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One thing that is interesting to me is that when we hear about resellers in the media, it’s usually people from first-world countries reselling to people from first-world countries.
Given there is profit in these pallets *but at a relatively low effective hourly wage*, why aren’t we seeing say Mexico as a clearinghouse for American used goods to be sold back to Americans? (Or maybe it is and I just haven’t seen the reporting.) Mexican median household income is like 25% of the USA’s after all, so a pallet that’s a bust for an American hustler might still be quite profitable relative to the alternatives.
Is it expensive to ship from Mexico to USA? Is it more profitable to buy pallets and sell them in Mexico domestically? Why is this dog not barking?
I track my sales carefully in my spreadsheet and have many times compared them to the numbers ebay shows in various places (60 day, lifetime sales, etc…). Ebay’s numbers are always laughably wrong, sometimes by a factor of 2x or more.
You really have to either live without these numbers or track them yourself, because ebay just gives you garbage.
I plugged in the numbers out of curiosity —see for yourself.
40k sales/mo is just a wild guess. But the upshot is, a store sub probably would save Pete about $1k/mo in fees.
(That’s significant for sure, but I thought it would be more… BTW this sheet is for Canada, I assume the US fee schedule is similar.)
Anyway, so any change in page ranking or whatever rationale he has, would have to be worth ~$1k/mo to justify itself.
So are you guys feeling pumped about scavenging more once the rentals are more squared away, or are you looking for your next real estate baron fix?
Good week on ebay.
Sales: CAD$1473, 13 items, COGS: $336 –> Item profit: $870
Expenditures (incl returns): $1031 –> Cashflow: $175
Mostly these costs are inventory, and a big return on a faulty PDU.
Listed: $863, 18 items
Notable sales: fume hood $325 (paid $10), various other odds & ends.
Scavenged: a bunch of fiber optic stuff, haven’t gone through it yet. $300 or so.I used to run into Selectrics all the time. They are such beautiful machines! I used to clean them up and sell them, but I stopped – they’re too heavy and sell too slow for me.
Yeah, I’ve batted around the idea of building on our existing lot, but the space we have is about 15×40, which is not big enough for serious future expansion. More importantly, it’s a nice residential area and I don’t think the neighbours would appreciate it.
Hey guys, good podcast. Agree with others Jay, your occasional stutter is no big deal to me as a listener whatsoever, & much obliged for the continued work you do to keep this community alive.
Ebay was pretty good to me this week.
Sales: CAD$1864, 6 items. COGS: $342 –> Item profit: $1220
Expenditures: $1119 –> Cashflow: $444
Hours: 10, $45/hr
Listed: $415, 5 items
Notable sales: HVAC balancer $800, bought for $300, fire alarm circuit boards $216 (zero cost old lot), PDU for $230 (bought for $30 or so).Buys: a couple weeks ago I bought a whole bunch of hoists from a construction company moving offices. Although I regret that buy, they did contact me again to see if I wanted some other stuff. Shop lights, monitor stands, exit signs… all new or open box. So I agreed to $325 for 3 pallets of this kind of stuff – got one of the pallets Friday.
I have listed lots of this kind of stuff before and I am on the fence about it. On paper, the prices are high – say $300 for one box. But it is bulky, and it is mostly NOT popular to the point of where, I’m not sure there’s a market AT ALL. But I offered them the cheapest price I thought they might accept and they were hungry enough. So I can live with it for the price I paid.We had a good weekend, went on a nice easy hike with the kids that ends at a waterfall & had a dip there. I finally took possession of my new storage unit on Saturday and bought two steel shelves ($250 each) to start filling them up. Feels good to have capacity again.
I am now paying $365/mo for storage. It’s not lost on me that a payment on a $200,000 mortgage at 3% would be about $800/mo… so if I expand much more I might look into buying warehouse space, or just buying some land that has a big shop on it. Even right now, there is a place in our downtown for $250,000 with a nice big quonset, for example. I kinda want to acquire some rural land anyway, but I never had a way to make money off of it before. Potentially, this would allow me to justify the expense. We’ll see!
07/08/2019 at 10:46 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 418: Brick & Mortar Store Is Not For Us #64627Gotcha. There is some truth to that. The actual existing sellers are tending now to hang out on discord chat.
07/08/2019 at 9:35 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 418: Brick & Mortar Store Is Not For Us #64621Just curious why you’re worried about the r/flipping crowd. I have my reasons for not posting there very much but curious yours.
07/08/2019 at 12:33 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 418: Brick & Mortar Store Is Not For Us #64608Did I understand you rightly regarding your new building, that you are taking on commercial tenants but not running a new front-facing business yourselves?
I had a really good week on eBay, I seem to be on a streak lately.
Sales: CAD$2225, 11 items, COGS: $193 –> Item profit: $1698
Expenditures: $536 –> Cashflow: $1335
Hours: 7, $191/hr
Notable sales: 14 voip adapters $510 paid $70, shower head $360 paid $60.
Not much scavenging as I was out of town Wednesday & Thursday. Of course, while I was away we had to have our basement drain back up, which meant my ebay lair’s carpet got soaked. Now that I’ve got the clog cleared, drying it all out. Doesn’t help that storage is a mess as I’ve been delayed in acquiring the new storage unit.I’ve dabbled in this as well. US shipping to Canada being generally ridiculous, it’s hard to make any profit. I have one outstanding experiment right now however.
Hi guys! I am not averse to moving to reddit, especially if it saves you guys trouble. The threading on reddit is defininitely a lot more intuitive in how it handles conversations and sub-conversations. I find this old school forum style tricky to follow, tbqh.
I had another pretty good week.
Sales: CAD$1488, 7 items, COGS: $91 –> Item profit: $1159
Expenditures: $887 –> Cashflow: $363
Notable sales: 11 POS devices, $840
Scavenging: paid $500 for 7 Tirfor winches, and about $150 for 12 SCBA air packs. I regret buying the winches, because after much reflection I can’t in good conscience list them as “used”. Normally it’s not a big deal to risk an item being broken but in this case it could be dangerous if one were to fail catastrophically. And these are quite rusty. So I listed for parts. Should still make money but I never would have bought, had I thought it fully through.Incidentally, this June was my best month ever for total gross sales at CAD$10,506.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by
simplicio.
Nice, that’s a good sales/cogs ratio & hourly rate!
Just my two cents but I believe explicitly tracking inventory $ risk is not worthwhile. It kind of locks in sunk costs thinking. You can’t get that money back – now you just have a bunch of assets (inventory), which should be disposed of in whatever way makes most sense.
06/24/2019 at 12:04 am in reply to: Answers on Finance, STR, and ROI to Mr Vintage Estate Liquidation from eBay #63984It’s plausible to me that eBay rewards quick turnover with eyeballs, but if so, why are they being so damned coy about it? If it is supposed to encourage quicker sales, why not say “Hi, we’re giving you higher placement because you’re selling stuff quickly”? Wouldn’t that impact seller behaviour more reliably than a bunch of mixed signals and whispered conspiracy theories?
Only thing I can think of is, they’re worried that if they state the metric, somebody will game that metric. So on that logic it’s better to be opaque. Seems a little too clever for ebay though.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by
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