Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
02/14/2017 at 12:34 pm in reply to: REMINDER: Do your removals & disposals on Amazon by tomorrow to avoid LTSF #12523
Jay, you won’t get charged. As long as the request is in prior to the deadline it stops the LTSF.
As for continuing to be for sale after the removal or destroy order is in, that hasn’t always been my experience. In Health and Beauty, it will often remain active for an hour or two but once stuff updates it is moved to inactive status pending return. But it’s hit or miss and I don’t do much media on AZ so I don’t know anything about the category.
Boy did this thread go in a hundred directions.
A couple of random thoughts that are worth what you pay for them:
1) It’s a choice. We get screwed on any platform as a seller, but it’s minimal and the cost of doing business. As Jay pointed out, we have a choice, not just on eBay, but everything in life. If it doesn’t work for you, move on. Raging against the machine can be therapeutic for the person on the soapbox, but it doesn’t typically do much for the audience.
2) It is not personal. Emotion has to be removed from our business model. As you did, my initial reaction to certain things that happen is one born out of fear. I quit a very lucractive career to sell full time. In my mind, every return, every neutral feedback, or every time I feel like a platform is screwing me I get my back up because in my mind it is threatening my income and whether I made the right decision. I have learned to tell myself that it is simply business, not catastrophic, and move on. When Jay and Ryanne talk about just issuing a refund if it isn’t worth fighting about is spot on because of the peace of mind it brings. We’ve adopted this and it is amazing how quickly I forget about the small mole hills I could have built a mountain out of.
3) Change is going to happen. The question is are you ready to adapt and move on? Life whitenile and retro I also sell FBA and we are pretty heavy into it. When the fee structures came in I started changing inventory and the model for Amazon. I don’t like the changes but I have adapted to them and moved on. To remove the fear from change, my next point is what I see as the key to success for online sellers.
4) Diversify. Shan and I often talk about how we do not believe we will be selling in the same forms we are now in ten years. There will be an evolution as platforms change. We are currently on three platforms and also use every extra penny to buy rental properties and now have two. I do believe Amazon will ultimately squeeze most third party sellers out. But it’s just my opinion and I am going to ride that wave until I simply don’t make my margins. In the meantime we are building our eBay pipeline to be as big as possible to compensate for Amazon. We are trying to expand our presence on etsy. We are looking at rental properties in other states.
5) By selling online, I think most of us are simply trying to give ourselves the gift of owning our own time day in and day out. Do we want to spend our hard earned time raging against the machine or doing something we love? Going back to 1), I try to remember that’s what it is all about. A choice. I choose to enjoy my time as much as possible because eBay currently gives me the ability to choose.
whiskey, of the long winded whiskeys
01/23/2017 at 8:05 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 294: Finding the Valuable Caches and Going All In #10995A world no one wants to live in! Thank you for telling me about Stone’s Delicious IPA. Stone’s Arrogant Bastard and Smokey Porter were my favorites until I couldn’t enjoy them anymore. I am already in the process of tracking one down. The only caveat is that Ommision and the Delicious IPA are not truly gluten free. They fall under the 2 million ppm that allows them to be called gluten free (Stone doesn’t call it gluten free, they use the term gluten reduced or something.). This typically means I can enjoy one, maybe two, before symptoms set in. But I am super excited to try it.
GF is same here in Oregon. It’s as abundant as possible. And thankfully meat and eggs provide protein for me, but I have come to love quinoa and edamame as alternative sources.
01/22/2017 at 9:31 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 294: Finding the Valuable Caches and Going All In #10902Paul!! Sorry to hear about the health issues but glad it sounds like there is a game plan. Welcome to the world without gluten. Say goodbye to bread that is light and/or fluffy. Pizza. And most craft beers. Have you found Ommission and strangely enough, Coors Peak? They are the only two that really taste like beer to me. And I think Freschetta makes a decent gluten free pizza.
whiskey, celiacs diagnosis a couple of years ago but kicking butt and moving forward without processed wheat
A quick google search shows Landia Denmark makes teak furnishings and that Mandia is not a company in Denmark. i would go with Landia.
For those of you who do not believe in corporal punishment, I offer pie boy as my argument that is pro corporal punishment.
Pie boy needs his butt whooped.
I can’t wait to hear how the great pastry descalation experiment of 2017 turns out! Hopefully he just went to Denny’s and is eating cheap pie pondering his next video game purchase.
As far as the interpretation goes, whatever he was trying to say, he did admit something has been working for 1000 years. so I would take that as a positive statement.
Or you could respond with something nonsensical that would make him stew on whether there is a hidden meaning like “I like pie” or “venus is aligned, the floss is waxed, and the soup is hot.”
Wow. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. My initial response would be to just walk away from the clown. But the statements are pretty strong and incredibly hateful. So let me posit this– you are clearly strong and thick skinned about it. But what happens when he spews misogenistic, anti-semitic, (insert hate speech here) to someone that is not as strong, thick skinned, or maybe just having a really rough time in their life. What happens when he spews to them?
I am okay with someone calling me an Asshole, bastard, or whatever. But when it is hateful, no matter how misdirected, I feel like they need to be tossed off ebay. Quite frankly I think they need to be tossed off the earth, but that is another discussion.
I don’t think I could stand by and let them do it to someone else even though it wouldn’t bother me personally. Regardless of how you choose to handle it, good luck.
01/10/2017 at 10:14 pm in reply to: Join me in the 2017 Something from Nothing Challenge anyone??? #10033Do it! Shan and I are both professionals. We were burned out and wanted supplemental income, or more importantly, a business that could begin to replace our income in 2013. In January 2014 we began our own challenge of starting a business with nothing. We had both sold on eBay but decided we were wiping the slate and starting with zero as a type of social experiment. We started with stuff that was just laying around in our home or that we could obtain for free. Yes, we had our laptops and phone, wifi, and a roof over our head, but everything in the “business” was started from nothing else.
In the early days we searched things like Taco Bell sauce packets (think “will you marry me”?, packets. or bulk of limited flavors) and we would stop on our way home from work and grab a small handful without buying anything, if we did drive through it was Jack in the Box with a free antenna ball because the ball paid for the meal, we found toilet paper tubes and paper towel rolls were sought after by crafters in bulk and we encouraged family and friends to save all of them for us. Maybe our best “free” product was stickers from a regional coffee company. You could get 3-4 different ones with the purchase of a cup of coffee. At the time we were the first sellers of these and would make 8 or 9 bucks per sticker. Now there are over a hundred listings for the stickers. They were free.
We used every penny to buy inventory. We couldn’t spend everything in our paypal on inventory by March of that year(we didn’t use anything for personal expenses). In July of that year we learned about something called Amazon FBA and did a ton of research and invested our extra free cash in inventory. The first year we did 65k in sales between the two platforms. Our entire business and inventory today stems from that initial experiment. We have bought two rentals. We still sell on both.
Here are my thoughts on the experiment:
It is fun. Be creative in what you can sell. Don’t limit yourself to what you have lying around. Grab as many free stickers as you feel you can with only losing pride and not getting a rebuke. Which leads me to my next thought.
Pride isn’t your friend. We will pick up pennies in the parking lot. I have cruised through bottle return areas and pulled the grolsch type bottles with wired on type stoppers and sold them in lots. We love free boxes at yard sales. Some of our biggest scores were found there.
Be disciplined. The money goes back to the business.
The amount you work determines your success and pool of paypal money. We both worked 50-60 hours a week in our salaried jobs. Our experiment was done in the wee hours at night and in the morning.
Find your happiness. I do this full time just a couple of years later. Shan will join me by next year at the latest. This is who we are.
Continue to learn. We read everything and anything we can to expand what we do. That first year we looked for ways to create value from nothing and we tried things with no safety net. We failed in some, succeeded in others. But the bottom line is we have done well for ourselves.
Probably way more than you wanted to hear and not necessarily a challenge, but I am a long winded bastard.
whiskey
And sorry, you asked about return rates and I forgot to include ours.
On eBay we are currently just under 1%. Amazon has removed the metric that told us our return rate, but historically it was about 1.5%. Amazon’s was a bit of a joke because they would authorize the return, take our money, and count the return against us. 45 days later they would give us back about 75% of what they took because the item was never actually returned and our metrics still took the ding. While the amount of money was fairly minimal there is a huge principle there that really torques me.
eBay
Total Items in Store: 1140
Items Sold: 60
Cost of Items Sold: $83.72
Total Sales: $1503.60
Highest Price Sold: $300 Video Game Console (paid $7 at an Estate Sale) and $150 for an old Keyboard that was in a free box at another Estate Sale
Average Price Sold: $25.06
Returns: 1 for $50 (Radioshack Answering Machine that buyer claimed wasn’t fully functioning)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $32
Number of items listed this week: 55
———-
Amazon FBA/FBM
Total Offers: 30
Items Sold: 154
Cost of Items Sold: $619.25
Total Sales: $2617.34
Highest Price Sold: 59.99
Average Price Sold: $17.00
Returns: None
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $80
Number of items listed this week: 0I agree with Jay– the only store closing sales we ever found great deals suitable for FBA was when staples and office depot or max did a lot of closings.
The bigger problem for me with walmart and kmart is that by the time things get to the right price the shelf wear is horrible. On ebay that is fine becuase you note it and move on. The problem with FBA is that it is used or like new by definition. And you only get the premium price if you can list as new. Even pristine stuff is technically not new if you can’t pass the warranty on. Short story long it’s a recipe for FBA disaster if you send in something with shelf wear as new.
Like pushing rocks up hill with your nose. Money was good when it was wide open. Now it’s time to build the pipeline even bigger.
It’s funny. When you realize you aren’t chasing a dollar, your are chasing a lifestyle, everything changes. eBay is a lifestyle. Amazon is a dollar.
I agree about permissions, but there are still thousands of major brands that can be sold without permission. Funny amazon charges a fee to get permission and the money goes in amazon’s pocket and not the brand owner.
We may continue white labels, but our current one is on it’s way out. A bunch of competition from Chinese sellers over the holidays have killed margins. Our success was ultimately our failure once we hit a sales ranking under 10,000 in health and beauty for a couple of months. There was no way to protect what we did as we just took a generic item, created a kit, and put it in a different category. It’s a lot of energy coming up with something, sourcing it, and fighting off competition for as long as possible.
- This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by whiskey.
-
AuthorPosts