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10/22/2018 at 5:37 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 382: Treasure Hunting with a Fishnet #50572
Big Brassica has its tentacles in everything, maaan
10/22/2018 at 3:00 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 382: Treasure Hunting with a Fishnet #50559I had a funny experience on the weekend. Happened to see an auction sign at a local hotel and popped in. The ONLY thing they were selling was a collection of about 1000 (not exaggerating) Cabbage Patch Dolls, one by one. There were 6 auction staff and 1 single bidder, an old lady who by the time I got there had already won a big room full of the things. I listened in and they relotted 5 dolls on the fly and sold them to her for $10.
I looked them up and it seems like average price is $20 or so, with these being mint condition. Some go for hundreds, one apparently for $13k. But the boxes are so bulky, I didn’t want to bother with them. Plus the whole thing was very offputting, to be honest. I think I could have made a fair amount of money, but I wanted to get back home and finish yardwork. So I left and let one hoarder generation pass the torch to the next (presumably, she didn’t have the look of a reseller). Man, that was twilight zone stuff. No idea what kind of market for cabbage patch dolls they thought would just materialize in my town with zero warning.
Anyway, decent week.
Sales: CAD$733, 6 items.
COGS: $213 –> Item profit: $393 (high COGS is due to still paying off my big auction haul).
Expenditures: $105 (hand exercise bike for disabled, hoping for $600 or so).
After-tax cashflow: $399
Listed: $650, 9 items. I’m out of stuff to list!
Hours: 3.5, $114/hr
Notable sales: humidifier from my big haul $160, chimney liner kit $5–>$125. Nothing spectacular.I forgot to mention last week that I had a big $300 refund. I sold a *new, sealed* Rosetta Stone language course on amazon – turned out to be a fake. Had no idea anybody even faked those things.
Ah, gotcha. You’ve got the vertical dimension working for you too, which is nice. I only have 7″ ceilings.
Still, seems like your items are much smaller on average which is the main factor.
It’s still 99% shippable stuff! But yes, a typical item is 1-2 ft in at least one dimension, and it adds up.
I don’t have a plane, but I still managed to rent this 400 sq ft “office space” from the hangar owner. He was happy for the income as I don’t think things are very busy the past few years.
Heh, goes to show, it’s all about what you sell. My spaces are about 8’x8′ at home and 20’x20′ at the airport, so about half of yours, and I’m starting to feel the pinch a little with only 600 listings. A lot of my stuff is big and heavy.
I think I can probably get to 1200 before I’m really and truly full. That’s on the horizon, but not SO far off that I can’t see it coming.
J&R – just curious how your storage is holding up. How many years do you think you can source and sell at business-as-usual rates, keeping your helpers busy, before the warehouse is full?
I know my airport storage, that looked huge half a year ago, is starting to feel cramped. Though I mainly need to get more shelving.
Yes, the worst case was actually a few weeks ago with a commercial ice-cream maker I sold for $1800.
I didn’t follow my own advice as it was heavy to ship and I paid too much in COGS… net loss to me is about $400 therefore.
That’s the only major loss I’ve ever taken using this strategy, though.
Jay, re: testing. Good question. I have a whole sorta philosophy of testing.
First, I always do my best to test without spending any money. E.g., I have a multimeter, and a DC power supply. That often suffices to check basic stuff. At a minimum you can plug it in and see what happens. Some stuff has a self-test that will identify problems merely from plugging in.
Often, I cannot fully test equipment, however. Then, what I do depends on a few factors:
-In the context I bought it, would I expect it to be OK? E.g., if it was out on the floor of a business, chances are it was being used. Typically the auction houses identify stuff that the consignee knows is broken.
-Is it light & cheap to ship, or heavy & expensive?
-How much extra am I gaining in $ by selling “used” vs “for parts”?
Basically it’s a cost benefit from that info. If I am making $500 more used vs for parts, and it costs $50 to ship to USA/CAN, and I think it probably works, I’ll roll the dice. If typical shipping to CAN/USA is $200, and I’m not sure, I’ll probably list for parts.
However, and this is crucial I think – when you list “used” something not fully tested, you’ve got to identify that in condition notes. I write something like “unable to fully test, but full refund if not working.” In case the buyer’s purpose for it is time-sensitive and a refund doesn’t really make them whole.
This way of doing things is somewhat risky, which affects how much I’ll pay for stuff that’s iffy. Generally want to be into it for 10x plus. Usually that means even a “for parts” listing makes an OK profit.
I get burned pretty rarely. It’s definitely worth it.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by
simplicio.
To me the biggest impact is I can no longer do an entire listing on the app. Because I have a fair amount of downtime with my phone, it was nice to be able to churn through a listing or two on a lunch hour or whatever. Now, it’s very difficult to do that.
Not the end of the world but it’d be nice to fix it.
I’d be curious to hear about this Dickens village, for sure.
The app updated again, and is even more of a ridiculous chimera than before. It’s cycling through 3 different “looks” on the listing page semi-randomly. Sometimes I can see drafts, usually not.
I’ve developed a process where I start the listing and insert the photos on mobile, then complete on my laptop. It works kinda sorta ok, but man…
Solid week! Seems like holiday sales regime is in effect now.
Sales: CAD$2245, 11 items. COGS: $283 –> Item profit: $1609
Expenditures: $105 (rent on storage unit only, no scavenging) –> Cashflow after-tax: $1368
Hours: 9, $153/hr
Listed: $1065, 24 items
Notable sales: pipette beveller $110–>$1115, lab data collector $5–>$350. Several low-dollar but big items that I’m thrilled to get rid of. Couple of international sales this week, to China and Taiwan.
I only have about 3 listings left to do from my big auction haul. Then, I’ll be looking for stuff again.Re cancellations. I believe based on what people say that 90% of my cancellations come when a buyer buys based on the sticker price, then is surprised how high calculated shipping is. Theoretically they should notice this before finalizing the purchase, but I think they must assume the real shipping cost is just a placeholder until ebay auto-invoices them.
On high dollar items. One further note I would put on this discussion is that going for high dollar stuff changes where your time gets spent. Your time shifts from listing and shipping towards scavenging. Since I enjoy scavenging much more than the other stuff, I kind of like this ratio. I like to spend about 3 hours scavenging for every hour listing & shipping.
10/11/2018 at 1:45 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50046I find if I aim for high-dollar stuff, I still get plenty of low-dollar stuff as a side effect, either because it wasn’t as good as I thought it’d be, or because it came as part of a big box/table/sea can lot and I compulsively can’t not list it. But yeah, that stuff helps even out the bumps.
Another factor is lotting. You can create high-dollar listings out of thin air by lotting up multiples. Generally I try to lot stuff to about a $100-200 value as long as it makes sense that someone would want multiples.
10/11/2018 at 11:34 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50031There’s definitely some truth to that – the online auctions are “easy”, therefore prices go high.
You can gain that edge back by willingness to buy obscure/long-tail stuff. Prices go high for quick flips but I can routinely find obscure parts and stuff that go for 10x+ amounts. This is not vintagey stuff mind you, this is my business/industrial wheelhouse.
Also gotta bear in mind the bidders are a finite number of mere mortals like us, who may or may not have the cashflow/interest in an item in any given week. (Witness the same issues we talk about with ebay auctions.) Sometimes you snag something incredible for pennies. It takes 2 seconds to bid so I just put in lowball bids on everything I’m interested in, mostly they come to naught but when they hit it’s great.
>My goal would be to have it stocked with at least 500 items in that price range. The goal would be to sell 10 items a month for over $300.
Why do you want such a large high-dollar *inventory*? 😉
I bet you guys can find 5-10 items worth $300 in a given month. That might cost you about $200-400/mo in COGS. Just keep doing that as much as you can afford until your high-dollar sales are where you want them to be. Ideally, when you reach equilibrium, the things sell as fast as you can list & ship them. You may never get to 500.
I was curious and looked; I have 106 listings (some are multiples) of individual lots for $300+. My prices are inflated so maybe 2/3 of those are actually $300+ items. That’s out of 620 listings.
10/11/2018 at 10:12 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 380: What Do Lifetime Sales Really Mean? #50021Gotcha, that makes perfect sense. I guess the helpers are a real gamechanger.
On the high dollar items. I think it’s hard to source them in in-person auctions due to the all-day time burn. (I literally CAN’T do that, due to day job/young family.) That’s why IMHO online auctions are where it’s at. There are 3 major online auctions in my area, 2 of which are weekly.
One is in town. I can usually get 1-2+ items per week that’re worth $300+, usually for like $40 each. I can drive to inspect before bidding, but usually don’t unless it’s a really big outlay, or heavily used item. You get a feel for what these places are willing to put out on the floor, so I trust them to be mostly good items (and most of my stuff is new/NOB anyway). So the time burn for those items is about 1 hr/week of surfing the auction catalogue and 30 minutes to pick up the items.
The other is out of town, but they ship to you for very reasonable rates. Same basic idea there, therefore.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by
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