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I like this concept of building a life or a lifestyle. I remember you and Ryanne bringing this up a long while ago, when I first started listening to SL. I have a vague memory of someone trying to compare hourly wage when reselling to some other job, and you kept repeating “but with reselling you own your time.” And at first I didn’t get it. I was like – why does he keep repeating that when we’re trying to compare wages!?!? But when it finally clicked, I realized that it’s like comparing any two ways of making money without taking into account all aspects. So one job has lower pay than another, but amazing health benefits. Or a 5 minute commute vs. a 60 minute commute. Or having to deal with people all day long or not (which is a pro or con depends on the person).
I also used to complain to a good friend “yeah, I can sell this thingy for $30 but after everything the hourly wage may be below minimum wage. Sigh.” And this friend kept saying “But what would you do instead?” And that annoyed me until I realized it was true. In my current situation, I need almost complete flexibility in terms of when I work and how much I work. And I pretty much have that now, especially after I copied RetroWV and set handling time to 3 days. So this flexibility, together with enjoying the work, makes me much much happier every day than I was in my previous job where I made $150k + 20+% bonus + plenty of stock options.
[deleting original comment] – never mind – I answered my own question when I re-read your post.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by
sonia.
good point!
12/14/2018 at 3:53 pm in reply to: Simplified Returns INAD – Obtaining Customer "Admissions" in Messages #53377Update on the FINAD process for those without free returns:
After I refunded (via paypal) the price of the item minus return shipping, the return auto-closed 2.5 weeks later. Success!Let us know how it goes. I’m no expert myself. I think I got started with curtains about a year ago after watching youtuber “thrifty paper garden” who hasn’t been active in a long time. Right now I have one lot of 4 vintage 60s/70s panels that has been sitting for a while with a lot of watchers. Wondering if I should split into 2 lots of 2 or just lower the price. Or maybe I’ll just do nothing for a while longer – that seems easier 🙂
12/13/2018 at 9:45 pm in reply to: What Sells On eBay: Dart board, Hats, Models, Car parts, Original painting, Vintage Crib Mobile #53336Wow, Sharyn! That tiffany tray and dictionary set were great sales! Congrats.
12/13/2018 at 4:48 pm in reply to: Simplified Returns INAD – Obtaining Customer "Admissions" in Messages #53325OK, so the difference is that with no free returns, you have to do the partial refund via paypal, and then wait several weeks (maybe a month?) for the return to auto-close, keeping your fingers crossed during that time that the buyer doesn’t call ebay demanding more money.
I, too, remember when you could get the rep to close the case right there on the call. I’ve decided to like the new way better (despite the drawbacks) b/c it reduces the number of times I need to call ebay.
Thanks, T-Satt. That makes a lot of sense. I think I would have enjoyed studying accounting! 🙂
“Now you’re going for asking for net profit after COGS, fees, time, etc”
Um, Jay, I was not the one to ask for net profit. You brought it up in the post I responded to when you said:
“Just incredible net profit per item that no other business can even dream about.”I now see that you meant GROSS profit, not net profit. I’m totally with you on awesome gross profits for resellers (which is why this is so much fun!), but not on net profit (except maybe Simplicio!! :)). As T-Satt said, his business would also (currently) net zero profit after labor costs.
As far as what definition I want for net profit, it’s not up to me. I should have asked what you meant by net profit in your post before responding, which probably would have avoided all of this back and forth, but in general I find it best to use well-established business definitions for profit, which can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(accounting)From that list, I find “gross profit,” “net profit before tax” and “net profit after tax” to be most useful for my reselling business. Both of the net profit numbers require “deducting all expenses”. Unless I consider myself a slave who works for $0 salary, the cost of my time is one of these expenses.
“Hopefully you still enjoy scavenging and somehow there’s some money to make your life better.”
OK, at the risk of getting kicked off the forum, I feel compelled to make one more attempt to clarify what I was saying.
I am absolutely making money from scavenging, and that money does make my life better. As I said in my post, I am making $20/hour (thousands of dollars a year). Just no profit above that.
Having a little bit of a business background, I just get very confused when people talk about net profit as a number in which labor costs are not included.
Jay,
I’m sorry if I sound confrontational. I truly do not mean to be. At all. And I’m totally fine. I guess I’m not very good at providing critique diplomatically. Could you take my comments in the same way as you would like others to take your comments when you say things like “All these youtubers say that they make $1m in yearly sales, but they don’t advertise their cogs, so it’s hard to know how much they really make.” I’m just trying to make a similar critique here – trying to get at the mathematical heart of the matter. Just by your statement about trying to make me feel better about no profit shows me that we seem to have some terminology confusion going on, and I was just trying to highlight it – I thought that would be something you would be interested in.Could you suggest a (very specific) better way of expressing my critique?
Very often I see you making a similar type of critique when people just throw statements out there without backing them up with real data or without truly defining what they’re talking about, and frankly it is technically confrontational, but in a good way. That’s why you’re a great moderator and interviewer. I’m just trying to do something similar once in a while, and somehow I end up unintentionally irking you (and others?), and I’m not sure why. If we can’t get to the bottom of why this is happening and what can be done to change it, I guess I’ll just stick to more direct answers when people ask for help, and keep my other comments to myself. I will try, anyway.
Simplicio,
Based on the numbers you’ve been sharing, I can totally believe that your net profit, even after labor is included, is fantastic. You seem to routinely make hundreds of dollars of gross profit on a single item without lots of piddly sales. But you as a data point seem like an outlier to me.It’s difficult for me to believe statements about resellers having better profit margins than some other (which?) businesses when they are a) not backed up with actual numbers and b) are sometimes comparing apples with oranges (ie, not counting labor). I also like to keep in mind that a higher profit percentage isn’t always better. I’d rather have a 10% profit margin that amounts to $10k than a 70% profit margin that amounts to $1k.
In 2017 I had 40% profit after all costs EXCEPT LABOR.
Once I included my labor at $20/hr (very rough estimate of hours), my profit was $0. I’m not full time, and don’t strive to be super efficient, but I do regularly sell items for $60-80 that I purchased for $5-15, so it’s not like I have $0 profit b/c I’m really bad at reselling. I’m very pleased to have created for myself a $20/hr job that I enjoy and is flexible.Anybody else want to share and compare true net profit numbers? 🙂
12/12/2018 at 5:21 pm in reply to: Simplified Returns INAD – Obtaining Customer "Admissions" in Messages #53232Elle,
Did you do the partial refund from within the ebay app, or via PayPal? I thought that if you have Free Returns the ability to do a partial refund shows up on the ebay website as part of the returns process.Yes, we can get amazing gross profit (revenue – COGS). But unless you count all your operating expenses like your own labor/time etc, employee labor/time, cost of health/disability insurance, etc, it’s not a fair comparison with other businesses.
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