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I use it all the time now. It is within the Google app on iPhone, so it is not a separate app (anymore?). There is a little camera icon in the Google app search box. For an image search, I find it to be significantly better than loading an image into Google on the desktop for a search. I think the advantage is being able to crop to the item on the phone to search. I have been able to identify some mystery items that I have trying to ID for a long time. At the same time, I have to admit that it sometimes seems to decide what type of thing it’s looking for and defaults to showing only those items. For example I was trying to identify a folding pocket knife with a distinctive handle and all it wanted to show me was jewelry of a similar design. I wish you could use a key word with the picture to point it in the right direction.
It also gives me much better and more informative results when scanning bar codes than the QR Reader app that I have been using.
10/3/21 – 10/9/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 378
Items Sold: 13 Gross Sales: $537.92 (not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $255 plus shipping – USS CONSTITUTION 74<sup>th</sup> Commanding Officer’s challenge coin on consignment, at auction.
Returns: 0
COGS: $157.55 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 9
$ Spent on New Inventory: $175.35A much better week for me than last. Scavenge of the week: A large lot of sealed vintage 1/25 scale car model kits at the flea market for $4 each. There were just a couple on a dealer’s table that were marked $10 each when I started looking at them. When he said he had a bunch more I channeled Jay and said “how much do you want for all of them?” And the haggling started in earnest. Some decent scores I made sniping this week are runners up.
Sorry; sometimes Imgur messes with me. Let’s try that hammer head photo again:
Well, a new voice is heard from! Great job, Stephanie! The few clothing items I have listed sit and sit on eBay. I obviously need to rethink my decision not to use any other platforms. Some recent sales of mine:
I had a couple of these vintage engineer field notebooks. There’s a little technical content but they mostly contain just specially ruled pages. One was a straight field book and the other was a mining transit book. I got them in a large free lot and they sold for $13 each plus shipping to the same person.
After some surprising successes I have tried to keep an eye out for older kitchen items. This vintage aluminum bacon press with wooden handle was $1 at a yard sale and sold for $25 with free shipping that cost me $4 (first class package).
Here’s something else I watch for – old hammers (or hammer heads without handles). There are many different types of hammers and some are very collectible. Unfortunately the most active collectors seem to be in the UK so one has to keep that in mind when pricing them. This vintage boiler scaling hammer head was out of a large free lot and sold for $13 plus the buyer paid $25 for shipping to the UK.
This US Navy cruise book commemorating the 1971 – 1972 activities of USS LEXINGTON and available for sale to crew members at the time was a book sale find for $5. It sold for $80 plus shipping. Years ago US Navy cruise books could be picked up cheaply on eBay until a couple sellers decided to make a market in them by buying them all up, listing them at very high prices ($200 – $500), and sitting on them. The market is finally catching up but LEXINGTON was a WWII-vintage aircraft carrier that was serving as a training ship in the ’70s and not very desirable so I was happy with what I got.
It is amazing! I just got an ID on three different mystery objects I was getting ready to post here. (It unfortunately did not reveal anything useful with that Navy cup backstamp I was trying to identify.)
Is the opening of the dish about 8 3/4″ in diameter? If so, the “22” indicates a size of 22 centimeters. Then it would be of European origin, possibly Eastern Europe where a lot of the old enamelware stock in antique stores comes from.
I don’t recognize the logo and I’ve never seen any compilation of enamelware logos though I’ve seen the numbers under various logos before like this, indicating the size of the opening in centimeters.
Thanks Ryanne – yes, I have some of those by Shenango (the H-35 code says yours was made in the second half of 1977) and I have seen the same Navy pattern by Homer Laughlin, Caribe China, Jackson Custom China, and others but any I’ve ever seen all have the usual maker backstamp for the year made. So I’m thinking that this one is a manufacturer different from any of those. Noodling with the design I’m coming up with something that either looks like this:
Or this:
Hmm I don’t see that but I did change the orientation of the image on Imgur so it shows up here and it does give it a completely different aspect. Looks like it might be a swan. I’m going to try a rubbing. Thanks!
9/26/21 – 10/2/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 382
Items Sold: 7
Gross Sales: $133.34 (not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $39 plus shipping – USS SULLIVANS challenge coin on consignment.
Returns: 0
COGS: $37 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 18
$ Spent on New Inventory: $2.50Sales have been very slow though I have been trying offers to watchers and putting older items on 50%-off sales. Guess it’s just not my turn right now. I have been ramping up on the listing and now my wife will be out of town for a couple weeks so I hope to continue to really crank it up for a while without distraction.
9/19/21 – 9/25/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 371
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $317.43 (not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $160 plus shipping – Belgian FN49 rifle bayonet.
Returns: 0
COGS: $69 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 27
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0I would double check your spam filter to make sure it hasn’t decided out of the blue that eBay emails are spam and also your eBay account settings for notification preferences in case something got changed and if neither of those are the problem, you could at least try calling eBay.
I love those stereos but don’t have the patience to mess with them myself.
This consignment challenge coin is for the 2-Star Admiral of the US Naval Special Warfare Command 2-Star Admiral, in charge of the Navy SEALS, etc. It is not named but still brought $280 plus shipping at auction. I started the auction at $265 which I thought was overpriced for it to test the waters.
Most small ephemera you run across is not worth a whole lot but when you can get so much of it for pennies and it’s so easy to list and ship, it’s a no-brainer. Part of a large lot a flea market dealer gave me, this Super Save Trading Stamps Booklet was from the long-gone Hamilton’s Market Grocery in Frederick, Maryland. It sold on a best offer for $8 plus First Class Package shipping that I made an additional $1 on. Not intentionally, but for some reason eBay calculated postage is a crap shoot for me. Sometimes too much and sometimes not enough. I do wish eBay would let us use the Standard Envelope with tracking for things like this to put more money in our pocket.
Here’s an interesting original signed and numbered etching by Don Swann of the Jamestown, Virginia historic church tower ruins. It was on the wall of a country thrift here in FL for $5 and sold for $31 plus shipping on a best offer.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Japanese self-defense force challenge coins can sell for more if you’re willing to sit on them for a while. This one is for the Commanding Officer of a Japanese destroyer, JS ASHIGARA, and sold for $74 plus shipping, going to Australia.
This is a WWI-era US Army Infantry Enlisted Collar Disk Insignia. Besides real age that can’t be faked, the metal composition, textured background on the face, and screw-fastener back help identify it. It was from a lot of insignia for which I paid about $6 each and this one sold for $29 plus shipping. It was about the most common insignia in the lot but sold first.
I’ve never had the option of getting a home pickup for my FedEx Home packages and I would assume they won’t come get a Smartpost either. That being said, the last Smartpost label I printed off eBay said both “Parcel Select and “Smartpost” in the upper right hand box so I just took it to the post office and they had no problem taking it as a Parcel Select package. They scanned the USPS barcode in the center of the label and ignored the FedEx barcode. That was last year – don’t know if that will still work but might be worth a try.
9/12/21 – 9/18/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 350
Items Sold: 4
Gross Sales: $110.31 (not incl shipping or taxes)
Highest Price Sold: $41 plus shipping – Partial press kit from the 1979 24 Hr Pepsi Challenge Race at Daytona.
Returns: 0
COGS: $8.27 (including consignment commissions but not including original cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 22
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0A very slow week. Some conspiracy theories were making the rounds of YouTube from people who said that when they sent an offer, the prospective buyer received an error message that the seller does not ship to their location when they tried to buy on the offer. Don’t know if it’s true but I have had zero purchases from my offers out for a couple weeks. That persisted until this Sunday, when I sold 4 items that almost doubled my gross from all of last week. So hopefully things are back to normal, if there really was an issue.
