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Week May 26 – June 1, 2019
Items in store: 3883 Listings for 5928 Items
Items Sold: 63 Transactions for 69 Items
Gross Sales: $3833.60
Highest Price Sold: $215, 3 Piece Suit
Lowest Price Sold: $4.99(shoe laces)
Average Price Sold: $55.56
Cost of Goods Sold $209, Plus consignment
Number of new items listed this week: 102 items
$$ spent on new inventory this week $70
Repeat Customers: 5Amazon
Items Sold 0
Gross Sales $0
Cost of Good Sold $0Another slow week, took some time to work in the garden this week. I decided to DIY the broken spigot for the drip irrigation system, which involved some time in the furthest darkest dirtiest part of our crawl space….but it was an otherwise easy fix and I didn’t spend a dime because I found a new spigot in the “plumbing department” of my garage. I guess I picked it up at a yard sale at some point years ago. While I was at it I also replaces a leaky faucet in the garage sink, and a smelly trap in kitchen. I rewarded myself with a burger and ice-cream from our favorite local vintage carhop.
We’ve hosted a few garage sales, none with much success. It’s usually early to mid summer after we do a big cleanup, declutter of the house, stuff we would donate anyway. We have a 4 car garage, so I usually spend a day setting it up on tables and just open the door at 6. Usually only brings in $200 or so, but we’ve had a couple better ones, the rest just gets loaded up and donated. My wife hates doing them, so I usually end up doing it all. lol.
At first I didn’t like seeing the sponsored listings in the sold items. After I thought about it, it doesn’t bother me too much because that means someone is seeing my promoted items too.
On the Spring Seller update it mentioned that they are working on instant payments for Best Offer. See link below. It’s in the FAQ section of the Best Offer Enhancements.
https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/seller-updates/2019-spring/growth-tools.html#m17-2-tb2
Thank you. I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m just a guy selling someone else’s junk on ebay like everyone else, always looking for ways to grow and improve.
In April 37.5% of our sales, as far as sold price, were consignment items. Physically speaking, it was roughly 30% of the items sold (101 out of 332 items sold.)
Active listings by length of time listed.
456 in the last 31 days
1151 in the 1-6 month range
1389 in the last 6 month-1 year range
674 in the 1-2 year range
132 in the 2-3 year range
35 in the 3-4 year rangeI sell newly listed and old inventory every week, but the largest chunk of the stuff seems to sell in the first 4-6 months. I could sell faster with lower prices probably, but I have the space…. for now.
I usually go out for most of the day, once a week. It’s at least an hour drive to anywhere decent, so I pick a direction and go. I’ve been known to drive 2-3 hours to the first store of the day, but in the last couple years I’ve kept it a little bit closer to home. My back just can’t handle a 16 hour day of thrifting and driving anymore. Of course I hit our little local stores weekly between errands.
I got curious on the breakdown of my store.
Thrifted or secondhand buyout – 1859 listings
Consignment – 1018 listings
New Wholesale – 958 listings representing 3001 items.A few ways
Thrift Stores mainly. Some wholesale which is a bit higher cost usually. I’ve even bought up a few death piles from sellers with space shortages or burnout, and some closet buyouts direct from the owner prior to donation.Week May 19-25, 2019
Items in store: 3835 Listings for 5884 Items
Items Sold: 61 Transactions for 64 Items
Gross Sales: $4383.37
Highest Price Sold: $295, LVC Leather Jacket
Lowest Price Sold: $15.00(necktie)
Average Price Sold: $68.48
Cost of Goods Sold $158, Plus consignment
Number of items listed this week: 120 items
$$ spent on new inventory this week $185
Repeat Customers: 7Amazon
Items Sold 0
Gross Sales $0
Cost of Good Sold $0With the slower sales this week, I spent 3 days completely re-arranging our 1100 sq ft office space to maximize work flow and inventory space to make it ready for the growth needed to pay for my wife’s masters degree aspirations. I think it’s really going to make a noticeable improvement on efficiency.
Offers to buyers:
Some items with watchers may not be eligible for sending offers because the buyers have to be opted in to receiving offers from sellers. So if you have 10 watchers, you may only be able to send an offer to 2 or 3 people or even 0.
About 5 years ago, the USPS upgraded their package scanning equipment. Our tiny local post office was one of the beta testers. At this same time,cthey had an interim postmaster who came in from another office, and really seemed to try to tighten things up a lot as far as cutting man hours. He told me they were not required to scan individual packages on the porch, and that I needed a SCAN form if I wanted them scanned, and instructed the carriers to stop scanning them. At the same time, he had them stop scanning when the daily truck would leave for the distribution, so if I didn’t have a scan form, they might not be scanned at all until they got to Harrisburg, and sometimes not until the following day.
I had 80 packages get dinged for late shipping. So, I started using the scan form. This meant I had to ship in bulk….which in turn prompted me to build an numeric inventory system to help quickly match up the labels to items being shipped….after mixing up outgoing packages on multiple occasions.
Now things have calmed back down in the local post office, but I continue to provide a SCAN form to save my carrier time. They really do work very hard for me.
@t-satt, I use Fitshipper for some of my labels, whenever I can save a little money shipping dimensionally. On that platform, it pulls in info directly from ebay, but you can also copy paste addresses into a quick ship form. You can print one at a time, and then print a scan form for anything shipped that day. It also has a cool tool that will tell you if you can save $$ by making the package a little smaller. The cost is $8/mo.Downside is that the only way to get the SCAN sheet is to bulk print. For us, that sucks. 10-20 packages a day, many looking the same (shoe priority boxes, multiple 9×12 poly bags) that we have to match up. By that time, I can get to the post office and back doing the dropoff myself.
I use the custom label/SKU field for keeping my inventory. Every item has a unique identifier that follows it from photos to measuring to storing to shipping. When printing labels in bulk, I then select to have the SKU printed on the shipping label. This way up to 50 labels can be printed at once and I just match them up the inventory number on each package.
Week May 12 – 18, 2019
Items in store: 3744 Listings for 5800 Items
Items Sold: 72 Transactions for 79 Items
Gross Sales: $4317.37
Highest Price Sold: $300, Burberry Suit
Lowest Price Sold: $4.99(shoelaces)
Average Price Sold: $54.65
Cost of Goods Sold $355, Plus consignment
Number of items listed this week: 90 items
$$ spent on new inventory this week $98
Repeat Customers: 8Amazon
Items Sold 2
Gross Sales $34.80
Cost of Good Sold $8If a buyer creates or uses a secondary username in order to circumvent your block list, that’s a violation of policy and will get any case closed in your favor.
Yes I had to buy one in February. It made things tight for a month or two, on top of the surgery, but they are both paid for.
Next challenge. My wife may go back to school for her Masters degree, it’s 3 years and $80K. We were on track to pay off our house early by 2024. My goal is to increase sales to pay for her school and not fall off our 2024 payoff.
At my current rate…I would have to sell an additional 2500 items or so, on top of what we are currently doing, to make it happen. Spread over 3 years, that would mean I need a 20% increase in # items sold. (16/week)…..Better get listing.
