Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hah, great stories.
So last year I went on my annual duck hunting trip with my Uni friend. On the way back, driving the family RV, I stupidly neglected to fill up, because uh, I like the adrenalin rush of driving on fumes? IDEK.
So I had to pull over on a township road about 30 km from town. My wife had to bring me a jerry can, my son was thrilled to “rescue” me. Then she drove back and I followed.
On the way back, she flagged me down. She had hit a bird. So we drove back, then went slowly along the shoulder till we spotted a nice plump grouse. Jumped out, threw it in the back and went home… it was bigger than any of my ducks, and delicious. 🙂
This week has been absolutely brutal for sales. I got $500 in offers, but I am holding out for more on those items (toner cartridges), so I countered and did not get a sale.
Sales: CAD$63, 1 item (AIEEEEEEEE)
COGS: $5
Gross profit: $48
Expenses: $55
Net profit: -$7
Listings: 2, $50
Hours: 2.5It isn’t immediately actionable, but I do pay attention to it as a comparison to the 9-to-5, to get a feel for what kind of items are worth the time.
My 9-to-5 is fairly demanding, it’s a longish commute, and I’ve got a baby and a toddler at home. EBay consists of little segments of time stolen from lunch hours, family time, and most of all sleep. So I am trying really hard to get a good return on them.
Wow, cool cutting board!
I am definitely seeing sales pick up a fair bit. This week was the best I’ve had in a while although per the pareto rule most of that is accounted for by 1-2 items.
Sales: CAD$1777, 7 items, $253/item avg
COGS: $227
Gross profit: $1290
Notable sales: addressable smoke detectors (qty 13) $65–>$800, massage machine $12–>$300.
Expenditures: $84
Net profit: $1206
Hours: 12, $101/hr this week
Listings: 11 items, appx value $1540I like the analogy between list it & forget it and buy and hold. I found myself in the car on the way to work considering the similarities and the differences.
Where the analogy really works is the psychological dimension. An investor is a fool to look hourly/daily at their stock prices. The daily fluctuations in their net worth are garbage information, pure noise. Moreover the pain of seeing the ticker go down 1 point does NOT outweigh the pleasure from seeing it go up. Still worse is trading on a similar timescale. Apply to eBay: looking hard at watchers, views, etc, or worrying a lot that your items won’t sell and habitually adjusting prices are analogous to this kind of self-destructive investor behaviour. (I have to admit I look at watch counts a lot on my phone when I’m bored… gotta stop doing that.)
The main disanalogy, to my mind, is storage. EBay sellers pay storage costs that can be pretty high, even if not measured in monetary terms. What I am finding is that I can indeed keep making money by “feeding the beast”, but to maintain or grow eBay cashflow, I have to keep listing, and my # of listings keeps rising and rising. That’s fine as long as I have space to expand into but every time I get more storage, it gets filled up pretty quickly. I think every seller needs to deal with that somehow eventually, either by going all in and buying a new shed or renting storage or w/e, or by trying to price to sell fast. (The latter is very hard to do with long-tail items, unfortunately.)
That is really cool. Did you have a saved search or something?
Sales: CAD$556, 4 items
COGS: $170
Gross profit: $289
Expenditures (incl. new inventory): $184
Net profit: $106
Hours: 5.5 hrs, $19/hr
Notable sales: HP Universal counter $10–>$150
Listed: 4 items, appx $475OK week for sales, except COGS was too high (some items on commission). Spent a bunch of money on toner, should pay off handsomely but for now it’s just cost. Also got 3 obscure books on mediaeval literature for $0.50 each, I think they’re worth hundreds but we’ll see…
What percentage of what you guys sell is new or “new other”?
I would say a good 20% of my stuff is new. Almost anything I have in quantity is.
Good point, I hadn’t thought to just use search, lol.
But I think a specific search, like “shoes”, may not tell us what we want. If I do a search for the string “e” (most common letter of the alphabet), I get:
– Sold, used: 251k
– Sold, new: 781k (ratio: 3:1)
– Unsold, used: 1.69M
– Unsold, new: 7.52M (ratio 4.5:1)So I guess I was wrong.
I wonder what percent of listings vs sales are new.
TBH 80% of sales being new doesn’t surprise me that much because people sell commodity stuff (iPhone cases) in quantity. I bet the % of listings that are used is higher.
Didn’t do much eBay last week apart from shipping, but sales ticked along OK… mostly sales of old, big, bulky stuff I am happy to see leaving my storage room.
Sales: CAD$461, 5 items
COGS: $84
Gross profit: $295
Expenditures: $0
Net profit: $295
Hours: 3.5, $84/hr
Listed: $0
Notable sales: incubator bath $10->$170It is more and more obvious to me that I am becoming limited by lack of storage space.
Last week I didn’t put much into eBay and didn’t get much out.
Sales: CAD$236, 4 items
COGS: $65
Gross Profit: $118
Expenses: $0
Net profit: $118Sales were all bulky old junk, which is OK. Get it outta my house!
A little followup on the lightbulbs: similar such buys in the past have not turned out well for me. I think the key difference is, for a bulk buy, it EITHER has to be a high-demand, fast-moving thing OR your profit margin has to be fantastic. (Ideally both of course, but that rarely happens.) In this case the profit margin was great (I just got lucky that it sold so fast, IMO).
If you’re only doubling up AND the item is slow, it sucks, because eventually you get desperate to move the item, and there’s time for other sellers to come and undercut your price (and not so much room to move before you lose profitability).
So for the future, my test will be that if I *think* I can bulk sell for say $50/item, $20 or even $10/item should still be acceptable.
Good sales this week! I love it when I have quantity that I’m expecting to gradually sell, and one buyer just buys it all.
Sales: CAD$1160, 6 items
COGS: $124
Gross profit: $863
Expenditures (incl. new inventory): $31
Net profit: $832, 7 hrs, $119/hr
Listed: 9 items, at least $240
Notable sales: a few weeks ago I bought a bunch of low pressure sodium lightbulbs for about $2 each – total of maybe 30 bulbs. This week I sold 22 of them at $40 each, for a total of $880 (free shipping, so my profit will be about $650). I am happy because I had second thoughts at dropping $60 on those things, but I’m glad I did and I still have 10 more to sell!Most of my other sales were clearing out old junk for more or less breakeven. But I did also flip a toner cartridge for $5–>$166.
Not much scavenging this week. The 9-to-5 has been crazy lately.
Oh, regarding the bundled listings. I think it’s about search rankings. We all know cheaper items get seen more, especially if buyers sort by price, but if items are expensive because they’re a lot of N, eBay needs a way to rank a $100 listing for 10 t-shirts the same as a $10 listing for 1 t-shirt. So you should definitely make sure to fill this part in or you’ll lose views (I speculate).
Glad to hear you sorted out the gas problem OK. What I probably would have done is to try to siphon out the gas, pass out from inhalation of the fumes, and get taken to the local hospital.
Fairly slow week for sales, but a big one for buying.
Sales: CAD$425, 5 items
COGS: $156
Gross profit: $198
Expenditures (incl. new inventory): $374
Net profit: -$71
Hourly: 7.5 hrs, -$23/hr
Notable sales: Wedgwood china $10–>$100My big buy this week was surplus, new-in-box wall panels for doctors offices (the kind of thing you see blood pressure cuffs etc hanging off of). I bought quantity 62 at $5 each, so spent $310. There are about 6 sold listings on eBay, all for right around $120. I think this will be a very slow moving item but if I’m right about it, it should net me at least $3k. Hope I don’t regret going ALL IN on these things, the last time I made such a buy it turned out to be a bit of a dud. But the profit on these was too good to pass up. Listed on eBay and amazon MF.
Cool to hear your podcast! My wife and I have travelled very little but our honeymoon was Iceland, where we were lucky enough to stay with family for 2 weeks. Definitely worth exploring, although the prices are definitely crazy. It was a good way to start our marriage I suppose, with an “omg we need to reaaaally budget” realization.
Assuming my two outstanding buyers pay, this was a pretty decent week.
Sales: CAD$576, 6 items
COGS: $136
Gross profit after fees: $349
Expenditures incl. new inventory: $92
Net profit: $257
Hours: 11, hourly rate $23/hr
Listed: 9 items, at least $180 (some of this is experiments so I’m not valuing it highly)
Notable sales: $20–>$200 CB radio tester, Lot of 25 Dell keyboards $20–>$100, MCM starburst wall clock $20–>$75, Wedgwood china set $10–>$100.
Notable buys: Got a bunch of motorcycle exhaust system parts for $10… looks like I may clear $300 from all this but it’ll take some research. Also a bunch of taillights and stuff like that. Feeling like a real junker this week. Also bought a VRA speech pathology setup for $20, this was a total experiment but I think it could be a big payoff if it pays off at all.It is most definitely not a sundial. The “hours” if that is what they are, are equally spaced – meaning it would only work as a sundial at the north or south poles (not much market for those). Sundials are calibrated to latitude but they will have irregularly spaced hours.
It looks to me like it could be part of a wind-up timer, like an old school kitchen timer but a 12 hour version. You would set it by twisting the compass star. But that’s just a guess. Also plausible that it’s part of an astrolabe or similar instrument, but you know, if you hear hooves think horses not zebras.
