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Good morning everyone!
A fairly quiet week this week.
Sales: CAD$702, 6 items, COGS: $84 –> Item profit: $507
Expenditures: $523 (mostly shelving for my new storage unit)
Cashflow: $68
Hours: 5, -$23/hr after tax
Listed: $1970, 8 items
Notable sales: I had 2 sales for a total of $500 from a box of optical components I bought a while back for $52. There’s still a fair bit to sell from that lot.
Scavenging: bought some medical imaging film at auction for $10. It’s a large lot of the stuff and I’m hoping the total will be around $3000.04/17/2019 at 11:32 am in reply to: My ebay Income is about 50% less YOY from 2018 than expected #60393Interesting – what about quantity of new listings?
04/17/2019 at 11:30 am in reply to: My ebay Income is about 50% less YOY from 2018 than expected #60392Yeah, absolutely. I have a much smaller inventory than you guys so you’ve definitely front-loaded more, but I suspect recent items still play an outsized role in your sales.
A fun exercise is to find your sales for the trailing year ONLY from inventory listed 1 year ago and before. I call this my inertial sales. For me trailing year inertial sales were $18.8k as opposed to total trailing year sales of $55.8k (difference $37k).
So 66% of sales in the last 365 days were from stuff listed in those same 365 days.
04/17/2019 at 11:09 am in reply to: My ebay Income is about 50% less YOY from 2018 than expected #60385Did you have any high dollar items in 2018 that may have been outliers that could account for some of this difference?
Also, sorry, 2804 items – that’s your average total listings on ebay during the period in 2019?
If so, I really don’t think 25% more listings equates to 25% more dollars. This is the nature of the long tail – every year, the most long-tail things continue to pile up in your inventory. My data clearly shows the majority of my income comes from fairly recently listed items (3-6 mo), with older stuff providing a much smaller income stream.
So I’d be looking at the quality and quantity of new listings in between these periods as the most likely driver.
04/15/2019 at 4:27 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 406: Disposable Income, WTF is that? #60219Yeah, I don’t get what the pull is for the buyer to do off-ebay sales either. It seems counter to their own interests. I really dislike it because I know ebay has an algorithm that looks for this stuff and based on previous experience, it has a hair trigger. I’ve had convos get flagged as off-ebay sales just because a buyer mentioned which city they’re in.
04/15/2019 at 12:01 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 406: Disposable Income, WTF is that? #60199Good podcast. Yep, disposable income is definitely a weird term – I guess the original sense of ‘dispose’ in the sense of ‘at my disposal’ is meant, but it sure sounds funny now. I think of it as ‘discretionary’, which is maybe a bit better.
Yep, ebay is not passive income. I think perhaps the right term is deferred income? Like, you put in a lot of work up front and then at random intervals it pays off. The nice thing being, it does allow you to spin up the flywheel and then leave it to keep spinning when you need to do other stuff.
It seems these days like every second buyer is trying to coax me into off-ebay sales. Either “just invoice me through paypal” or “just send your address for cash/pickup”. Must just be a random blip but I keep getting it.
I had a really good week on ebay.
Sales: CAD$2342, 13 items, COGS: $462 –> Item profit: $1490
Expenditures: -$353 (i.e., a credit – this time from shipping insurance payout) –> Cashflow: $2306
Listed: $10, 1 item (ouch!)
Hours: 6, $295/hr
Notable sales: Optical comparator, part of an ancient lot of optical stuff – $420 (local sale). Pipe thawing machine $775 (paid $350 or so).I have not been sourcing and listing much! Need to spin up the rotors again!
I agree, and would add the following.
(1) People will always want to get rid of stuff that is valuable (to somebody somewhere).
(2) Many or most people will not want to put in the effort to sell it at retail prices themselves.
Why? because it takes effort, and it takes up storage space for potentially a long time to get top dollar.
(3) They can sell it for below-retail prices more easily, but that still leaves profit opportunity for us (garage sales etc.).
Our willingness to put storage space, time, and effort into selling is an edge in itself, as is our willingness to warranty items that were previously sold “as is”. When people talk about sourcing oppos going away, it’s like they think a stream of free money is inevitable drying up. It was never free money, you always had to work for it, and therefore it should never really dry up.
As long as reselling is a pain in the butt relative to chucking stuff (or getting rid of it for very cheap), we’ll always have inventory.
Enjoy your break!
I had a pretty good week.
Sales: CAD$1097, 8 items
COGS: $424 –> Item profit: $465
Expenditures: $1281 (mostly prepaying my new storage unit for $1015).
Cashflow: -$391
Hours: 5.5, -$102/hr
Notable sales: reel of fibre optic cable $105, this makes me happy because I have about 5 more reels and I got them all for like $5.Absolutely, any half decent sale price should make the lifetime listing fees on that item negligible.
That calculator will do the fees on an individual item. Ebay used to have one that let you calculate the optimal store size based on your selling numbers. It seems to be gone.
Morning all!
I have to disagree with the advice for a new seller to immediately get a store subscription. I get that it eliminates the psychological problem of people freaking out over listing fees (dime holding up a dollar!) but in sheer money terms it’s not worth it till you hit a certain level of sales/listings. I only got a store when I was up to about 500 items. There used to be a calculator that you could use to figure out which store (if any) made sense based on # listings and sales/month. Super annoying that it seems to be gone now. But you can calculate yourself based on:
https://www.ebay.ca/pages/help/sell/storefees.html
IMO it’s good to only get the store that makes sense dollars-wise… gotta stay scrappy. That anchor store is a big expense!
Anyway, good week for sales.
Sales: CAD$1271, 8 items, COGS: $60 –> Item profit: $984
Expenditures: $539 –> Cashflow: $505
Listed: $190, 10 items
Notable sales: endothermic mat $300 (bonus item from an ancient auction)
Hours: 22.5, $7/hr after tax
I spent so much because I moved all the inventory from my old storage unit to my new one, which necessitated a U-Haul rental ($180), and a new shelving unit ($230) among other things. MAN was this a lot of work. 5 hours Friday night loading the U-Haul, then 12 hours Saturday unloading into the new unit and getting the other two loads.I purged quite a few things. I want the new unit to have room for expansion and I was depressed looking at these old old HUGE items that have seen no sales. So, I’ll take them to the dump next Saturday.
Feels good not to have paid a dime to the new owners of my old storage unit.
Every time I buy that stuff it weighs 4x what I thought. Can be great margins though.
What I most dislike about these items is the combination of weight & volume which means they have to sit on the floor of my storage rather than on a shelf. So they eat a whole ~4 sq ft or whatever and I have to step round them. Seems trivial but matters once the shed starts filling up.
Yep, thanks! I hope it will help us pay down debt ASAP.
If I built a building it’d be something like 12’x24′. Could possibly even go bigger, to 12’x40′ before we hit our property line.
The 12’x24′ looks like it’d cost CAD$6000 built or $5000 for a kit. I may still do it but I don’t have the cash at the moment and certainly don’t have the time to build it.
Congrats to your wife on her impending freedom!
Not sure I should admit this but uh… whenever you guys get all nitty gritty about $5 shipping rate discrepancies I giggle. I made $3500 in shipping profit last year. =)
Mostly because I charge my buyer calculated Canada Post and then ship Chitchats.
I know it’s frustrating when buyers cancel but I don’t think a policy change is needed. The main problem is just violated seller expectations. Gotta calibrate to the fact that a sale doesn’t real until the buyer pays. I don’t do a damn thing, not even update my spreadsheet, till Paypal notification comes in.
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