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Last week marked the first time we made less than 2k in close to a year. We’re not in the managed payments program but the day before it went into affect, our sales took a hit.
Not putting on my tinfoil hat just yet, it’s just a weird coincidence.
Anyways, here are the rough numbers for the past week. We’re getting started on tomorrows orders so I’ll have to get a more detailed idea of our numbers sometime when we’re free.
Listings in store – 14,994
Gross sales – $1,980.73
#of orders – 93
# of items sold – not sure, we had a few combined orders but we haven’t counted the # of items sold yet, but with 93 orders, we probably had 103-110 items sold once we include combined orders
COGS – Less than $20. Stuff that I paid for, a few 78s, a few comics, a hat, some other smalls
Money spent on inventory this week – $0.
Goals for next week, maintaining above 15,000 listings, get our sales back up in the $2,500 range.
Good news is I think we already had our sale of the week today, so the numbers should be back to normal by this Sunday.
Sold a Dolly Parton Jacket. Embroidered record label release. Believe it came from employee release party or something. No history on Ebay, Worthpoint, or Google.
Threw it up for $500, took offer of $375 today. Customer already paid. I paid $8 for it maybe two months ago? Local online auction, bunch of music memorabilia. There was a Bruce Springsteen tour jacket that I assume everyone was focused on. It sold at auction for close to $200, seeing comps on Ebay, I don’t see enough meat on the bone. But, part of scavenging is picking up stuff that others don’t see value in. For us on that day, it was all the music jackets besides the Springsteen one.
Hope everyone has a great week.
There is a section in the loan papers stating they would need collateral if over 25k. I don’t know if that’s a segment left over from previous disaster relief loans they usually gave to small businesses hurt by natural disasters. It’s possible that they did require collateral with those loans but since this program was rushed out, accidentally left that section in without enforcing it. It’s also possible that they consider my inventory collateral. Either way, yeah, they never asked for it.
Just the collectibles category alone is pretty huge and you guys sell a lot of it, so you should see some positives from this as well.
I believe they use Square. It’s been a while since I checked but I think they were only offering short term 6 month loans at the time.
Hello all, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’ve still been listening to your weekly podcasts. We haven’t seen any sort of summer slowdown yet, which is welcomed but weird. So we’ve just been chugging along, trying to get as many listings up before the free listing promo runs out. Hope they extend it another month or so. Still been eating off the huge paper haul we got last June.
It’s Monday so another big day of getting orders out. We have 62 weekend sales that are going out today, so here’s a quick overview of last weeks sales.
July 5-11
Gross sales (without subtracting fees/shipping) $2,928.62
Total orders – 133
Items currently in store – 14,896Hope everyone has a great week.
I haven’t got an invite either. I saw that one of the many categories that are going to be prohibited are adult items and I have several hundred adult mags up. I called Ebay and a rep told me that sellers who have a lot of these items listed, aren’t getting invites as of yet. They cs rep told me their working on figuring out how adult sellers or vehicle part sellers can still keep their inventory on Ebay. We shall see.
Are you doing all the packing? My wife does most of the packing, I do spend a few hours pulling items each morning for her though. My listing amount has actually dropped the past few weeks, as I have been listing less daily and doing other things with the business. I think like any other business, there are times when you ‘hustle’ and times when you take it easy. We have a goal we’re trying to meet, so right now we’re just going full gear. When we reach it, I’ll be able to relax and take it a bit easier.
Also, screw Gary V.. Anyone who’s legit trying to push the dead 2014 reseller meme of “Mug Life!” is full of it. He doesn’t make much money at all reselling, he’s in it for most of the reasons other youtube resellers are, marketing.
Total Items In Store: 14,820
Total # of orders – 134
Total # of items sold – 149
Gross sales – $3,319.80
COG – ~$20 maybe? I dunno, it’s super late and I’m beat. I’m pretty sure most of my brain functions shut down like two hours ago and I’ve just been listing on autopilot.Some cool sales, Weekly World News with everyone’s favorite murdering cannibal, Jeffery Dahmer on the cover – $75
Birth of Venus engraved proof, basically a large single page print – $75. Interesting thing about that piece is that it came from a book that people sell for a few hundred bucks. The book is full of these engraved proofs. So I just pulled the proofs out and listed them individually for $75-125 bucks, this is the third or 4th one I’ve sold over the last two-ish years. There are several books in the set, but not all of them have the proofs.
More interesting is that just typing that out reminded me I should check Ebay out to see if anyone has one of the engraving books listed for cheap and they did, for $14.95, sweet.
Anyways outside of that, my favorite thing in the world, combined orders. Several over $200. So all in all busy week.
I seriously have no idea how you guys manage all your other businesses on top of Ebay. Every day is just a blur to me, working from when I wake up until insane hours like this. All to be back up again in 5 hours to pull yesterdays orders. Just over and over again, until infinity. The thought of spending my older days at my own local coffee shop sounds freakin’ great. Besides the daily grind packing/picturing/listing on Ebay, I’ve met way too many people who don’t think this is a real business.
I also just think there’s a different level of satisfaction in owning an actually brick and mortar business, helping revitalize your old town, over just selling dead peoples stuff online.
Eh, I applied twice for the grant and never heard anything back. That fund was depleted almost immediately.
Items in Store 14,878
# of orders – 120
Total # of items sold – 135
Gross sales – $2569.23
COGS: ~$14Steady week, other than being back in the $2500 range instead of $3kish, no complaints on our end. This past week was a big week of ending and tossing items. I took down around 100 listings and thew away about 5 times that amount of books that were taking up way too much space. Cheap books that have been sitting for years without moving. I figure I’m getting to the point with them that I’ll start losing money in listing fees. Plus I needed the room for better stuff. I ended up condensing 6 shelves full of books down to just two.
Very busy weekend, we had close to 100 items go out today. We had a item sell on Amazon for $85 that we had listed on Ebay for $55 yesterday as well, weird, but we’ll take it. One of my repeat buyers put in an order for around 22 magazines today. He’s one of my favorite repeat buyers because always pays shipping on each item, instead of requesting a combined total. I think we both have a unspoken understanding, I do give him good deals on items. His order total was $181 and he paid $273 total, it’ll cost us about 12 bucks to ship it. This will go on to next weeks sales total .
I’m off to pick up some auction items tomorrow and the day after. The one I’m going to tomorrow is kind of a bummer because I completely forgot about the auction end time, only won 3 of the dozens of lots I bid on, and is an hour away. The items I’m picking up Wednesday is one of my favorite auctions to source from. I spent a little over $300 on paper, ephemera, and some small easy to ship stuff. I was able to score some antique scrapbooks for $10 each. I will be spending the next week or so cutting the valuable stuff out of the scrapbook, or using a heat gun to loosen the adhesive and remove the scrap paper all together.
One book in particular is about half full of paper dolls/barbies. The other is full of old 1920s-50s theater and actor advertisements. All this stuff is gold to me. It gets a bit tricky to get a cost per good with this stuff, but I should be able to pull at least 50 listings from each book, so I’m thinking at the end of the day, I’m looking at maybe 20 cents or so per listed item from those lots. I would love to get my COGs down to that kind of number on everything I buy, but online auction prices have jumped up since thrift stores shut down.
Now back to listing, it never ends haha. Hope everyone has a great week 🙂
04/19/20 – 04/25/20
Total Items In Store: 14,959
Total # of orders – 150
Total # of items sold – 165
Cost of Items Sold: ~$42
Total Sales: $ 3,310.22
Highest Price Sold: Potbelly Antique Chestnut Coal Stove – $225 – $50 partial refund = $175
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0Busy week again, not a day under $300 gross sales, which is great. I had an issue with the customer who bought the cast iron stove. He claimed the “back” damper was missing, the damper on that item is on the top, not the back, so he was either fishing for a partial refund or didn’t know what he was talking about. At the end of the day, I just provided him a $50 credit an he kept the item. It would of cost me nearly $60 to send it back, so it was the most sensible option. I paid $30 for it 2 years ago and it was a pain to pack, so I’m just glad it’s gone and I made a profit.
Best of luck with the 2020 plan you guys have started!
Seems like most of us had a nice increase in sales this week, lets hope it continues.
04/12/20 – 04/18/20
Total Items In Store: 14,924
# of orders – 124
Total # of items sold – 163
Cost of Items Sold: ~$30
Gross Sales: $3,660.64
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0Super busy week for us. I had hit 15,000 listings earlier in the week, but we’ve been shipping more than I can get listed. Highest sale was a 45 RPM Record that I paid about a nickel for, sold for $400. Tons of combined orders as always. Personally, doing this for a living is my gratification. It does become a grind, but anything in life does after a while. Thanks for the podcast and hope you have another great week on the bay.
Yeah, 90% of the sales were magazines. And I agree, it seems like nothing was learned from the 2008 recession, even though this is much different circumstances. I don’t see why their #1 priority shouldn’t be small business funding, it’s the backbone of our economy. Corporations shouldn’t even receive free money from a slush fund, it would make more sense to give them access to near 0% loans that they can then pay pack.
I’ve been reading that many who applied received an email to reapply. I’ve received nothing, not even a credit pull yet, which means they haven’t got to my application or they just flat out denied it due to have no employees.
04/05/20 – 04/11/20
Total Items In Store: 15,014
Gross Sales – $2,117.28
Total Orders – 89
Total Items sold – 112
Cost of goods sold – ~$11
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0Slower week than normal, was under 2k for the week until yesterday. I also applied for the Disaster grant and it was almost comically simple, so I’m very skeptical that I’ll actually get the funds. The SBA is already trying to back out of the law that was passed, which I didn’t know was even possible to openly ignore a law. Last I read they’ve now changed their grants from 10k to 1k per employee. The whole thing is a clusterfuck, really.
