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Cool. I’ve been adding it to the SKU field today. I like seeing it on the page with my selling price. Helps keep everything in focus. I already see some things that I won’t bother with buying again, because the profit margin is just “eh”.
My son is still too little to really help, (he’s only 8), but we give him little jobs to “help”, like putting labels on packages and carrying boxes into the post office. He comes with me when we hit the thrift stores, and asks “Are we getting that to keep, or sell?”. I have made a point of giving him a few dollars from time to time, as “payment” for helping. Money is still kind of esoteric for him. He isn’t a very materialistic kid, so getting money for work doesn’t make a big impact yet.
I hope that when he is older, he will want to sell on his own. I suspect he’ll end up in a tech job, like his dad, but hopefully he will see ebay as a good side-hustle.
Kind of related to burnout: I have been feeling really stressed out about my store, and dissatisfied with the amount of money I am making. I realized a few things were contributing to this:
1) I switched to the newer seller hub, and seeing my sales percents going up and down in relation to the previous period was making me tense. If my conversion rate went down 0.5% on a given day, I started wondering what the heck was up, and fretting that it meant something terrible. I googled it, and most people have a conversion rate of about 2%. Mine was 1.7%, at that one moment in time. I removed this and the traffic stats from my hub. I don’t want to see that I am down 30% in one category compared to the rest of the market for that given period. If I had a static inventory type, maybe that would be a big deal, but inventory varies greatly. There’s some value to the info, I am sure, but seeing it daily doesn’t work for me.
2) I am selling fewer items, but charging more per item. I feel like I am doing less work, but I am bringing in about the same amount as last year.
The fix was easy for #1, but I need to get over myself for #2. 🙂
Is the Custom SKU field visible to buyers? I am wondering if I can put COGS in that spot.
Yes, slow sales. Everything that sold was very low dollar, which was a little disheartening. The election, plus the World Series earlier in the week. Even *I* watched, and I don’t much care for baseball.
Retro Treasures, I like your point that COGS is relative. I got really hung up on trying to make my store fit a specific profile: only sell items for at least X dollars, COGS can be no more than Y. It didn’t exactly work out. I made money, but I probably missed a lot of opportunities because I thought “Don’t pay more than $3 for shoes. Don’t sell anything below X dollars”. I gave up on that, bought the $10 cowboy boots at Goodwill, and sold them within the week for $60.
I get a lot of inventory at estate auctions and local thrifts. I’m in the country, and yard sales can be really far flung. I don’t want to spend all day driving and come away empty handed. I’d rather go to an auction, buy several box lots for $5 each, and work it that way.
Total Items in Store: 321
Items Sold: 16 (15 ebay, 1 truegether)
Cost of Items Sold: about $40
Total Sales: $410
Highest Price Sold: $103 (Sterling napkin ring from Westpoint Military Academy)
Average Price Sold: $25.31
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $50
Number of items listed this week: 36I set up an account on Truegether and Bonanza. I sold some things on Bonanza last year, but it fell off my radar after I went on vacation last fall. I never put the store back to active when I returned. *shrug* Oh well. At most I only sold one item per month there.
I never know if I should include in COGS when I sell personal items, (things I did not source with the intention of selling). I sold off some of our old homeschool curriculum, and broke even on it. If I include it, then COGS is more like $80. But we would have bought the curriculum regardless of ebay.
