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Yep. Recipes CANNOT be copyrighted. If you want to learn how to make something, you can. I like to do that a lot. Find a dish at a restaurant that I like, then learn how to make it myself. I sometimes feel like we eat like kings on a paupers income…
The crazy thing is, if you scroll around on YouTube, you can see these guys that have software that they will use to import thousands of listings from WalMart, Amazon, Jet, etc. that they can instantly create on their eBay store, with a certain markup. They aren’t making a ton of money on each item, but the software helps create the listing, manage the inventory, does the buying, etc.
It is out there…
And if you want some large pot meal recipes, just let us know. We have some EXCELLENT meals that we make that are for making more than 1 meal at a time. Veronica and another reseller that we are best friends with will get together regularly and will make 4 batches of enchiladas at once, with will cover meals that night and in the future.
We have Veronica’s Chili, my Green Chile Stew, my Bourguignon, and I’m trying an Ancho Chipotle Stew recipe soon.
Maybe we should have a Recipe section Jay! 🙂
PS – On that same front, if you can learn to pressure can, it is SUCH a time and money saver. I make Green Chile Stew and will can 4 quarts of it, so when we are too tired to cook, just heat up a can, grab a flour tortilla, and you are done with dinner. We are seeing that if you are going to make a good meal, why not make 2-3 times the amount and freeze or can it so you are ready for the future.
Amen. YouTube, NetFlix and some Amazon Video for us, with some Broadcast TV thrown in. I listen to podcasts all day, with some Pandora or my MP3’s for music. Very cheap entertainment.
Plus, we keep an eye out for DVD’s we want at yardsales…
Correct. I did a quick check in SixBit and 5.5% of our items are Christmas related.
And to clarify, this is on cash basis accounting, not accrual basis accounting. Meaning that this represents our cash basis P&L for tax purposes.
Our three biggest expenses are Shipping (variable), Fees (Variable), and Inventory Purchases (semi fixed). We don’t really spend more in Q4 for inventory, since we spend about the same amount each time we go out shopping. Since the activity of shopping and spending for inventory is independent from sales (so not variable), it acts more like a fixed cost (though I call it semi-fixed since I can control how much I shop).
So come Q4, Inventory purchases as a percentage of revenue drops significantly (like in half), so our cash profits increase dramatically.
True. I should have made a better distinction.
Our Q4 Sales as a % of total yearly sales for 2015-2017 have been:
2015 – 36%
2016 – 30%
2017 (Fcst) – 31%Our Q4 PROFIT as a % of total yearly PROFIT for 2015-2017 have been:
2015 – 42%
2016 – 41%
2017 (Fcst) – 42%Mike, totally agree with you on the challenges with Sales and Promoted Listings on 30 Day listings. Here is what we have done (and still do).
For sales, we only (generally) run a sale on items that we want to just dump. So we have a store category called Clearance Sale. Anything we just want to get rid of is put into that category and then we would run a weekly sale (Friday to Friday) on that store category at 50%-75% off. If the item fell off and was then relisted, it is not on sale until the next sale kicks off on Friday.
It is similar with Promoted Listings. When and item falls off after 30 days, it is not promoted when it is relisted until it is selected again manually through eBay Promotions Manager. For those, I check on them each day and for items that have newly relisted, I will manually put them back on Promotion.
We have not run a storewide sale yet, but might around Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday.
100% agree, and the scheduled listings is one feature I love. I love having new listings hitting every day, so I will schedule listings to hit every 2-4 hours, so I have a pipeline of new listings contantly hitting.
Yep, both would work. They are databases so the entire listing remains in the database and can be resubmitted to EBay at any time.
100% agree that you can’t base your plans on what your high months are. Get a solid level of numbers as to what your seasonality is, and then plan accordingly. We get a good bump in Q4, as each year Q4 is over 30% of our yearly sales. 2018 should be the year that we will have enough items listing that our low months of July & August are enough to cover regular personal expenses, so rather than have to use savings to cover those low months, we will be able to expand into other income streams, which right now is rental property.
Week of 11/5-11/11
Total Items in Store: 1,720
Number of Items Listed: 113
Number of Items Sold: 92 (includes 1 Bonanza, 1 TruGether, 2 Etsy)
Weekly STR: 23%
Total Product Sales: $2,383
Cost of Items Sold: $426
Gross Profit for Week: $1,818
Highest Item Sold: $100 – Vtg Pendleton High Grade Western Wear Wool Jacket
Competition: Highest Priced Sale: Troy wins the week (three in a row!) and Veronica leads for the year 25-19.Sales had a nice bounce back this week, with 92 items being sold being tied for our best week ever, and the 23% STR our best rate in quite a while. I think Q4 is arriving…
It was nice to get a solid week of listing in and get our new listings up over 100 again for the week. Right now our goal is to get over 100 each week, with the plan to get it over 125 starting in January. It was interesting to see that the two weeks that we didn’t list, our sales dropped, and the week we list over 100 again, our sales bounce back.
Trying to close an offer from a buyer for over 34 shirts at once. He bought 5 shirts a few weeks ago, and then messaged us on Sunday offering to buy all of the shirts of a same size. We are haggling on price, but we may be too far apart. It would be great if it goes through!
I feel you Retro. Those conversations are hard, but numbers reveal the truth. You can cut a lot of expenses and when you focus on them regularly, you find more ways to cut. We cut our cable, removed the phone line, do more of our own gardening, make our own wine, etc. But make sure you don’t cut so much that you hate your life. Budget in some luxuries. We love to find deals, including on food (hence the 5 freezers in the house, tons of canned food, etc), so we don’t feel deprived.
Dining out is our vice as well. We don’t do it often, but we love doing it when we do (and we do when sourcing and it becomes a business meal to lower our tax bill). We love to cook, so that helps, and we do a lot of crock pot meals to make a lot with lower prep work. We also then learned pressure canning so that we can make a lot of food at once and then it is ready for future meals. We do this a lot on Sundays.
The only other advice that I could give is that when you have the expenses as low and the best you can, you have to increase the income. Spending more time listing on eBay, second job, more $ per hour sometime. Easier said than done, I know, but sometimes that is just how the math works out.
I remember that when Veronica and I were first married, we delivered newspapers from 1:30am to 4:30am everyday, slept for an hour, then went to our office jobs. We are both making good money doing jobs we went to college for, but we had some debt to pay off so we just went Hard Routine and paid them off. I really admired one other family that was delivering papers that had 4 kids. We would see some of the kids at the distribution center with them at that time, and they would rotate who worked each night. It is amazing what you can see people do.
I’m sure the answer is out there and will reveal itself. Hoping the best for you!
