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Hi all! Enjoying an early winter now – we got a foot or two of snow and the kids and I have been tobogganing today. Also a time for catching up on homeschool curriculum. My wife is working this weekend while I’m home with the little ones.
J&R, I’m sorry to hear your sales suck. I wonder if you really want to hear ANOTHER person put in his two cents, but… I don’t think it’s complicated. You guys haven’t been scavenging. Almost every week you guys say “we didn’t do much scavenging this week”. The fuel rods are spent. Time to mine some new ore. 🙂
I know you guys are a long-tail store, but even in that kind of store, newly listed items always pull more than their fair share of the weight.
I had a good week.
Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2425, 12 sales, COGS: $629, Fees: ~$329, Shipping: $173 –> Gross profit: $1468
Expenditures: $676 –> Cashflow: $1420
Listed: $2520, 48 items
Hours: 9
Notable sales: toners $300, engine cylinder boring tool (I’ve got to freight ship this one) $300.
Scavenging: still going through my giant auction haul from a week ago.Another thing happening is, my wife and I have been discussing how we need a deep freeze for frozen food to be more frugal with food. Trouble is, there is no space for it except downstairs, in my dank ebay domain. Which is also floor space (I am told) that could be used for a desperately needed pantry. If I moved all my storage out of the house, I’d have to rent another storage unit at $200/mo or so (making 3 for a total of $600 or so). At that point, owning my own warehouse starts to seem much more attractive. So, I think I’m going to have to start stalking local real estate again. A small piece of land with a large quonset shop would do me for a long time.
11/04/2019 at 10:41 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 435: List and Forget, Still Works For Us #70017It’s kind of a mix, tending towards not competitive. However, my situation often boils down to “there’s a market price but I don’t know what it is”. The reasons why: (1) pricing info is hard to find/requires a formal quote request, (2) a part may be worth quite a bit, but not so much that it’s worth it for the buyer to just buy a new widget altogether. The buyer knows that go/no go price point but I don’t.
11/04/2019 at 4:49 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 435: List and Forget, Still Works For Us #69996To a certain extent I agree with “list it and forget it”. However, I do suspect that too high a price discourages some buyers and it’d be nice to automatically reduce the price by say 10% every 6 months down to some floor price of my choice. I dislike sales because you are selectively selling the fraction of inventory “close” to the market price, but the stuff that is way overpriced stays overpriced and, when the sale is over, reverts to the original price.
I had a good week! Went all in ($4000) on an out of town auction, a bankruptcy of a pretty big drilling operation. Mostly paid for some inverter drives, but I also bought several “grab bag” lots. As usual, upon getting it home, I find the stuff I paid up for slightly disappointing (not bad but not amazing), while the lots I paid pennies for yield up amazing treasures. I am only about 1/3 of the way through everything. It’s great fun.
Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2531, 13 sales, COGS: $22 Shipping: $287 Fees: ~$353 –> Gross profit: $2156
Expenditures: $4490 –> Cashflow: -$2312
Listed: $640, 12 items
Hours: 15
Notable sales: laptop port replicators $500… lots of ~$100 sales.10/28/2019 at 8:43 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 434: Do You Have A Business Destiny? #69649Crazy week. Seemed like all my best stuff sold at once.
Sales (c/w shipping): CAD$7141, 12 sales
COGS: $207, Fees: ~$928, Shipping: $704 –> Gross profit: $6006
Expenditures: $1963 –> Cashflow: $4250
Hours: 12
Listed: $1150, 15 items
Notable sales: sold the rest (70) of my Panasonic laptop battery packs for $4000.
Buys: spent $800 on 7 seismic sensor things (on ebay), hoping they pay back at $400-700 each.That’s easy. Picked up a small package of vintage 80’s diapers at a thrift store for $5 (kind of expensive I thought!), sold them for about $250 within 60 seconds after listing.
O Tempora, O Mores etc etc
Great podcast guys, it was fun to hear you hashing things out in real time.
I think you are on the right track. Two things:
(1) There is a tradeoff between precision and flexibility. When you talked about “shelf 1, rack a” etc. – depending on how big your items are, that sounds a little too precise. What I found by trial and error is that a whole shelving UNIT is (for my fairly large items) enough precision, because it allows me to reorganize that shelving unit without affecting my inventory (moves between shelves require data to be updated). Basically – don’t narrow the storage down SO much that you can’t shuffle things around a little.
(2) It’s an interesting choice to use the custom SKU field in ebay for storage of this info. What’s good is it allows your helper to be looking at photos of the relevant item when she is tracking all this info down. The bad is – well, I don’t trust ebay to keep this information. If it’s wiped out in some ebay bug, you lose your whole painstaking inventory system.
(3) SPREADSHEET. I don’t get how you have lived all this time without one (seriously, when something sells, where do you get your COGS from for taxes?). I dunno, maybe you’ll still want to use ebay custom SKUs. But know what you’re missing. You can dump your whole store at: http://www.isdntek.com/ebaytools/BulkPhotoScanner.htm
and pare that down, then add the fields you need (storage location, COGS, etc).You asked about the reliability of the random SKU system. Yes, one drawback is, if I put something away and forgot to enter its location, I won’t have much luck finding it. You’ve got to be punctilious about that because the stuff is NOT organized thematically.
I had a great week on ebay.
Sales c/w shipping: CAD$3790, 13 items, COGS: $403 –> Gross profit after fees: $2878
Expenditures: $131 –> Cashflow: $3151
Hours: 11
Listed: 2 items
Notable sales: it was the week of the valves. Water valve for $720, and 2 gas valves for $400 each.Good question. I do buy other stuff in my in-person buying. Mostly consumer hard goods but also I have done OK on vintage stuff before. Doubtless there is money to be made on auctions in other categories, but I am finding enough stuff in my category (which is really a huge catch-all supercategory anyway) that I’m not feeling the urge to branch out much. Maybe will happen eventually, though.
I spent some time this past week navel gazing and concluded that I am too dependent on one particular source of items, which is a fantastic source that I will continue mining, but doesn’t afford much opportunity to scale. In particular, a place that’s only open office hours is no help if the time blocks I have free for sourcing are mostly evenings. Accordingly, I’m starting a grand experiment of sourcing on eBay. Basically, just trolling the bus/industrial auctions for closing soonest, looking for likely stuff. So far, so good. It is clear if I’m going to do this, I must be content with lower margins (3x-4x). The shipping cost is brutal, especially from the states. So it needs to be stuff that sells for $150+ for it to be worth the (usually $40+) shipping, even if the item itself I buy for $0.99. So far this week I’ve spent $250 on about 5 items – we’ll see how it pans out! Regardless, I am sticking with this till I figure it out.
Lots to talk about this week… very exciting that you are training somebody to ship. I highly recommend you *start* an inventory system now with newly listed items, and fold your old inventory into that system gradually. Personally I use (1) numbered shelving UNITS for big items, and (2) numbered tote bins for smalls. Each newly listed item, when stored, has its location marked in the spreadsheet. There are lots of other systems, but the point is, you can start with new inventory, you don’t have to completely revamp the old immediately.
Good week on ebay.
Sales c/w shipping: CAD$2725, 8 items, COGS: $355 –> Gross profit: $2001
Expenditures: $900 –> Cashflow: $1456
Listed: $640, 40 items
Hours: 13
Items sold: best was 36 thermostats for $700. These have been listed forever. Also, 2 huge gas valves (weight about 80 lbs each), for $200 each but I made money on shipping so I profited about $600. Got the lot they came in for like $15, and I still have 4 smaller valves to sell.10/07/2019 at 8:16 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 431: Top 10+ Scavenger Life Lessons #68702Great podcast – you said it, that’s a lot of philosophy summed up in a few minutes.
My own minor contribution is: be content with Good Enough when it comes to listing quality, photo quality, customer service etc. It’s important to take good photos, but going from good to great doesn’t move the needle that much & if it takes you a lot more time, it’s not worth it.
This week I am reporting numbers slightly differently. Trying to get more lined up with how my numbers are reported at tax time.
Gross sales c/w shipping income: CAD$2019, 8 items
COGS: $81, Shipping: $190, Fees: $277 –> Gross profit: $1662
Expenditures: $441 –> Cashflow: $1301
Listed: $200, 3 items
Hours: 9
Notable sales: more Panasonic battery packs for $1200. This may be my best buy this year, I’ve already made $2400 off of ~1/5th my stock of these things.I forgot to mention that I now get to send offers to interested buyers. This started 2 weeks ago or so, and ONLY exists in the mobile app for me.
That being said – not a single thing has sold by this route, to my knowledge.
I got a business bank account over the weekend and I’m completing the process of separating my business and personal bank accounts. The LLC is registered. There are some more housekeeping things to do – for one thing, I have to work out a system for tracking GST paid and received (super annoying). But then, the GST thing should have been done even before I incorporated, I was just lazy.
Hi guys, nice day for a Sunday podcast. I was home with the kids today, and 3 feet of snow has fallen. They were throwing snowballs with neighbourkid all day. Not summertime anymore, but the living is still easy.
I had an appointment with a tax accountant on Friday. It looks like I am going ahead with an LLC based on the following considerations (not sure to what extent these apply for Americans):
-In an LLC, profit is taxed at ~15% until it is paid to the shareholders. When this happens, the shareholders pay income tax at a rate that is basically their marginal rate minus the 15% (to prevent double taxing).
-In practice, this means if I can avoid sucking all the profits out for personal use, I have a huge tax savings/deferral (~$10k with my numbers), which can then be rolled into inventory or anything else. It incentivizes growing the business, in essence.
-There are other benefits related to liability but for ebay I think these are nonstarters. If you’re gonna do it, it’s about the taxes only.
-Lots of possibilities related to income splitting with my wife, and playing with deduction timing to reduce taxes.
-Drawbacks:
-$1100 setup cost (can be less if you DIY but I don’t have time)
-$2000/yr tax accountant fees (too complicated for most to DIY)
-Have to set up separate accounts for business vs personal, with associated minor fees. However, taking money out of these accounts is as simple as a bank transfer, there’s no paperwork till tax time when you state your personal income from your LLC.
-Accountant recommended, for income splitting, that if I’m going to pay income out of the LLC to my wife as the lower-income shareholder, she may have to be able to prove her involvement in the business in an audit situation. So we’ll have to get her a basic understanding of it in case anyone quizzes her. (He said technically this is even true now, as I have it set up as a partnership).I see it as a risk of $2000/yr accountant fees (if we do end up bleeding the business white all the time for personal use), versus an available deferral of $10k in taxes a year.
One thing I like is the idea of using the corp as a savings account, where I sock away quite a bit of cash and pay it to us when our marginal rates are low (mat leave, lost my job, etc). Basically, I can pay myself a salary when I need it and grow when I don’t.
There is one other benefit, which is that I may want to start an LLC anyway to do consulting later in my career, so this way it’s already set up.
I had a good week on ebay.
Sales: CAD$1699, 11 items, COGS: $186 –> Item profit: $1253
Expenditures: $221 –> Cashflow: $1218
Notable sales: security camera $700.Wow, it’s hard to read the forum this morning as it’s all compressed into one huge column of text.
I looked up the metronome thing, it’s pretty cool! Made more sense when I realized they must be coupled together by being e.g., all on one light sliding surface.
I had a good week on ebay but more horrible returns. Seems like I’m getting all the year’s returns in one month. This time on a nice projector lens I sold for $500.
Sales: CAD$1685, 11 items, COGS: $295 –> Item profit: $1124
Expenditures (incl returns): $1384 –> Cashflow: $36
Notable sales: best sale was $600 for 3 rolls of glass cloth tape.I spend $450 at an auction and got tons of stuff, which I just finished listing:
-Lathe parts including a nice chuck I’m hoping brings $500 or so. The rest of the parts are marginal but I listed them anyway.
-Two big boxes of roller bearings. I paid $11 for this lot and already sold ~10% of it for $300.
-A huge lot of cleaning solution dispensers for $3. I really regret this lot as I didn’t realize how gigantic they were, not to mention sticky and disgusting. I’ll get rid of them if no interest within a few months, trying to move them locally pretty cheap.
-Super heavy counterbore sleeving tool for $50. I don’t know yet whether this was a genius or idiot buy. Probably idiot.
-Gas valves, 6 for $75. These are heavy and annoying but each should bring $200-300 or so… EVENTUALLY.I had a crummy week – after last week’s big return, I had another $2300 refund on an envelope printer which was working when I sent it out but must have sustained some shipping damage, although I packaged it to death.
However I had a good sale to somewhat offset that and it looks like September should be just breakeven rather than a loss month.
I regret nothing! I think my bets were +EV, just outta luck.
Sales: CAD$2416, 8 sales, COGS: $428 –> Item profit: $1624
Expenditures: $3086 (including return) –> Cashflow: $-1033
Notable sales: last week picked up 110 notebook battery packs for $250, sold 20 of them now for $1200. So this is looking like a really good pick.Went all in on a local auction today, we’ll see what it brings. Looks like I lost out on most lots, which is maybe not so bad considering my cashflow’s in the dumps now.
I think about efficiency a lot, and also at work. There is a project management concept called “Critical path” that is particularly helpful, which Ryanne may appreciate if she’s not encountered it before. (Actual business implementations of this idea are not nearly as useful as having internalized the concept.) Basically, you are “on the critical path” when it’s up to you to perform a task, and other tasks (possibly done by other people) can’t proceed till you’re done. This helps you prioritize tasks. E.g., if a permit application for a construction project takes 6 months to turn around, there’s no point going into deep detail on other aspects of that project *before* you apply for the permit. So, apply ASAP and then work on the other aspects at your leisure.
Once you get used to the idea you find yourself using it for such mundane tasks as cooking a meal.
On Ebay. Unfortunately, my great sale of last week (photon counter) was indeed defective, which is too bad. I had to refund $2300 and I changed the other listing to “for parts”. Disappointing, but par for the course – I knew even when I shipped it that there was a good chance it’d be defective.
Apart from that refund I had a pretty good week.
Sales: CAD$1612, 8 items, COGS: $220 –> Item profit: $1126
Expenditures (incl. returns): $2581 –> Cashflow: (-$1235)
Listed: $250, 9 items
Hours: 8
Got a fancy microscope at auction; will be picking that up today.Great sale, amazing item! I am listening to Charles Murray’s Apollo history now as it happens.
That’s cool!
Smith manoeuvre is a little more involved than my summary above – the idea is you keep borrowing and investing until your HELOC+investment eat your whole mortgage. I suppose it is less attractive for Americans, who get to deduct mortgage interest anyway (we cannot do that on a primary residence here).
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