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12/17/2018 at 8:42 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 390: Building a Business to Build a Life #53482
You just made me realize why ebay is so satisfying. It’s paleo baby! It’s hunting and gathering! Our brains were honed by millions of years in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) to be thrilled at the sight of a juicy
woolly mammothtoner cartridge.12/17/2018 at 8:31 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 390: Building a Business to Build a Life #53479I bet! Man, once you guys get a legible inventory system and teach your helpers to ship, you’ll really have it made in the shade. :)))
12/17/2018 at 8:17 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 390: Building a Business to Build a Life #53476Regarding hourly rate as a way of looking at your eBay business, which is something I believe fairly strongly in. Jay, you’re right that a big part of that is having a busy life. Every hour I spend on eBay is STOLEN! Mainly from two places: my family, and sleep. I really have to make those hours count, hence my obsession with hourly rate. Do I enjoy eBay? Yes, absolutely – particularly scavenging. But I feel a strong need to justify that time spend (to my wife if no one else!).
You guys have often talked about not making a sweatshop for yourself. That’s hourly rate logic right there. I’m just trying to optimize as far away from sweatshop as I can get, systematically. Hourly rate is a way to think about that consistently, every single week instead of getting exhausted and then changing course.
You guys also emphasize freedom from employers, which I think is very compelling. Most folks who work 9-to-5 are very beholden to their employers, who (a) can crater their future careers if they so choose, and (b) provide benefits such as health & dental & insurance that they come to depend on. You can’t put a price on being able to feed yourself with or without an employer’s help, and that makes the direct comparison of hourly wage with a day job apples-to-oranges. It’s freedom! Who can compare $20/hr as a debt serf with $20 as a churl?
Anyway. Fantastic week! Even discounting my biggest sale, a good week.
Sales: CAD$3995, 15 items ($266/item avg)
COGS: $751 –> Item profit: $2657
Expenditures: $973 –> After-tax cashflow: $1744
Hours: 12, $146/hr
Listed: $1904, 16 items
Notable sales: sold some shunt diode barriers (25) for $2000. This pays off (with $1400 profit) the remaining COGS on a big auction lot from a few months ago. I never even knew I was getting these things with my lot, which is the best. Whole bunch of other random $50-300 sales. I shipped a lot of stuff this week.
Scavenging: went a little nuts last week. I bought a big lot of around 700 athletic compression shirts for $400. These are fairly standard-issue, and normal sizes this time, hopefully I don’t regret this bulk clothing buy. Very on the fence at the moment. Also, bought a weird surgical aid thingy for $425. It basically tracks the position of a physician’s scalpel during ACL surgery. This is either something that no one wants, or maybe I can turn it around for thousands. It’s an expensive, heavy, lottery ticket I guess.It’s true that resellers in reckoning profit forget the real costs – particularly time.
It’s also true that even once you take all that stuff into account, the ROIs can sometimes be incredible.
@sidehustlershane Nice job on the $19k! Now – is that net of unsold inventory cost?
I would definitely track hours. It’s really key info when you’re strategizing what kind of stuff to buy. I’m not super formal about it but every day or two I log the approximate # of hours for the past couple days in my sheet.
Personally I would NOT try to code hours to individual items – I tried doing that and it was way too much of a pain!
Thanks Inglewood, that’s super interesting. Our numbers seem pretty comparable. I worked 450 hours this year and my hourly rate is in the same range.
I simply do the post tax numbers by taking my item profit and slicing off my marginal rate. So I consider my day job to “use up” the lower tax brackets as it were. I can see how it’ll get a bit more complicated when you go full time!
I’m not falling for this elaborate prank, there’s no way a thing called a “pickle castor” actually exists.
Preach!
CAD$48… is that net of tax and unsold inventory cost?
I agree that your buyer is silly, still, I’d remove or sharpie all price tags. Never show the customer how the sausage is made.
One might even say… a miracle!
“I’m like the Warren Buffett of garbage. List it & forget it.”
One cool thing that happened this week is I noticed while driving near my work a sign for Chit Chats. It’s new to my city and a branch is 5 minutes from my work.
This is another place that ships via USPS for Canadians. Difference is, at 5 min from work it’s no longer a hassle to go there. Plus, their website is really slick, it connects to my ebay store so I can generate a label easily (although I can’t print it at home very well, but you can login and print at the store for free). I tried it for the first time this week.
I don’t think this is a game changer but it does make international shipping much cheaper for me. Like, a shipment to the Netherlands that would’ve been $160 cost me $60 this week.
What I’m really curious about is how different shipping to the USA will be. Haven’t done comparisons yet. It won’t be half price but even if it’s a 20% savings, that’d be great.
Edit: just tried one comparison and yep, for a typical 5 kg package to California, half price, from $68 to $32. Yeehaw.
I decided all my above goals are boring. So here’s my actual 2019 goal. Source and sell either one item for CAD$10k +, or $10k+ worth of one SKU if it’s multiples.
Reasonable for folks to have quite a bit of identity in their jobs. Work’s the main way that one is useful to other people. Trouble is, reselling has always been hard to sell as prosocial, we’re basically merchants and people tend not to see merchants as adding any value (wrongly, but there you go). One step from usurers, historically, is how we get seen. I sort of like to embrace the disreputability a little bit and joke about it. But I still have my respectable day job to cling on to as well.
Sales were good this week. I spent so much money on inventory, it amazes me I almost broke even.
Sales: CAD$1529, 9 items ($170/item avg)
COGS: $448
Item profit: $855
Expenditures: $1352
After-tax cashflow: -$270
Hours: 11, -$25/hr
Listed: $2910, 23 listings
Notable sales: fancy faucet for $800, bought for $150. Thought it was a mistake till it sold. Also 5 more face shields for $150 – this now pays off the lot of 60 that I bought for about $160. These are selling fast so this looks like a good buy – I have 54 more to sell. 3 silver forks for $75 from an ancient, huge lot, long paid off. And some smoke detectors for $160, paid $25.
Scavenging: HO BOY. I got me a lot of 146 actuators for 900 odd dollars. It’s all one SKU, which can be a blessing and a curse. Not a lot of sales history on the exact model, but similar ones go for $50-100. (I bought at $5 each). I hope I don’t regret going all in on these bad boys. Also spent about $200 on a huge lot of faucets and other plumbing supplies. Bid blind, so some were disappointing but I reckon it’ll be at least $2k.It definitely seems a pretty strange to me too, but that’s what he said. One part is true, at the time he was loading about 50 wheelchairs into his van, which lends some verisimilitude to his story.
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