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I probably need to seek some advice if and when I decide to jump back into books. Probably any rank below 2M, with expected profit $25+.
Yeah, last week I actually sold one such item which was an experiment. A pediatric gait trainer walker thingy. Sold for $360 only I screwed up royally on shipping and had to beg the buyer for extra, which they provided (split the extra, basically).
But yeah…. good money there, if you can store it!
I would use it in a very limited way, for newer, shorter tail stuff and for books. My mistake last year was sending in tons of super long tail books and CDs that wouldn’t sell. It’s only $20 a month so even though I don’t find much brand new short tail stuff, it’s not hard to justify.
I partly want to do it because I find books sometimes, but it’s not profitable to sell them on Amazon MF in Canada due to our high shipping cost (unless they’re like $50+). We pay typically $15 or so to ship a book domestically, $20 to the US, so it just kills your profit. Same time, selling books on ebay is too much of a pain in the neck due to the long listing process vs just a scan.
– Not be so precious, and accept decent offers, especially on lower dollar/bulky stuff. Inventory grows way faster than sales do so I gotta do this or get swamped by the logistics of huge volumes of stuff.
– Acquire more storage space and reorganize my existing storage unit with numbered shelves. The stuff at home is organized but at my storage unit it’s a disaster.
– As a cashflow-limited seller a perpetual problem is being short of cash due to “nickel and diming yourself to death”. Meaning, buying a hundred little individual items for 5x or 10x that aren’t that amazing. Need to keep a big wad for the really big opportunities when I want to go all in on something substantial.
– Sell more locally for greater exposure & to mitigate the risk of being primarily on one platform.
– Give Amazon FBA another try? I don’t think I really gave it a fair shake last year.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by
simplicio.
I use the unpaid item assistant and it does do its job of relisting after the case closes – for one-of listings. But as soon as quantity is involved it falls apart. *shrug*
I have a little tidbit but it may save a fair amount of time in aggregate.
For those of us who reuse amazon boxes… there is NO NEED to mask all the barcodes that’re printed directly on the box. They basically just give box dimensions. They don’t, as far as I understand, interfere with the post office’s tracking – or else the original amazon shipments would have problems.
So you don’t have to fuss those. I’d still mask the SKU sticker though.
Since other folks are reporting November numbers too.
November report:
Sales: CAD$4506, 41 items, COGS: $1127 –> Item profit: $2643
Expenditures: $960 –> After-tax cashflow: $2123
Hours: 29, $73/hr
Listed: $4085, 48 items
STR: 0.8%
After-tax cashflow was about 1/2 of my 9-to-5 net income. Full replacement being the long term target. Solid month, overall.Sales: CAD$1598, 11 items, COGS: $642 –> Item profit: $688
Expenditures: $338 –> After-tax cashflow: $813
Listings: $1198, 9 items
Hours: 4, $204/hr after tax
Notable sales: pediatric gait trainer walker $360, paid $30. Mind you I still have to ship this tonight and it’s not gonna be fun. Electric motor $25–>$200, spirometer $350–>$550. It was a mistake to sell this last one so cheap, I dunno what I was thinking. Oh well, the cashflow is really helpful right now at least.
Scavenging: Listed a big lot of 60 respirator face shields, I paid $140 for the whole thing. Sold one for $40 the next day, which seems to bode well. Hopefully they sell consistently.
Looking, looking, looking for another couple home runs before christmas.A bankruptcy followed by a sky burial, cool.
In general, processing & listing is not my bottleneck, however I have found a couple efficiencies recently.
– Previously I put every item on a scale and measured it with a tailor’s tape measure in 3 dimensions. Now I have got better at guessing weights and only put items over 2 kg on the scale, and I measure with my hand. If I stretch my thumb and pinky out as far as possible away from each other that’s about 20 cm (8″) so I just use that to measure objects. (Obviously when shipping I do the accurate measurements.)
– Related, I no longer write either of these measurements (weight or dimensions) down at the time of processing. I take a photo of the scale measurement (if applicable) and a photo of my hand as above, for scale against the item. Less precise but it means the whole process is camera based, no typing. I type the measurements in afterwards, during listing on the PC. This means processing typically takes 10 seconds instead of about 1 minute.
– Descriptions are just copy/paste of the title.
– When researching price in the field, take screenshots of the completed prices on your phone. It saves doing the exact same pricing research at the listing phase.On reflection, the biggest hole in my process is consistency and scaleability in scavenging. I often exhaust all my sourcing locations/websites and go to marginal locations (thrift shops) to pass the time. Occasionally this pays off but usually it’s a waste of time.
So the biggest improvement I could make is to get inventory to come to me, or to find more places to source from – particularly online.
Want ads on local websites? Learning to source on ebay?
What’s the appeal of this versus a tape gun?
11/27/2018 at 9:58 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 387: Do Black Friday, Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday Matter? #52339Curious what his storage looks like, now!
Great topic. For the whole process here’s roughly where I spend my time.
Scavenging: 60%
Processing & listing: 5%
Customer service (mostly shipping inquiries): 5%
Picking: 10% (I have a 10 minute drive to my storage unit, which has 1/2 of my inventory, which accounts for most of this)
Packing: 10%
Shipping: 10% (5 minute drive to post office accounts for most of this)So really, the greatest improvement would be if I could scavenge faster/better. I don’t have any big ideas though.
11/26/2018 at 1:46 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 387: Do Black Friday, Small Business Saturday or Cyber Monday Matter? #52294Ehhhhhh
The article says: “Adobe projects that 70 percent of online sales will be driven by just 1 percent of SKUs”
Is that surprising, given the truly vast number of SKUs in existence? Remember, every edition of every book on amazon is a SKU. Every model and colour pattern of every coil ring notebook is a SKU. I bet a huge portion of amazon SKUs are basically dead because the product is superseded or long tail or whatever.
So I suspect the news is really “lots of SKUs are basically defunct”, not that buyers are only buying like 10 things.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by
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