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Do you have a link to the video? With every update Ebay does, the response is usually almost always negative with the youtube Ebay community. I don’t get that mindset at all. Here is a link to the terms and conditions, Ebay guarantees delivery dates and protects sellers from late deliveries. I don’t see anything about 6-8 week delivery time.
https://pages.ebay.com/sell/send/termsofservice.html
I will say that even if it did state that delivery times can take up to 6-8 weeks, I would assume that language would be in there to cover worse case scenarios. That’s no different from US USPS shipping policy. Twice in the last 2 months, a package has stalled or been lost during transit. One packaged was returned to me a little over a month after it was scheduled to be delivered, and the other is still unknown, with package being stuck “in transit” for several weeks now.
At the end of the day, it’s a cheaper option for the buyer, allows me to edit/combine invoices, and gives me the same seller protections I would expect from GSP. I’m happy with the service so far.
Feb 2 – 8
Total Items in Store – 14,245
# of new listings ~342
Total # of orders – 131
Total # of items sold – 185
Gross Sales – $3,131.06
COG Sold ~$26
Inventory Bought – $0Busy week, no big sales, just a bunch of them and a bunch of combined orders. Another week of mostly magazines sales out of the big magazine haul I got over the summer. Most of the items that I had to pay for are ones that I paid less than a dollar for. Records, pins, comics, hub cap, etc. A type writer, action figure, and old bench motor sold this week as well, which were the highest COG items, I paid $5 for the typewriter and motor and they’ve been up for years so I was glad to get them out the door. The action figure I paid $8 for over the summer.
Ebays addition of the standard international shipping option has been great so far. I added that as an additional shipping option to my first class business policy. When I added the option, it stated it would be used if GSP wasn’t available, but it seems that buyers have a choice between GSP and standard international, because every international order I’ve had since adding it has chosen the standard option. Which is freaking great because I can finally send combined invoice for all my international orders.
Good podcast as always, hope everyone had a great week.
1/26 – 2/1
Total Items in Store – 14,088
# of new listings ~291
Total # of orders – 100
Total # of items sold – 132
Gross Sales – $2,434.05
COG Sold ~$12
Inventory Bought – $0Pretty normal week, mostly paper/magazine sales. The cost of goods come from some hot wheel sales out of a huge lot I bought years ago, records, pins, and postcards. Just a bunch of small cheap stuff that adds up.
Listings were a bit low this week because I was down for 2 days with a wicked stomach bug. Interestingly, my two lowest sales days were the two days I was sick. Both days had sudden drops to under $200 and the following day shot back up past $400 when I went back to listing. Who knows.
Antique paper advertising, postcards, records, small pins/unique items.
Strangely enough, also look at bootleg toys. We came across knock off transformers a few years ago, the “Titanic bot”. They sold for $70-100 a piece.
Total Items In Store: 13,931
Total # of Orders – 109
Total items sold – 159
Gross Sales $2,814.01
Highest Price Sold: $150 (antique yearbook)
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 0
Number of items listed: 294
Cost of Goods Sold – ~$28Another week of mostly magazine sales. The yearbook that sold was my highest cost of goods, costing me $10 about 2 years ago at an auction. The 2nd highest single item that sold was an action figure for $120. I paid $8 for that item last summer. The rest were paper items, records, and smalls, all which I pay well under a dollar a piece for.
11 of my orders last week were combined orders. You’re correct, it can be a hassle sometimes to combine orders on Ebay, they need to streamline it more. What I generally do if a customer messages about ordering several items is I ask them to send me a list of the items they want to buy. Then I just end all but 1 of the listings. The last listing I just edit and change the title to something like “Private Listing Lot of 8 Magazines for “xxx”
Sometimes I’ll add the other items photos to the combined listing, but sometimes when they order 10+ items at a time, I’ll skip adding photos and in the product description will have a list of items included in sale; then just update price/weight. Customers seem to enjoy buying in the simplest manner possible, so I usually do what I can to help make it easier. That’s personally helped me gain some repeat customers, especially GSP customers who want to combine orders.
Speaking of return customers, I agree 100%. I have no idea how such a basic feature hasn’t been added to Ebay yet. You can use paypal reports to give you a list of your top and/or repeat customers of 2019, but I don’t believe it’s complete data. It doesn’t account for customers who don’t purchase via paypal.
Hope everyone had a great week.
Great episode. The loneliness and social isolation is definitely an issue with working from home full time. I never realized the majority of my social life was based around going to work and interacting with my co-workers until I started reselling. I also feel like current events and pop culture passes me by a lot more now. My group of work buddies would always talk about the latest movies or tv shows on our breaks, so there was always a reason for me to stay on top of things. Priorities and the way I spend my free time is much different these days.
1/12 – 1/18
Total Items in Store – 13,796
# of new listings ~422
# of orders – 123
Gross Sales – $2,818.31
COG Sold ~$8
Inventory Bought – $029 items sold this week came from outside the big magazine/paper haul I got over the summer. All items I paid less than a dollar for. Some of the items, like the hats, print ads, brochure, and the 78 record were picked up for less than ten cents apiece due to buying in bulk. One of the items was an Avon 70s skin care cream had been up since 2014. Probably came close to breaking even on that one, but I’m glad it’s out the door.
It’s been a big tabloid week for us. We started working on the dozens of banker boxes we have full of Examiners/Enquirers/Globes, etc. I’ve listed over 400 of them this week and have probably pictured well over 1,000 of them, I’m seeing freakin’ tabloids in my sleep at this point, haha. The original goal was to process them all this month and get them sorted/Sku’d but I’m getting pretty burnt out on them, will probably switch up items to list this coming week.
Yeah the Circus magazines all came from the same haul, pretty much everything I’ll be listing for the foreseeable future will be from the same estate. And you’re definitely correct, they are hard to come by. Usually when I come across them at auctions, they’ve been handled by so many people that they’re all pretty worn which really can kill the value. From what I’ve seen, a collector would rather pay the extra costs for the better conditioned item, same as with comic collectors. I’m not sure if I would be doing as well as I am with these items if they were in poor condition.
Nice job on those Circus/Creem collection. Did they all have the posters still attached? I’ve had people buy magazines just for the poster itself. The fashion magazines blew me away, so I’m constantly on the look out for them. I think those might be the rarest ones I’ve come across so far. If you ever find any and can’t any on Ebay or within the last 10-15 years of complete sales on Worthpoint, list them very high with best offer. Both the Jaclyn Smith that sold for $150 and the Lynda Carter that sold for $99, sold within 2 days of listing for full price. They could be worth $200+ for all I know. Good luck on those Onion newspapers, you should do really well on those if you can get a hold of them.
Yeah, they were definitely a hoarder/collector. I go to a lot of auctions, I had never seen such a massive collection before. The day of the auction itself, I filled my truck and a trailer and ended up leaving dozens of bins behind because I couldn’t haul anymore. There was the common 2-ring type setup that large auctions have. Then there was legitimately ~500-1,000 totes of paper/small items laid out in the yard. They would just pile up totes and auction them off. Most people were interested in the massive comic, toys, and movie collection he had, not a lot of interest in the paper bins in the yard, so I was just buying piles of totes $5 a pile. I was blown away. Same with the 78 records. There were 15 100-gallon totes full of 78 records, absolutely nobody wanted them, I got them for $2 a piece.
Funny thing is the guys house was a dump, border line condemned, yet just about every single item he collected was in near mint condition and he collected everything, even personal mail he had acquired over the years, which was just trash. He may have started out as just a collector but then slowly begun to develop a hoarder type mentality.
I would guess people buy old magazines because they’re collectors of physical media, I remember reading an article about the rise of physical media collectors coinciding with the rise of digital media conversion. Some are collectors of specific people. The big tabloid lot that went out today was to a Liz Taylor collector, they all had Liz on the cover. There’s a guy who collects a lot of Dallas TV stuff and buys quite a bit off me. There’s a guy who just specifically collects old WWF/WCW ads out of just one particular magazine title. I sold a $20 Muppet magazine to a person last week who only wanted it because of a specific He-Man ad in the back of the magazine. Then lastly, a lot of international buyers buy them because they were never released in their country, so buying them on Ebay from the US is one of the only ways they can get their hands on them.
Oh yeah, 80s/90s sci-fi/comic magazines are generally low in value, unless there’s something specific on the cover or a specific desirable article. It really sucks. I think the lowest we post our mags for is generally $7.5 + shipping. Anything lower than that we have been tossing to the side to lot up. We got tons of those with this haul. Surprisingly fashion and swimsuit magazines have been the most expensive magazines so far. Aside from the $99 Sophisticates we sold this week I talked about in my other reply, our highest single magazine was also a sophisticates. It was a Jaclyn Smith Sophisticates beauty magazine. I price things according to worth point instead of Ebay comps and there was absolutely no record of that item ever being sold and I think worthpoint goes back 10-15 years. I listed it for $150 + shipping and it sold overnight.
A lot of swimsuit mags have sold for $30+, so I would say those two categories would be what I would look for. Also 70s/80s TV and soap opera magazines. I generally get anywhere between $17-40+shipping per issue.
We haven’t processed them all yet, so we’re still not sure what all we have but so far about 90% have been listed individually, the others have been set aside for lots. Out of the 86 items sold last week, around 75 of them were magazines. Highest single magazine that sold last week was a Sophisticate’s Fashion magazine that sold for $99.
Another thing to consider is combined orders. Going out today is a lot of 22 tabloid magazines for a total of $231, a lot of 3 tabloids for a total of $30. A lot of 7 People/Us magazines for a total of $116.85. The highest single magazine that sold this weekend was a rugrats magazine for a total of $50.14. All prices include shipping.
We’ve also gained around a dozen or so repeat buyers that will pick our store monthly and order from us. Which is something that we didn’t notice when we sold a bunch of one offs.
I’d say we do around $1,500 -$2,000 per week just in magazines.
The ones with no mailing label and are in at least VG condition seem to be the ones the collectors are looking for.
We’ve also been able to control/change the market prices for several magazine runs. Since we have almost every issue of some of these titles, we were able to flood the market with those and increase the prices. For instance, there’s a certain magazine that had less than 100 listed on Ebay, all listed for less than $10. We have 5-10 times the amount of those specific titles, so we threw all ours up from anywhere between $15-25 a piece and have been doing well with them.
Smalls/papers/magazines are also incredibly fast to picture, list, and ship. We can picture ~100 of them in under 2 hours and can post 50-100 a day if we have the whole day to work on them. The way we can do that is we try to take photos of the same magazines titles, all at once. For example, I’ll spend a few hours picturing, say, Globe tabloids, then transfer them to my pc. When I list one the title will say something like –
“Globe Tabloid Aug 5 1995 – Oprah – Dallas Linda Gray – Brooke Shields”
Since they’re all basically near mint, my condition description is generally just –
“Excellent vintage condition. Minor toning/stressing along edges. ”
Most of those mags only have 3 pictures. 2 of the front, the main photo is trimmed and cropped, the 2nd photo is cropped but still leaves a small white border, and the 3rd is a pic of the back cover.
Then in the description, it’s just say “Please look at all pics and contact me with any additional questions. Thanks”
The price of these is generally $14.95 + shipping.
When that’s listed, all I’m doing is hitting sell similar, changes a few words in the title, changing the pics, and then that listing is done, rinse and repeat. Listing them may take 5 minutes each.
My username is also my store name, so you can find me that way, but if not and anyone wants to check out my store, I’ll include the link below. Thanks. I hope that answered everyones various questions. Feel free to ask anything else, I enjoy talking about reselling and how we run our business.
Hello, been listening to you guys for years and appreciate all the content.
Jan 5-11 2019
Total Items In Store: 13,502
Items Sold: 86
Cost of Items Sold: Around $18
Total Sales: $ 2,569.97
Highest Price Sold: $325 (lot of 20 1940s Montgomery Ward Cards)This is my first post here, so I’ll just give a bit of background and explain some of the numbers.
I started off ~6 years ago, you guys were one of the first mediums I found talking about reselling. Truth be told, I modeled my business after your store the first few years. Started off dumpster diving and going to Goodwills/Thrift stores. I soon got to a bottleneck of sorts, where I just was running out of room, even with a 2 car garage, a 1 car garage, and a storage unit.
I ended up changing my business model a few years ago. I stopped going to thrift stores and started focusing on rural live and online auctions. I stopped buying clothes, glassware, kitchenware, electronics, etc. etc. and started focusing on smalls and vintage paper ephemera.
Over the summer I was at an auction of a life long comic, sci-fi, and magazine collector who passed away. I ended up buying around 10,000 78s for $30 and around 2,000 magazines for a fraction of a cent a piece. After that, came the deal of a lifetime.
So the guy had passed away and they auctioned off the house during the auction. I knew the person who ended up buying the house and when they got the keys, they discovered every room of the house was stacked to the ceiling with magazines that had been stored for years in bins, most of them all in near mint condition.
The person was going to throw them all away because he thought they were trash, I offered to clean out the estate if I could have them all. He agreed. We ended up with around 15,000 magazines. That was back in July and we’ve been throwing them up as fast as possible ever since. We now have enough unprocessed inventory to last maybe 2 years, during which time we will be aggressively paying down all our debt and hopefully buy a house.
Sorry for the long post, hopefully that explains my low cost of goods. The Montgomery ward cards were picked up for $10 at an auction, 50 cents a piece, which is a large chunk of my cost of goods sold this week.
Thanks again for the inspiration to do this, I’m not sure if I ever would have started if I didn’t come across your podcasts.
