Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Good luck with free returns! It isn’t really on my radar, I think because it’s ebay.ca. I just hope it doesn’t get in the way of partial refunds as that’s how a lot of my cases end.
On adding a handling fee, my thinking is that your buyer has a certain willingness-to-pay for a given item (say $50), and you’re already doing your best to extract that from them with a high BIN & make offer. Adding an extra dollar handling fee just means they’ll be willing to offer $1 less for the item, on average. But I think the extra “unexpected” line item in the invoice may piss off the odd buyer, so IMHO it’s a negative, not neutral. Just my two cents. As a buyer I’d rather see $49 + $10 shipping than $48 + $10 shipping + $1 handling. Still… it’s only $1.
Not a bad week for sales, and I went and picked up 2 out of town auction hauls. Both were somewhat disappointing in the flesh, but I’ll still make decent money on them. I have a lot to list this week.
Sales: CAD$603, 6 items, COGS: $47 –> Item profit $458
Expenditures: $542 (auctions) –> After-tax cashflow: -$138
Listed: 4 items, $1910 –> Replenishment (listed$-sold$): $2048
Hours: 14.5, -$10/hr
Notable sales: HP transmission line tester $20 –> $248 – this is the cherry on top from a lot of barcode scanners I made $2k on a few months ago. Buddy also had this in his storage unit and although I had a distinct clenching feeling in my wallet after buying the scanners for $500, I yoloed and bought it.Yeah, theoretically I should be doing quarterly.
The easy workaround if you have a day job is to have payroll deduct extra, which I have now set up so I should be neutral or close next year.
OH MY GOD. Taxes.
I did mine this weekend. Must’ve blocked it from my mind.
The good news is that preparing them wasn’t too bad in the end and I will be able to do them myself henceforth, I think (using simpletax.ca). Assuming I didn’t screw it up and end up audited.The bad is that we owe $8000. About half of that is ebay’s fault, and half is due the fact my wife’s mat leave pay only remitted 2% in tax for some reason. I think that happened with our first kid too, but we were too exhausted by the first year of parenting to remember it happened in time for the second child.
Hey, the podcast is out! I will be listening anon.
This week pretty well ends the month, which was something of a milestone for me, as April was the first month in which I made more as a reseller than in my 9-to-5 eng job. I doubt it will happen next month, it’s mostly a matter of several really good sales clumping in April, and I am somewhat depleted of good inventory. Still, an encouraging sign as I still typically put about 8 hrs a week into reselling versus 40 into my day job.
A great standalone week for sales, too. But my scavenging slump continues.
Sales: CAD$4,099, 7 items, COGS: $610 –> item profit: $2,950
Expenses: $267 (mainly supplies) –> after tax cashflow: $2,644
Listed: 3 items, $245 –> inventory replenishment -$2,399 (boooooo!)
Hours: 15, $176/hr
Notable sales: the great 3.5” floppy disk pick is officially at an end. I sold the last 83 packs for $2,838 (cost for those was $175). So on the total pick, $565 COGS to $4310 profit. Best pick so far. Also a printer drawer $5 –> $315 (almost a year later).I also had my first freight experience. A while ago I bought an espresso maker at auction for about $200, not realizing from the online photo how heavy the damn thing was (about 170 lbs). It took about 9 months to move but I finally sold it to a guy on the other side of the country for $600 (after all the screwing around and money spent at hardware stores etc, I would say this transaction was breakeven). On Saturday I palletized it (not too hard, I just wrapped it, put a big hunk of cardboard over, and roped it to the pallet tied with a bunch of trucker hitches). On Sunday I took it to Air Canada freight in the back of my Honda Fit (fantastic little pickup truck, if you’re in the market). I think the buyer paid about $400 for shipping.
I might do an item like that again, but it would have to be really high profit. I feel like this one was a huge time waster. But freight no longer feels scary either, and I have some leads on shippers.
Tomorrow is an auction I’ve been looking forward to for a while. Hopefully I can finally get some good inventory listed.
Let’s say you have a nice big 2000 sq ft house. That gives you 2000 sq ft x 8′ = 16,000 cubic feet of space. Divide that by 300,000 and you get 0.05 cubic feet per item, which corresponds to an item about 4″ on a side.
IOW if you had 300,000 things the size of a grapefruit, it would literally fill that size house up from wall to wall to ceiling with no room for oxygen.
I don’t know how they came up with 300,000 things as an average, but assuming it isn’t a bullshit number, it’s certainly not the *median*. And although I’m sure rich people have somewhat more things than poor people, I don’t think the Jeff Bezoses of the world are generally known for hoarding hundreds of thousands of… what, snowglobes? in their penthouse apartments.
Yep, we have prime membership. It’s actually cheaper in Canada for some reason at CAD$79/year… possibly it’s the only thing in the entire economy that’s cheaper here.
We buy a lot of stuff on amazon (household goods like diapers etc.).
The panic over satanic music wasn’t the worst of it… people seriously suffered over the Satanic daycare panic. It’s certainly unthinkable now to get that worked up over Satanism, but it doesn’t seem like we’re free of moral panics generally. They just follow the zeitgeist.
Great pod! On the amazon/returns question… one data point but I do find when we are buying that amazon’s basically blank cheque on returns factors into whether to buy there or slightly more cheaply on ebay… ymmv.
I had a great week for sales but boy am I sucking at scavenging lately.
Sales: CAD$2605, 5 items, COGS: $267 –> item profit: $1947
Expenses: $24 –> after tax cashflow: $1761
Listed: 3 items, $110
Hours: 5, $352/hr
Notable sales: metallurgical saw $237 –> $2200
From an out of town auction… rolled the dice on this one and it paid off nicely. This was a beast to ship… 64 lbs, 25x25x25″ packed, cost $200 to get it to California. I had to use UPS as it’s beyond Canada Post weight limits.
There are some auctions coming up… hopefully I’ll finally get some inventory. I’ve started keeping track of my “shortfall” – sales minus newly listed $ – and this week it’s $1651 that I took out of the pipeline without replacing. So I’m coasting atm…Morning all! Haven’t listened to the pod yet, I’ll hear it on the way to work.
Fair to middling week for both sales and scavenging.
Sales: CAD$1,044, 2 items, COGS $846 –> item profit $52
Expenditures: $11 –> After-tax cashflow $875
Listed: $200, 1 itemBasically I divested myself of an item (robot coupe mixer) for which I paid way too much… ultimately almost broke even. Doesn’t make me feel too clever but I’m glad to get my money out of it.
Interesting episode. I will be finding out this very April how much of what Mark said applies to Canada. Just need to find a few hours to crank through my taxes.
Last week was decent, and I got a little listing done too which was nice. Still finding it hard to scavenge good stuff lately but hopefully my luck will change.
Sales: CAD$940, 6 items, COGS $100 –> item profit $694
Expenditures: $182 –> after tax cashflow $459
Notable sales: 6 of my medical wall panels $30 –> $540 ($418 net profit)
Notable buys: 3 ATV axles $15 apiece, should all be $120+
Hours: 9.5, $48/hrI have about 300 listings at the moment, goal is to list at least $1000 worth of stuff a week (my sales goal is $500 so that implies growth). I think I’ll hit that goal this week although the past two I’ve been living off the seed corn.
My thinking is that being willing to ship annoying items is a competitive advantage, inasmuch as other sellers won’t touch the stuff, so it’s rarer on ebay and cheaper to source.
Returns are a risk, and I’ve eaten a couple big refunds. But drastically outweighed by the profits. For heavy stuff, I am extra careful to test it and generally list as “for parts” if there is any lingering doubt.
Plus lugging these damn things around is the only exercise I have time for! 😉
I did well on one giant vacuum tube once… the others I had were loose and I think I got $100 for a lot of about 100 of them.
I think they’re super cool.
As far as profit goes, that’s a very complicated equation.
Generally I look for:
-Sale price $50+
-Sale price/buy price ratio 4+
-Interesting to me personally is a tiebreaker
-Quantity has to be evaluated differently, it magnifies both the potential risk and the potential reward…“-don’t buy anything too big or awkward in dimensions – the time it takes to pack and ship is never worth the profit.
-don’t buy anything too heavy (keep it under 2lbs) – heavier items cost more to ship, and people don’t want to spend too much money on shipping.”Have to strenuously disagree here. 2 lbs is a HUGE limitation, that would exclude like 90% of the stuff I sell. I have buyers paying $50-150 for shipping on the regular.
Sure, there are some items like fine china that always seem to break. But on the whole, you can pack anything with big boxes and liberally applied 1/2″ bubble wrap. It’s not that hard.
Example: a few months ago I sold an Optelec Clearview magnifying viewer, and shipped it. Bubble wrap and box probably cost me $10, and about an hour to pack. Sold for $750, profit was $483. This was the hardest thing I’ve ever packed, but was it worth it? For $483 an hour? Yep.
OK, that was an unusually good sale. A more bread & butter heavy sale: back in October I sold a broken microtome (weight: 63 lbs) for $90 + $120 shipping.
Kerosene heater, 16″ x 16″ x 20″, sold for $425 plus $174 shipping.
Printer tray sold for $95 + $160 shipping.
Vacuum cleaner $500 + $90 shipping.
Optics rail $200 + $90 shipping.
Ceiling fan $250 + $130 shipping.
Old copper switchboard (wall hanger) $150 + $110 shipping.
Waterski $80 + $94 shipping.Buyers will pay shipping for good items!
One caveat: you have to be VERY sure you won’t get a return on these kind of things.
