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I find y’all to be highly inspiring and want to jump in too. If I post every week, perhaps it will help me stay more accountable. Been in the glumps lately and when I get stuff actually listed it feels so GOOD…so by God I am going to set some goals and keep going. I don’t necessarily want to be part of the contest but nice to have the company. So here’s my 1st week’s accomplishment:
New Listings:
Amazon – 0
Ebay – 2
Etsy Store 1 – 25
Etsy Store 2 – 5Total listings accomplished: 32
All were from death piles.Onward and upward!
I had a bad week with ebay this week too and it also had to do with guaranteed delivery. I got an email from ebay stating that I was in danger of losing my guaranteed delivery status because of 5 sales that were scanned as late, although they were shipped on time, as always. I clicked on the link and checked the 5 items and they all showed as shipping and scanned on time. So I called ebay and got transferred to their “seller performance” dept, where I waited ON HOLD FOR 55 minutes. 55 MINUTES. I finally hung up and called back and asked that person to NOT transfer me. He said he’d look at my problem. He then said that the email was a scam email and that I needed to change my ebay password, and if I really wanted to be prudent I should change my gmail password too, since I had clicked on the link. He said that he thought it was a scam email because it wasn’t showing up in my ebay messages, and every email they sent should also show up in messages. ( I checked and it wasn’t.) So I dutifully changed my ebay password. He said not to worry about the guaranteed status, that I still had it…no worries.
He also asked me to forward the email to their scam dept. I did so and received an email back saying that YES the email was a scam email, and thanks for forwarding it.
Two hours later, the email showed up in my messages. So it wasn’t a scam email after all.
Two hours after that, it showed that I didn’t have any late scans.
So, happy ending, but I was extremely frustrated over spending about 2 hours on the phone over this mess. Ugh.
It’s fun to hear all your stories about prop sales. I too tend to see vintage items on TV shows and in movies and get distracted. I was SO excited when I sold a pair of funky 60s earrings on Etsy to the Sony prop department in LA about a year ago. It was an $8 sale but I was psyched!
Grimm was filmed here in Portland and they had a HUGE prop warehouse sale after the airing of the final episode last spring. It was heavily advertised and made all the news channels so you can imagine the excitement. I chose not to go because I had other stuff going on, and I also wasn’t sure there would be picking prices..but several friends went. They got there an hour early and waited over THREE hours in line to get in. Yikes.
Jay,
I sold $151,955 on Amazon in 2017. After cost of goods and Amazon fees my net profit hovers around 16% of that. I sell about 70% FBA and the rest I fulfill myself. There’s a LOT not to like about selling on Amazon and the competition grows ever fiercer but Amazon has been very good to me over the years so I try not to complain too much. I agree that selling on Ebay is a whole different animal and so far I like it much better.
I started on Ebay selling the same vintage-new stuff I was selling on Amazon, as that was the fastest way to jump in, and then started putting my vintage on there too, taking my own pictures of unique items. I have huge death piles, as I have saving items that I thought would be great on Ebay and are too specific for my local antique shows. A good example is a vintage brass water meter that I picked up at a barn sale for 25 cents and sold on Ebay for $45. One of my big goals for 2018 is to get a HUGE amount of these goodies listed on Ebay. Right now I have about 80% new retail on there and only 20% vintage and that’s going to change as I move forward. It’s always MUCH more thrilling to sell the vintage treasures.
Thanks Jay.
I started out selling books on Amazon. It was a natural progression, as I was already scavenging at estate sales and garage/yard sales for vintage goods and I also LOVE BOOKS. My specialty was buying large collections of books and I was quite lucky over the years….but the market fell out for books on Amazon a few years ago, and while I still buy books to resell…I mostly sell them other ways, including the vintage shows that I do. People love beautiful old books.
My shop was a mixture of vintage items and new items that have a vintage vibe. I figured out that these new items would sell quite well on Amazon and have built that part of my business up to selling over $100,000 on Amazon every year. It’s a extremely competitive market and I’ve had to evolve to keep up, but I like the challenge. I go to the Atlanta Wholesale Market every January to scout out new product, and that’s a blast in itself…getting to see the new trends.
I had thought about selling on Ebay for a long time, but with wearing so many hats had never quite pursued it until I talked to another vintage shopkeeper in the Summer of 2016 and she mentioned that she was doing quite well on Ebay and had moved most of her inventory off Etsy and onto Ebay. That was all the nudge I needed to start my Ebay journey.
I did want to mention that I LOVE the term scavenger and scavenging. Thank you for introducing such a great word into the picking vocabulary. People say junking or picking and I do call myself a Glitter Picker since my eye is drawn to pretty things, but “scavenger” is the very best word for what I do. I LOVE it!
I pick up several boxes a week of packing peanuts from a Sports Card shop that’s next to where I used to have my brick and mortar. He’s constantly getting in new inventory and is thrilled that I am willing to take the peanuts away.
…..your boyfriend decides to plan a romantic weekend for the two of you and he asks you what you want to do and you ask him to take you to the Goodwill bins on his side of town.
When I get to a really good garage sale or estate sale I go into my ZONE and have laser focus…Brad Pitt could be standing next to me and I wouldn’t notice! I went to a garage sale a couple of years ago that was run by a sweet little old lady getting rid of some of her treasures super super cheap. I immediately went into my picking trance, grabbing items right and left and making a pile by her checkout card table. It had been open an hour and I was shocked all these great things were still there…there were a lot of estate sales that day which most dealers here go to instead of garage sales so I was lucky. A woman and her husband walked in and looked at the stuff I was taking to my pile and she turned to her husband and said in a loud hiss….SHE MUST BE A DEALER!!! Like it was a bad word!! I wasn’t dickering on prices and I wasn’t grabbing anything out of anyone’s hands. I was just minding my own business and doing my thing and making this sweet lady happy because I was buying so many of her treasures. And they were amazing! I don’t keep much from my picking but I did keep two things from that sale.
One of my things is vintage books and I do see the same book dealer at a lot of the estate sales. He tends to buy differently than me so it’s not a big problem. However, there’s a big time dealer in my area…she has a HUGE instagram following and specializes in vintage Christmas and vintage Halloween. If there’s an estate sale that advertises lots of vintage Christmas I know she’ll be the first one in the door and get all the best stuff. She lives and breathes vintage kitschy Seasonal so it’s slim pickings for the rest of us (literally and figuratively.) 🙂
I sell on Amazon as well as Ebay, and I sell enough volume that I wouldn’t be able to find enough random boxes for my Amazon sales. I buy my new boxes in bulk from Uline and I wait until they have a free shipping promotion for a $300 purchase. There’s certain sizes I have figured out that work best for me and I buy them 100-200 at a time and I only need to order every 6 months or so. I haven’t found anybody else who is cheaper than Uline.
The annoying thing about Uline though is the thick catalogs they start sending frequently, as well as including them in every order. So wasteful.
Argh, I hear ya about being outed at a garage sale as a reseller. People sometimes get bent out of shape. I don’t understand it myself, as I am willing to pay the same price as anyone else, and a sale should be a sale should be a sale.
In August I went to a hoarder sale out in the countryside. Big two story house with four outbuildings. They’d already had an estate sale and there was still tons left and they had to be out of there in five days so they were desperate. It was a down and dirty sale, mouse droppings and dodging rusty nails but man, were there still treasures everywhere, even though lots of digging was involved. It was two sisters handling their aunt’s estate and they said to just make a big pile out front and we’d negotiate a price. A buddy and I were both there, each of us with our own vehicle. She went one direction and I went another. It was 100 degrees and we were dripping sweat but man was it fun!!! THREE HOURS later we each had a massive pile of finds. One of the sisters had asked me at one point if I was a dealer and I said yes. I am always honest when asked directly. So when the time came to negotiate, she poked through my pile and noticed some 1970s Holly Hobbie items and said…oh you are going to make good money on that. I groaned inside because I knew she was going to ask more! However, all’s well that ends well. She asked me to make an offer. I said how about $30 for all of it. She said $40. I said let’s meet in the middle at $35. She said yes. My friend negotiated her huge pile for $25. So I paid a ten dollar premium for being honest…but I didn’t really care. My minivan was filled to the brim for $35. You can’t beat that. It’s easily about 2 thousand dollars worth of stuff. By far the best buy this year.
Thanks for letting me share my story!
