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Had a nice long weekend, we went to our first Airbnb in a town we like to travel to, which was a great experience.
Ebay was pretty dismal this past week. But I did do some work in storage which will hopefully serve me well. I put the last possible shelf up in my current storage unit and completed most of my inventorying. This allowed us to clean up the basement so my workspace is MUCH cleaner and my kids can play there again. However, I will need to rent another storage unit soon if I want to keep scavenging because my house and my current unit are essentially full.
Sales: CAD$387, 4 items, COGS: $48 –> Item profit: $274
Expenditures: $356 –> Cashflow: -$34
Listed: $270, 5 items
Hours: 8, -$5/hr
Notable sales: car headlight bulbs for $130.
Scavenging: Not much. Got a balometer for like $30, hoping worth $300.You mentioned the experience of walking into an expensive thrift store and leaving if it doesn’t look promising. I no longer shop at thrift stores unless I’m just killing time, BUT before, I found expensive ones are sometimes more profitable if you look for big ticket items. A thrift that prices everything for a dollar, when it gets something really special – prices it for a dollar and it’s gone within the day. A thrift that prices everything at $20 prices the special thing for $20 too, even if it’s worth $200. And it’s *still there* when you show up, because it wasn’t bought by the first picker whose eye it caught. It’s a different kind of filter, and it works for you as long as you can swallow paying $20 for an item.
I had a decent week.
Sales: CAD$1124, 9 items, COGS: $115 –> Item profit: $823
Expenditures: $378 –> Cashflow: $560
Listed: $2130, 25 items
Hours: 10, $57/hr
Notable sales: electrical cabinet $0–>$200 from a long ago auction, dust filters $20–>$220.
Scavenging: got some good buys this week. Big box of fancy security cameras for $50, hoping it’s all worth around $1000. An auction haul included a big box of various hydraulic filters for $140, some are cheap but a couple are worth $200-500 range. Fluorescent lightbulbs for cheap too, should be $500 or so for all of them.Looks like I’m doing an out of town auction pickup this coming week too…
I can imagine that running two separate stores is a good division. If my wife should happen to get interested in ebay that’s probably the way we would go, at least at first.
My wife is not involved in my eBay business, though she supports it. So I don’t know about working on paid work at home with a spouse. But I believe if two people are butting heads at work, what’s often at fault is failure to delineate separate responsibilities. The solution is to parcel out responsibilities and give both parties their own pieces of the business, for which they are accountable. For example, the Czar of shipping and the Czar of listing, each in their own separate Imperium. Or, the Task-Oriented one and the Big-Picture one (this is a bit more hierarchical, which may be fine with you or may not). Conflict comes from two people having the same responsibility and blaming the other instead of discharging their portion. In the corporate world I’ve heard the term “two-in-a-box” for this troublesome arrangement, and likewise the military is very skeptical of co-command, for good reason (only example I know of that worked well is Lewis & Clark).
I had a good week.
Sales: CAD$1145, 4 items, COGS: $25 –> Item profit: $935
Expenditures: $91 –> Cashflow: $869
Listed: $515, 11 items
Hours: 8, $109/hr
Notable sales: truck part from an ancient auction $280, more VOIP phones $350, half the remotes I bought last week $25–>$405.
Scavenging: a whole bunch of surplus lab/medical equipment for very cheap ($2-$5 each piece for ~8 pieces that should be $100+ each). Instrument sterilization trays, mainly.What’s inventory $ risk?
If I ever have enough money to spend on luxuries the first luxury will be weekly housecleaning. Imagine buying a speedboat before you have even ONE servant.
A new life awaits you in the offline colonies
Yeah laundry sorting is the absolute worst. Especially the socks, half of whose mates have gone looking for a better life elsewhere. Piles of clean laundry sit on our bedroom floor for days/weeks. I have reached the stage of Acceptance and now refer to the arrangement as our Turkish Closet.
While we’re talking about offers though… one thing I would LOVE is for ebay to display FOR ME the calculated shipping cost to a buyer whenever they message me about an item. For whatever reason many buyers can’t see the calculated shipping and so they ask for quotes (I still don’t know if this is an ebay bug or just inexperienced buyers). I then have to bring up the ebay shipping calculator, look up my item’s dimensions in my spreadsheet, look up their postal code etc. Ebay, just show me the calculated shipping rate that you should be showing them!
Good to hear from you guys! I am embarrassed how many times I refreshed your site to see if it was live, the podcast is like a weekly ritual for me now. 🙂
Yes, kids definitely make productivity hard. Most of my ebay stuff happens after our 2 and 6 yo’s are in bed for that reason. I once tried to do my day job from home and it was a disaster. I think I got like 10 minutes of work done all day.I have to disagree on immediate payment for offers and auctions. At least, keeping other ebay infrastructure constant. Probably 1/3 of my sales involve some sort of prearranged deal on shipping such as a quoted shipping price (overriding the calculated shipping), free shipping, or local pickup. The buyer relies on me to invoice them after sale for the appropriate amount. Ebay would have to make offers more detailed (including specifying a shipping method and cost) before it would work to immediately take that money out of their account. Plus, to be frank, it’s annoying but it’s not really a big problem if 1 item out of my 650 is unavailable for a few days because a buyer flaked. All in the game.
Sales: CAD$1237, 8 items, COGS: $75 –> Item profit: $950
Expenditures: $356 –> Cashflow: $669
Hours: 11, $30/hr after tax
Listed: $2085, 14 items
Notable sales: more voip phones, total of 50 for $375. Maybe should note, this is an experiment with promoted listings that seems to have worked out well. Also a pump probe for $375.Got some great scavenging in this week. On Saturday I had to haul some stuff to the dump, so I stopped in at the dump thrift store and got a big box of brand new sealed identical remotes for $25. there are 62 remotes and I see lots of solds for USD$10 each. Some lot sales too… so this should be worth $600 at least. Also some random biomedical equipment at surplus for very cheap.
I also snagged 17 Herman Miller chairs for $5 each on Friday, which I posted about elsewhere in the forum. Going back to try to get more today at lunch – fingers crossed. Most of them have tables like for a lecture hall, but I believe the shells alone should be $100+ each. A lot are bright orange and in mostly good shape. In order to make room in the car, I took the first carload to a vintage furniture shop a few blocks away and put them on consignment – we’ll see how that experiment pans out. Yesterday I got 10 more.
I believe that, given the risk that long-tail items never sell at all, it is best not to put too many calories in up front. I’d only clean them if it’s very easy and/or you expect it to increase the sale price by like, double or something.
Yep, they all say Herman Miller. I think I will ship them like that… not much more of a pain than some other packages. 🙂 Trying to sell them locally too though.
That’s a great point – especially if the legs come off as two seperate pieces it might be very shippable. The table can come off but the metal arm it’s on is welded on, so that’s not going anywhere.
These are from a university, which explains the side table thing. I do feel like your typical collector prob doesn’t want the side table… BUT it’d be easy to oxy cut the thing off, or simply sell the shell.
Thanks for your advice!
Took 10 of them straight to a vintage consignment shop so I could load up again. So now I’ve got 17 total.
Buddy at the consignment shop is going to list them for $179 each, of which I would see 55%.
He doesn’t want the ones with tables… yet. So I still have to decide whether to sell them whole or just sell the shell. The new 7 have nice clean bright orange shells.
Strike while the iron is hot! Call and ask for higher limits!
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