’ll need… without some pruning, the monthly expense just grows inexorably.
Jay and Ryanne got out of this trap by living rural and building a large storage building. But I think many sellers just give up when they hit this wall. A $150/mo storage unit needs to be worth it and if it’s full of $20 items that will “maybe” sell “in a year or two” it’s harder to justify. And that’s before we consider the feats of organization (spreadsheets, shelving, bins, inventory SKU systems) you have to do to actually find your items once you pass 500 or so – which not everybody has the discipline for. So, this may be the reseller Bermuda Triangle.
Anyway, I had a good week on ebay.
Gross sales c/w shipping: CAD$2,854, 12 sales, COGS: $827, Fees: ~$390, Postage: $515 –> Gross profit: $1,123
Expenditures: $1,858 –> Cashflow: $606
Listed: $5,680, 71 listings
Hours: 16
Bid on a BIG pallet of electrical supplies. Scavenger high! – my proxy bid was $3100 but I only paid $450. There were 15 identical items in there that sell for $500-900 each. That was 1/100th of the lot by volume. The rest is just gravy… some of it is marginal (lightbulbs, conduits) and I’m trying to give it away locally to get rid of it, but there are tons of little easter eggs too, that I never knew I was getting.
Decent sales this week, one good item was an ebay buy – a small kit of surgical tools sold for $1400, I paid $700. A little higher COGS ratio than usual but I’ll take it.Big picture is a little gloomier: the month isn’t over yet, but so far I’ve made less than half the gross sales in Feb as I did in Jan. I have been listing like a MADMAN for two solid months and would have expected a much bigger bump in sales from all that new inventory.
VintageTreasures: it’s tricky, because there is absolutely no question that new listings sell more than old ones. So it is expected that after a lot of listing you’ll sell a lot (…of the stuff you just listed). I see the same: here is a histogram of “days between listing and sale” in my store. as you can see the majority of sales are within a month or two of listing.
What is not so clear is whether listing activity pushes OLD stuff up in search.
Fun podcast, always enjoy hearing from Troy.
I had a very spendy week. Sales were OK. Seems like I’m getting rid of low dollar stuff lately.
Sales: CAD$1,520, 15 sales, COGS: $117, Fees: ~$213, Postage: $304 –> Gross profit: $885
Expenditures: $3,988 –> Cashflow: -$2682
Mostly spent on new inventory on ebay. Some new flame sensors for $2000, hopefully worth $12k.
As I approach my termination date I’ll have to be cooling it on the spending, though.Fair to middling week on eBay.
Gross sales c/w shipping: CAD$1,291, 8 sales, COGS: $354, Fees: $173, Postage: $138 –> Gross profit: $626
Expenditures: $1,273 –> Cashflow: -$156
Hours: 8
Listed: $1,940, 15 listings
Sold some more door strikes, $380.Good to hear that interview again, it was a fun one.
I had a pretty good week on ebay, spent quite a bit too though so cash negative.
Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2056, 17 sales, COGS: $348, Fees: ~$276, Postage: $278 –> Gross profit: $1154
Expenditures: $3043 –> Cashflow: -$1263
Ebay sourcing continues full throttle, though it looks like I’m laid off at the end of March. Much tedious job searching in store.A variable DC power supply and a multimeter can do a lot vis-a-vis testing. It may not allow you to confirm full functionality but at least you can check it powers on without having to buy the OEM adapter, and you can see whether there is some kind of an output too.
I much prefer to get them new (e.g., those door strikes). Some, I can test. Otherwise, I am relying on the other seller to state their item condition correctly… which definitely has its risks.
Interesting to hear about your free shipping experiment!
I had a really good week on ebay.Sales c/w shipping: CAD$3,808, 17 sales, COGS: $1,229, Fees: ~$522, Postage: $389 –> Gross profit: $1,669
Expenditures: $721 –> Cashflow: $2,565
Hours: 11
Listed: $1,510, 13 listings
Sales: ECG simulator $500 (paid $120 on eBay), door strikes $980 (paid $780 on eBay, still plenty more to sell).One suggestion this week would be: try out Terapeak. I have started using it and it’s actually much better than I thought it’d be.
One great thing about it is it shows you total dollars sold under your search term in the last year, so you can judge not just price but popularity. That’s a feature watchcount does not have.
