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Week of 1/29 – 2/4:
Total items in Store: 325
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales: $208.65 (w/o eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $46.34 (including consignment commissions but not the original cost of family castoffs)
Highest Price Sold: $28 plus shipping (a pair of antique heavy duty trunk drop handles)
Average Sales Price: $20.87 (not incl eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 17Week of 1/22 – 1/28:
Total items in Store: 332
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $294.43 (w/o eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $41.25 (including consignment commissions but not the original cost of family castoffs)
Highest Price Sold: $110.00 plus shipping (a pair of my son’s Nike sneakers)
Average Sales Price: $29.44 (not incl eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 23I had my first experience selling an eBay authenticated pair of sneakers. The option appeared automatically upon listing, and defaulted to a free label for me to ship to the authentication center in Las Vegas (of course, the perfect place for it) by FedEx Ground (unfortunately, so I had to drive to drop off) and the buyer paid a flat $14.95 for the shipping and the authentication. It was nice to recoup almost what my son paid for them new but I got a direct, personal experience of how much more effort eBay is putting into selling sneakers compared to everything else I normally sell, which did not make me very happy.
I got a lot of items listed last week but most of them were lower value smalls from my death piles. I need to try to start digging out some higher value items.
Week of 1/8 – 1/14:
Total items in Store: 325
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $273.15 (w/o eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $67.78 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $41.56 plus shipping (Korean Navy destroyer challenge coin)
Average Sales Price: $27.32 (not incl eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 0Life got in the way of eBay scavenging and listing last week but I still had a decent week, for me.
Week of 1/1 – 1/7:
Total items in Store: 333
Items Sold: 8
Gross Sales: $166.22 (w/o eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $20 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $30.00 plus shipping (Peruvian Navy training ship 2008 world cruise challenge coin)
Average Sales Price: $20.78 (not incl eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 15With the loss of my beloved Easy Auctions Tracker for 2023, I’ve been spending much more time than I’d like to in figuring out my recordkeeping going forward. I find the eBay reports to be too difficult to work with for my day-to-day requirements. EAT is recommending My Reseller Genie but last I checked, MRG does not accommodate consignments so they have to be done manually. That’s a non-starter for me – I’m not paying for anything that doesn’t handle consignments since I have all these consignment challenge coins. Wonderlister or Sixbit seem to have what I need but to get consignments capability they’re $50 and $68 a month, respectively, and are way overkill for me otherwise. I guess I’ll be spending a lot of time messing with the eBay reports to manually create a spreadsheet I can use.
I had an interesting encounter with another seller using my photos for their listing this week. I sent a polite but firm message, to which he quickly and apologetically replied, saying he’d taken and added his own pictures and removed mine. He said he’d gotten them off the internet and didn’t know they were mine. (Sure, and using my title verbatim and pricing the item at exactly $10 less than my listing was just a coincidence. Whatever.) I then checked the listing a little while later, and saw that he was still using my photos but he had simply cropped them to remove my background. He had added one photo of his own, but not even as the main photo. The main photo was still mine. So, I sent a less polite and more firm message and he finally removed all of my photos.
I’ve seen many gun related pouches and holsters in my day but this one is not ringing any bells. With the offset strap it could be for a specific small taser, something that would looks like this:
Or a small pistol with a rail or optics that would need all that space for the barrel with it pointing down. But the shotgun shell snap doesn’t jibe with either of those. With a rectangle you think magazine pouch but it’s not that with all that open space at the corners.
My best guess is that it is a pouch for some specific shotgun accessory or something you would use while shooting skeet, clays, bird hunting, etc.
The Numbers 12/25 – 12/31
Week of 12/25 – 12/31:
Total items in Store: 328
Items Sold: 8
Gross Sales: $193.19 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $36.75 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $76 plus shipping (US Navy figural challenge coin in the shape of the Star Wars Millenium Falcon)
Average Sales Price: $30.92 (not incl eBay fees, shipping, or taxes)
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 8So the year went out with a whimper not a bang. I’m decided to start reporting my numbers in a way that is more useful for me rather than using the eBay sales data that includes shipping and taxes.
Week of 12/18 – 12/24:
Total items in Store: 325
Items Sold: 9
Gross Sales: $310.95 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $203.24 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $31 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $80 plus shipping (signed WWII aviation history book)
Average Price Sold: $34.55
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 15I think the pink stone might be coral. I am really bad with jewelry and have a bunch of it that I’ve been procrastinating on myself. There are a number of Native American silversmiths who use some variation of the crossed arrows as it was a symbol of an alliance or friendship. But take care with using “Native American” in a title or description unless you can ID the maker and confirm their tribe because eBay is strict in using that as a descriptor.
What I’ve been doing to help ID items is to use Google image search on my phone for an item, which often pulls up other eBay and/or Etsy listings of the same or similar. Sometimes I have to capture a few different angles and views before something useful comes up. I can then copy their key words or at least get some information to get me on the right path for research. You can also try it with the hallmarks but I’ve had less success with that. For silver hallmarks, there are websites like http://www.silvercollection.it , http://www.830-1000.dk , and http://www.925-1000.com but of course there are hundreds if not thousands of small jewelry makers who are not cataloged anywhere.
“I am seeing over 30% final value fees.”
@ChristineR: Where are you getting that number? FVFs depend on the category but I’d guess the average is about 12%.Week of 12/11 – 12/17:
Total items in Store: 316
Items Sold: 9
Gross Sales: $306.93 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $178.39 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $71 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $49 plus shipping (USN Command Master Chief’s personal challenge coin)
Average Price Sold: $34.10
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $12.08
Number of new items listed: 3As for number of new items listed above, it was pretty poor at 3 but emphasis on those 3 were “new”. In addition, I also ended and sold similar 75 of the oldest items in my store. Of those, for 6 new listings I used a different main photo (or used the same one but significantly edited it), moved words around in the title, and changed the price (anywhere from 10 cents to up to $10; the latter based on checking Terapeak to determine if I was way out of line on pricing). It seemed to increase interest in everything but mainly in the 6 heavily edited items and I did sell one of them almost immediately. For all the other ended listings, the only edit was changing the price by 10 cents and I waited one day to list them in the hopes that it would make it more likely that the nightly eBay to Google Shopping listing upload would hopefully show them as new. The result on those was lackluster. I’m not sure that the bulk end-and-sell-similar trick works so well unless each item is more heavily edited.
I also went on Google Shopping and did a sample of my store by searching for 10 different random items, using specific search terms. Out of the 10, only one of them showed in Google Shopping so I guess I’m not cracking that code yet.
Week of 12/4 – 12/10:
Total items in Store: 322
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales: $409.84 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $293.15 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $91.00 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $100 plus shipping (Romanian M59 rifle bayonet)
Average Price Sold: $31.53
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $0
Number of new items listed: 17Posting numbers late is becoming my bad habit. More items sold that week with a higher gross but average price down, but a much better ROI and net. The challenge coins are starting to move again for me, which is good. When a category suddenly goes silent for me, I begin to wonder if its time has passed and that category has gone the way of Beanie Babies.
Ooohhh LukasTreasure posted his weekly numbers late, so now I don’t feel so bad about jumping in. Speaking of; you sold a Forbidden Zone soundtrack? I might have had to keep that one. I started listening to Oingo Boingo when their first album came out in 1980 when I was in the Army. Crankin’ it up in the barracks.
Week of 11/27 – 12/3:
Total items in Store: 316
Items Sold: 5
Gross Sales: $338.46 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $161.48 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $114.00 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $175 plus shipping (Italian M1891 Carcano rifle bayonet)
Average Price Sold: $67.69
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of new items listed this week: 0Way down on sales that week; but worse, a pretty crappy ROI. Sometimes it happens with the random mix of what sells.
As I expected, that reloading press lot I posted about previously was short tail. It brought in $240 for the press (free shipping, but the label only $10.73 on Pirate Ship for 20 lbs!), $38 for the extra turret (free shipping; priority flat rate small box), $13 plus shipping for the sizer reloading die (for parts or repair; had a bent shaft), and $16 plus shipping for the seating reloading die; all for a $27 investment at Goodwill, of all places. Of all of it, only one of the dies went on best offer, the rest for full price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275534781601
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275534816186
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275543386278
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275543381740Week of 11/20 – 11/26:
Total items in Store: 321
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $453.71 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $368.29 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $40.00 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $239.99 incl shipping (Lyman T-Mag 2 Reloading Press)
Average Price Sold: $45.37
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $4.50
Number of new items listed this week: 0Decent sales for being on time-away for the entire week. Things slowed down over the weekend to it’s time to get back in the saddle and get listing.
Week of 11/13 – 11/19:
Total items in Store: 331
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $399.33 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $275.34 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $86.50 (including consignment commissions)
Highest Price Sold: $101 plus shipping (M1895 Chilean Mauser rifle bayonet)
Average Price Sold: $33.28
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $12
Number of new items listed this week: 26I was on a roll listing the week before Thanksgiving before I headed out of town for the holiday. I traded relatively sunny Florida for gray and rainy (and cold) Texas and family time. Interesting reports from you all this week, from an incredible estate sale in Michigan and 25 beer cans going to a TV show to a $3500 free work scavenge!
This vintage US Naval Academy plaque was a family item and sold for $66.21 plus shipping on an offer to watcher, down from a $78 listing price. It took a while to sell but there’s always a ring-knocker out there somewhere who needs one of these for their I-Love-Me wall.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275507992205
Distant relatives clearing an estate in Texas let my family go through and pick out stuff we wanted after all the close relatives had their pick. Among other things, I found this Dietz railroad lantern with red globe in barn-find, rusty condition and missing a few parts. There’s quite an active market in lanterns but condition is important so I put it up at auction starting at $35 plus shipping and it sold for that.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275521168950
Another Texas find: A local indy thrift there has a separate guy-stuff building full of tools, hardware, and miscellaneous junk the ladies don’t want in their nice-stuff building. This Tektronix pulse generator piece of test equipment was out there for $10. It didn’t have a cord but I found one that fit in their cord bin and it powered up. I channeled Simplicio and bought it. I thought about trying to test it after getting it back to Jax but it was beyond me. I put it at up auction strictly for parts or repair for $99 with free shipping to test the waters and it went for $102. Waters tested!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275521172574
This BMW E36 (1990’s) on board computer check control box was a remnant of my son’s first car, a 1994 325i bought running but it needed enough stuff to keep him busy with me helping him sort it out. These OBC’s go bad but there’s a cottage industry of people that repair and resell them and you can buy some of the restoration parts for the unit so I thought a broken one would be worth putting up. I was right; it sold for $25 plus shipping on a best offer. I have another one to put up – both were free. (We bought two on eBay that were sold as used functioning but were both DOA and the sellers just refunded without sending a label.)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275518454464
The wife of one my challenge coin/militaria consigners goaded me into taking her Longaberger basket “collection” on consignment. It seemed like there was an active market but most buyers are looking for the special editions with the cloth liner and all the bells and whistles. She didn’t have any of those. They’ve been sitting. This 1997 Longaberger large rectangular serving basket finally sold for $24 plus shipping on a best offer down from $29.89.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275493802572
