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Good to hear your update. That’s cool that the rental is done, it must be a load off!
I had a decent week for sales, 3 good sales and 2 of junk. Both make me happy.
Sales: CAD$423, 5 items, avg $85/item
COGS: $42
Gross profit after fees: $309
Expenditures (incl. new inventory): $117
Net profit: $192
Hours: 13.5, hourly rate $14/hr
Listed: 14 items, at least $650 value
Notable sales: I mentioned last week that I got about 80 sockets for $10 at a garage sale. Well I was going to sell them individually but I got lazy and lot sold the Snap-Ons for $150. That leaves the others to dispose of for I dunno, maybe $50. Also sold an MCM teak wall clock $5–>$64, and an old car security system NIB $7–>$125.Did some solid scavenging and listing this week too, we’ll see how it all pans out. Riding helmets, exit signs, a whole bunch of wire, a vintage table hockey game, we got all this garbage and more on ebay dot com.
No huge home runs but I am looking at a possible big buy this week.
One of my better sales weeks in a while. Good mix of high-dollar stuff with a bit of old junk I’m glad to get rid of for anything.
Sales: CAD$782, 8 items
COGS: $80
Gross profit: $559
Expenditures (incl. COGU): $88
Net profit: $471
Cashflow: $551
Hours: 8.5, hourly rate $55
Notable sales: vintage diapers $5–>$125 (yes I’m serious, yes they sold within SECONDS of listing); optical rail $20–>$200, cool big copper “steampunk” electrical switch board $20–>$150.Tried an experiment on the weekend, went to a garage sale (turned out to be a fellow picker getting rid of stuff) and bought a big box of assorted sockets for $10. Remembered reading the Snap-On ones have some resale value, so gave it a shot. Turns out there are about 30 or 40 Snap-On sockets there, each selling for $10 or more when I look them up individually.
I generally don’t like selling one-ofs for that little, but being so easy to ship maybe I’ll make an exception if I can pare down the listing to a really bare-bones template. The trouble with these is you don’t seem to get much for lot sales, I think because the market consists of people looking for one particular socket or set of them, and my box is just a jumble.
Also hit my selling limit at $27k. Didn’t really notice that issue coming. Going to call ebay today.
Material looks to me like resin, intended to imitate ivory. As for the script, I’m kind of at a loss. Overall look is similar to katakana but on inspection, probably not… there’s for example that weird character that looks like two pi symbols…
Terrible week for sales! I only really had two sales; luckily one buyer bought multiples. Didn’t do much scavenging either.
Sales: CAD$231, 4 items
COGS: $31
Gross profit: $161
Notable sales: 3 used medical “lead” vests for $50 each to same buyer, bought for $5 each.
Expenditures (incl. COGU): $134
Net profit: $27
Cashflow: +$58
Hourly rate: $5/hr, 5 hrs
Listed: 10 items, ~$1010, total 223 items/~$9600.
Notable buys: a whole lot of fluorescent and low pressure sodium lightbulbs. The price was right and the sale prices are good… hopefully they sell in some remotely reasonable timeframe.Storage is quickly becoming a problem for me, as the niche I have done best in (basically, lab & medical stuff) tends to be big, clunky things. I am at about 75% of my storage capacity with 223 items but to get where I want to be for sales numbers, I’d probably need double this inventory. That being said, a lot of my old inventory is junk I wouldn’t buy again. I am really getting motivated to just turf it to make room.
Pretty sure it’s a C-5A Galaxy. Can’t be a Hercules because it’s a jet not a prop plane.
Something that I always forget is how clothing-heavy most scavengers’ stores are. You can see these guys have clothes down to a science.
I think I am team attend some things and forget others. I usually attend stuff that I’m into for a lot of money and need to move, or is taking up a lot of space, or has a market that diminishes with time.
For example I have 20 units of a CPU hanger thing that is in pretty big boxes taking up an entire wall of shelving in my garage. I am trying pretty hard to move those babies, tweaking prices etc. But some weird knickknack? Put a crazy price on it and forget it.
Another good week for sales, though for some reason they all came early in the week. Clumpy sales gonna clump.
Sales: CAD$409, 5 items
COGS: $40
Gross profit (after fees): $302
Expenditures (incl. new inventory): $60
Net profit: $242
Hours: 5.5, hourly rate $44/hr
Cashflow: +$282
Listed: 12 items, $255+Notable items: gigantic vacuum tube $0–>$140 (part of a lot that already paid itself). This thing was suuuuper cool and I really hate to see it go. But obviously the person who bought it likes it more than I do.
Scavenging this week was not stellar, but it was *cheap*, which is something I need to focus more on. Best item was a box of fluorescent lights, should bring $100 for $5 cost.
Pretty good week for sales.
Sales: CAD$514, 6 items
Notable item: Trail camera #2 of 3, bought for $25 each, sold for $200.
COGS: $126
Gross profit: $307
Expenditures: $201
Net: +$105
Hours: 15, hourly rate $7/hr (ouch!)
Listed: 14 items, worth $320+, total listings 211On Saturday I moved my entire eBay area to our basement from where it was on the top floor. That was a big job… but I am very glad to have done it. I also created a work area for myself for listing, packing, and shipping. Previously I had been storing stuff upstairs, measuring, photographing, & shipping on the main floor (but my shipping stuff was stored upstairs!), and printing labels in the basement.
Now I have my grandfather’s old student desk set up with printer, scale, & other tools… but I still have the problem that I’m always fighting my wife or kids for the laptop.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, cheap laptop (PC, our other ones are Mac but I want PC this time)? I don’t need too much out of it really, just internet, printing, and word processing. I was thinking about a Chromebook.
This move also motivated me to try and sell off some old inventory so I slashed prices on about 20 listings for things that take up too much damned space. This probably means the stuff will take exactly as long to sell and will net me less money when it does. Oh well.
This would have been a fantastic week if I had not gone to an antiques auction as an experiment, felt like I had to buy to make the time worth it, and overpaid for a whole bunch of junk. I won’t lose money, should double up, but it was not worth the time or outlay.
It was strange, though; people were paying ridiculous prices, $70+ for chotchkes (like Doulton figurines) that sell for around $20 on ebay! One of them was an antiques dealer in my town. I guess you can get a crazy premium for that kind of stuff in an antique shop?
Sales: CAD$570, 5 items
COGS: $56
Profit: $426, over 9 hours = $47/hr
Listed: 25 items, estimated value $1430, total now 203 items
Expenses: $457 !!!!! what was I thinking??
Cashflow: +$113
Notable sales: Shure radio receiver $10–> $262, Cuddeback game scouting camera, found 3 of these new in a thrift store, paid $25 each, sold first for $190. Glad, because they were new but old stock, was worried they were too dated to be worth much. Original $400 price tag helped convince me.I find I keep going back and forth on willingness-to-spend. One week I’ll be ready to drop $200 to make $500, next week I won’t want to pay any more than $20 even if there’s profit there. Got to find some sensible mean there.
It didn’t help with this but I found this website which seems to have a database of artists by name/initial, period, and location. Might come in useful.
Have you used google reverse image search before? I have somewhat extensively, and found it pretty flawed. This sounds similar.
BUT… I think part of the reason for that is a huge # of false positives when searching EVERY IMAGE ON THE INTERNET. Perhaps when your database is limited to products people are selling, you get a bit more specificity and less garbage hits. All the same, I’ll believe it’s a good functionality when I see it.
I figure the mix of small and large we see in the market is, for better or worse, optimized for today’s technology, regulatory environment, labour costs, etc. etc. It also likely emerges from people’s preferences about stability of income. There are doubtless those who could run their own business but don’t like the uncertainty of working “without a safety net”, where a bad month for sales could mean negative cashflow. And I have met many “entrepreneurs” who are failing because in the absence of a boss to motivate them they can’t accomplish much besides surfing youtube, or because their whole business idea is ridiculous and doomed from the start.
It is interesting how resilient the traditional employer/employee relationship is, when a priori one might expect each employee to, say, negotiate their own specific hours, customized dress code, etc. When it comes to labour it seems we have a feudalism-shaped hole in our hearts.
Sales: CAD$547, 4 items
COGS: $147
Profit: $317
Hours: 8.5, hourly rate $37/hr
Listed: 13 items, $1088 estimated value
Expenses: $253
Cashflow: $294So slow all week I was losing the will to live. I only sold a little medical consumable foot pad $5–>$50 overnight.
On Friday when searching flatware on kijiji, I found a listing for about 45 pieces of sterling flatware for $100 total. Thought it must be too good to be true, no brands were given, so I looked at completeds on eBay for sterling flatware and chanced upon the pattern shown in the picture. It’s a beautiful one called Wallace “Grand Baroque”, the other half of the pieces were a less attractive one by International Silver. So I swooped on those babies like a starving vulture. It was an hour drive. A wealthy lady getting rid of her parents’ silver… I guess she thought because the sets weren’t complete they weren’t worth much.
I listed half Saturday and sold $300 worth before I finished listing… think the whole thing is going to get me around $1100. I can’t believe my luck.
I must admit it was a bit bittersweet to sell, as I was sore tempted to keep that set and let it be a family heirloom. But we need to pay down debt more… maybe someday I’ll get a set we can keep.
Kinda surprised how many people are selling solid silverware on ebay for really close to the melt value of the silver! I mean, it’s not a flipping opportunity because of shipping, but it seems surprising.
Also paid $50 for a blue glass Aladdin lamp, expecting to sell it for $250… then the fuel cap broke off in the car. 🙁 Can’t win ’em all, I guess.
