Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Craigslist Hunter is interesting to watch because he’s consistently willing to pay way more for inventory than I am. If I can sell something for $100, the most I’ll pay is $20. He seems to be OK going up to like $50. Maybe he makes it up in volume but IDK…
Cool to see your numbers! I would say there are two other critical pieces of information: (1) net profit/costs, (2) time invested.
Weird problems with posting this… hopefully doesn’t get duplicated.
______________________________________
I had a decent week on eBay even without counting my biggest sale ever. I am pretty elated.Sales: CAD$4,180, 11 items, avg $380/item
COGS: $665
Expenses: $332
Net profit: $2,557
Hours: 11, hourly rate $232/hr
Listed: 13 itemsSo on Tuesday I finally met up with a guy on kijiji selling 25 beat up old barcode scanners (for warehouses etc.), after trying to arrange a meetup for a few weeks. Eventually I had to just duck out of work for an extra hour on my lunch break.
Guy’s basically an older picker who used to sell locally, now he has storage lockers full of stuff that he’s trying to unload. We settled on $560 for what turned out to be 39 scanners (plus some other odds and sods like chargers) after a bit of testing and tire kicking. I put up a listing for 2 of them to test the waters and got a message from a buyer who refurbishes these scanners. After a bit of back and forth we settled on $3,000 for all 39 scanners. So my profit comes to $2,000 after fees. Could have got more by selling them in smaller lots, but honestly I wanted to get some cashflow this week. Still have 44 batteries and some chargers to sell, should bring a few hundred more.
I am still in contact with the guy I bought from, so I may buy up more stuff from him if it looks good. He has more big lockers full of stuff and seems motivated. Also moved a couple toner cartridges for $460, they cost me $40. And some old odds and ends that I am pleased to have off my shelf.
It has not escaped my notice though, that that single sale accounts for 1/7 of this year’s profits and it only ate about 6 hours of my time (total hours clocked year to date: 363!). If that isn’t motivation to try to move up a weight class, dunno what would be. If only I could find these things every day.
I have decided to try a new SOP. Because storage is getting to be a critical problem (I’m now taking over a guest bedroom in addition to my basement storage room), I am going to set a goal of purging one item per month. At the end of each month I will choose a bulky item that needs to go, and give myself the next month to dispose of it by any means necessary – slashing the price & selling, or failing that donating/throwing away. Obviously I wouldn’t do this for items I know have great resale value, more the “for parts” listings etc. This month I am getting rid of a broken IBM Selectric.
Oh, and I learned one thing recently that doubtless all of you guys know, but maybe there’s somebody else out there mixed up like me. I do calculated shipping on everything, but I was always confused about what to do when a buyer asks for local pickup, as that’s not an option in the listing unless you do flat shipping. I now know that it’s as simple as invoicing the buyer and changing the shipping method to “local pickup”.
Our md’s dump actually has a “salvage centre” (i.e., thrift) attached to it. Good place to pick! The vintagy stuff is all marked pretty high but anything weird/industrial/automotive is a few bucks.
I reckon expensive thrifts are actually good, it filters out competition so the higher end flips don’t get bought up as fast. If everything’s $0.25 it’s all gone before you arrive.
Good morning! I am feeling good today, it was a good week!
Sales: CAD$1,716, 6 items, $286/item average
COGS: $337
Expenses: $406
Net profit: $726
Listed: 8 items
Hours: 6, $121/hr
Notable sales: Lot of 4 barcode scanners $215 $1260.
Scavenge of the week: got some good medical stuff this week including an EKG machine and a pipette beveler. Cost was $125 for these two but I’m expecting about $1200 out of them.My costs are quite high this week also because I bought a whole bunch of packing supplies.
I ALMOST bid on a huge 1500lb X-ray machine, but thought better of it when I changed my mind on the expected sale price. It did impress upon me though the need to get my garage heated so I could actually store such a thing if a good opportunity should come along.
Now to go listen to the podcast…. it’s become a Monday morning ritual. 🙂
Wow, cool podcast. I was actually wondering about that jacket because I was creeping on your solds on that Monday morning and saw it. Nice sale!
I had a good week on eBay, terrible week at home. Us and the two kids got a nasty stomach flu that stuck with us from Thursday to Monday, and I’m still quite weak from it.
Sales: CAD$653, 10 items, $65/item average
COGS: $138
Expenditures: $104
Net profit: $298
Listed: $1310, 9 items
Notable sales: perfume $25–>$125. This is the first time I tried selling perfume, looking good! That $25 paid for 3 more bottles that are also listed. Otherwise, just a lot of bread & butter stuff, as you say.
Didn’t scavenge anything all that amazing.Plausible to me it’s one side of an antique reel (for e.g., large wire or rope). However, typically those are not made from a single piece of wood, at least not these days.
Great podcast this week. Maximizing the value of my time is a huge preoccupation of mine on eBay. I am new, but I think I’ve done OK at keeping my sale price around $100… which does mean only an average of 4-5 sales per week. It means passing by a lot of stuff that could make money. I think I have done pretty well at getting even higher dollar sales, it seems like I can get $500+ every 3 weeks or so on average.
Many of those very big sales have one thing in common: *they are items used for productive purposes rather than personal luxury.* My current thinking is that this is how you scale. Organizations have deeper pockets than individuals, and even non-rich individuals are willing to spend more for things that help them make money, versus something cool for the house. Example: I just purchased a lot of 4 new inventory scanners for CAD$215, expecting to sell each for $200-300. We’ll see if that pans out for me, but if it does it will not be a grind!
The trick is finding this business/industrial/scientific/medical stuff… currently my obsession. I only really have one steady source of it at the moment.
Anyways… decent week this week, though it doesn’t look like it on paper.
Sales: CAD$416, 4 items, $104/item average
COGS: $15
Expenses: $353
Net profit: -$21
Hours: 7, hourly rate -$3
Notable sales: vintage IBM typewriter $5–>$175 (I CAN’T STOP FINDING & SELLING GIANT TYPEWRITERS PLZ HELP)
Listings: 11 items, at least $440My expenses were through the roof because of the inventory scanners I mentioned above.
I had some GREAT scavenging this week though, feel really energized again. 54 blank specialty tape cassettes for $5, should get me $200+, lot of 4 Givenchy perfumes for $25, should get me $300+. Never sold perfume before, but I thought to look ’em up thanks to you guys.
…And a huge cache of about 300 sewing patterns for $10. Some new, some used, mostly from the 70s. So here’s where your podcast is very apropos – lot these things up or do the grind? Need some advice here.
If I lot them up I think I’d get about $200-300 without burning more than a few calories.
On the other hand, I think they’ll ship individually in an envelope with a stamp… mostly a bunch of $5-10 sales BUTTTTT looking at solds, the odd one goes for $40-100. So I would only need to find like 5 of those kind to make more money than a lot sale. Have any of you guys sold these things? How often do you find a good one in a random lot? How do you price them? I figure the time invested is… well, about 30 minutes cradle-to-grave for the lot sale, versus maybe 30 hours to photograph, list, pick, and ship all the individual ones. I can’t make up my mind which way to go. It all depends how much more I’ll get from the individual sales…On the soap question. I love the idea that Ryanne makes detergent out of the slivers! That really is peak scavenger performance. I am partial to Jay’s method, but I find if you get a new soap out of the cupboard when the first one begins to be a sliver, and stick them together well, you can have an unbroken apostolic succession of soap without any strange multiple-sliver chimeras. Does this constitute one soap, or multiple soaps? I suppose it depends on your purposes in asking. Philosophers since antiquity have known this conundrum as the Soap of Theseus.
For the most part, my new stuff is government surplus. Also the odd NIB item from a thrift store.
That was a bit of a slow week, but acceptable.
Sales: CAD$405, 4 items
COGS: $73
Gross: $264
Expenditures: $136
Net profit: $128
Hours: 6, $21/hr
Listed: 11 items, $230 at leastNotable sales: Blue/green jadeite Aladdin lamp, broke a little in the car on the way home from that garage sale, still $50–>$150.
In terms of scavenging, I think I found some good sci/med equipment, we’ll see how it sells. Forked over $40 for one piece, a sonic sample homogenizer, think I’ll get over $400 but who knows. Also selling a surplus tampax dispenser. For all these great deals and more, visit my store at “E” Bay Dot Com.Sorry to hear the auction experiment didn’t go that well. I feel the same too: the kind of stuff I’d want to put up for auction (basically, bulky stuff that isn’t selling) is exactly the kind of stuff *least* suited for auctions.
I had a pretty good week on eBay. COGS was a little high because I sold some stuff on commission… pretty much done with that.
Sales: CAD$980, 8 items, avg $122.50
COGS: $231
Gross profit: $572
Expenses: $104
Net profit: $467
Hours: 8, $58/hr
Notable sales: kerosene lamp/heater combo, $45–>$425, sold to a guy on Baffin Island (fair ’nuff!)
Scavenging: nothing too huge to report. One thing I found was 6 big galvanized wash tubs for $5 each. I think I can sell these for $50 each. People here use them as planters… probably the best are going to end up in our garden come spring though.So you know that thing where people end all their listings and start new ones? It occurred to me there is a fairly easy way to test whether it works. What you would need is a big store, that has not seen any major changes in how it’s run recently.
* Compute the average # of sales/week for that store over a suitably large timeframe (see above, you don’t want to go so far back that the store was run drastically differently back then – if this were Jay & Ryanne’s store, I’d say 2 years would be about right based on my podcast retrobinging)
* End and relist all listings in the store
* Count the # of sales in the week following thisThe Poisson distribution would then give a pretty good idea of whether this was due to chance or not. Say you have an average of 50 sales/week and after you end and relist all, you get 75 sales the following week.
In Excel:
=1-poisson.dist(75,50,true)
gives the probability of getting 75 sales or more given an average of 50 (which turns out to be 0.04%, so this made-up result would strongly suggest the technique works).I would do this myself but I think my store is too small and my selling behavior has changed too much too recently, for the info to be worth anything.
One thing that has occurred to me is that when I’m watching an item and somebody ends & relists it, I do get a notification… is the burst in sales people say they see happening partly because of that?
Whenever I buy my 4yo son a toy or something he confirms that I’m not going to “sell it to somebody far away”.
And yeah, the number of relatives I’ve invented rivals the progeny of Chingis Khan
I couldn’t speak to big game but our bird was fine – think we just whacked its head, didn’t run it over.
I believe here you technically need a permit for harvesting roadkill… I do know a guy who runs a local secondhand goods store I pick at, and prepares game meat as a sideline, maybe I’ll ask him next time. “Uh, asking for a friend…”
Hat tip to the caller with the cool vacuum tube. That was one of my favourite sales, a giant vacuum tube from a radio station, sold for $150 I think.
Despite my dismal sales, I did have a scavenging success last week, but not for resale. Found 5 new-in-box sous vide machines for CAD$40 each in a thrift (usually these are $100+). I bought one because a coworker had raved about the method, and my wife tried it on some meat last week. We loved it so much, 2 days later I returned and bought the rest – 1 extra for us and 3 for Christmas presents.
You guys have no idea how great meat (and veggies etc.) turns out when you cook it this way… PERFECTLY even throughout, restaurant quality every time. Only thing worries me is heating so much of our food in plastic… but we ordered some silicone bags to that end.
