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Your feelings are real and understandable. And they are a big reason why going full time is tough. How to handle the swings…
Congrats on the milestone!
Love that you have some extra streams of income. That helps a lot when one area is slow. Part of why I love my consulting gig. It is helping me right now that things are slowing a little.
One more year and this money is gravy!
AtomicStar: We felt the summer slowdown for the first time this week. We are similar to you in size, what we sell a lot of (shoes and clothes) and sales amounts (we are $200-$300 per day as well).
Using some current data on our store (includes shipping):
Sales last 31 days – $8,852
Sales last week – $2,462
Sales last 7 days – $1,497 (yep, a little slow)So yeah, we see the drop as well. We were out of town Sunday-Wednesday, and changed our handling to cover that. But then things picked up when we got home. I put the store back on same day handling, and we did our shipping this morning, then our daily numbers picked up. Granted, today is Thursday, which tends to be our best day of the week, but look at the numbers suddenly:
Thursday, 6/14 – $583
Friday – $293
Saturday – $236
Sunday – $188
Monday – $239
Tuesday – $219
Wednesday – $90 (!)
Today – $274 (so far as of noon MDT)We usually see our store dip in mid June until early to mid August. So this is on schedule. We get back to having good days, then days of crickets.
So for us, we are on track.
For you, what to do? Best I can say is run some 10% off sales, look at any stale listings to spruce them up, etc. We have been trying to look for more summer type stuff and I think that has helped smooth out our summer. But summer is summer. If you don’t have what buyers are looking for, they don’t buy from you. No level of promoting, sales, etc. will help that.
How to keep from hyperventilating? Know that what they say on Game of Thrones is a good thing for resellers… Winter is Coming…
Ride the wave, list good stuff, and know that you will have a lot of shipping to do in November-December!
Yep. This is where the states need to be smart. If they require every seller to register with their state to remit, they are going to be crushed on day 1 with applications. Imagine tens of thousands of sellers starting to bombard them with requests for sales tax id numbers.
Potentially times 50…
We are with Jay on our reaction to this. Still time for things to shake out. Congress may get involved, a national organization may work to help states with this, and at least (so far) it is only at the state level, so eBay is set up to handle that.
Should the counties and cities get involved, it gets sticky (we dealt with that when we did oil and gas work on site…what state/county/city tax do we have to collect, and how to remit?). I would think that if cities and counties would get involved, some smart entrepreneur will develop a matrix that will run things through with how to charge and how to remit.
For now, we list and work, and when we have to, we implement a strategy.
Interesting to hear about your experience on PoshMark. I like your thought of basically “just try it and see”. I think we will be getting into that soon. It is a different set of eyeballs than what you get on eBay, so it may be worth it for the right kind of clothing.
Welcome John. I’m interested to hear more about your experience as well, and I hope we can help you with your eBay business!
I have heard of others that do that too. I just don’t because it takes too much time to add that to the process.
Steve Raiken: I agree with how he does the chest, but not the length and sleeve.
For the length and sleeve, I go with dress shirt tailor measurements. Sleeve should be from the midline of the back (seam where collar meets shirt in the middle of the back) to the end of the cuff. This is how dress shirts are measured (32, 33, 34, etc).
For length, I again measure from the bottom of the collar (not the top like Steve did) to the end of the shirt).
For us, lay the item flat and measure from the armpit seam across to the other armpit seam. Make sure it is flat, but not stretched out. It should be a natural flat surface.
Tip: Provide both the pit to pit as well as the all around (2x the pit to pit). People ask for both.
Amatino: always love that story!
I know your distinction…but not about the computer side.
Interesting…
Interesting concept. This is something you can do in SixBit, but not that fast. You can have SixBit change the price of the item when it auto-relists, by whole dollar amount or by percentage. It is a potential strategy I have thought about but not implemented on more commodity items.
Mark: I have a strategy on roulette as well, and I am a net winner in it. I wonder if it is similar. I only play outside as part of the strategy. Do you play inside or only outside?
Overall, poker is my game. I’m way rusty at this point, which is why if I do hit the tables, it is only small stakes and certain games. Poker takes away any house advantage (as long as you can beat the rake, which I can). I really need to get back to playing regularly, as I miss it and was a net winner. When they passed the online poker laws, that really hurt…
Week of 6/10-6/16
Total Items in Store: 2,255 (Up 44% YOY)
Number of Items Listed: 152
Number of Items Sold: 79 (Up 58% YOY)
(Includes 0 Etsy, 0 Bonanza, 1 TrueGether, 0 Amazon)
Weekly STR: 15% (Down 2% YOY)Total Product Sales: $2,069 (Up 93% YOY)
Cost of Items Sold: $429
Highest Item Sold: $100 – McDonalds Extra Value Meals Store Menu Display
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Veronica wins the week (of course!) and Veronica leads for the year 13-11.eBay Clothing
# Listed: 1,426
# Sold: 57
STR: 18%
ASP: $22.40eBay Shoes
# Listed: 251
# Sold: 13
STR: 22%
ASP: $34.48eBay Hard Goods
# Listed: 578
# Sold: 9
STR: 7%
ASP: $31.14Etsy Hard Goods
# Listed: 160
# Sold: 0
STR: 0%
ASP: $0Hello from Las Vegas! We had a chance for a free 3 night hotel stay at the Luxor, so we are doing that now. Figured I could remote in to our computer this morning and post our numbers. Posting now, will listen to the podcast on the drive back.
I love Google Remote Connect to be able to work from anywhere. Also love that SixBit is relisting our items for us and that we have 105 Free Scheduled Listings going up while we are gone. The store keeps on churning!
Really happy that we hit our 150 item listing goal 2 weeks in a row. The process is working…
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