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eBay Global Shipping has a warehouse in Kansas? I live in Kansas and they always have my shipments go to a GSP warehouse in Kentucky. Weird.
I sold a huge vintage gold starburst Syroco clock for $150. It was a real pain to pack, but it definitely qualifies as interesting. I don’t think I’d want it hanging in my house, but to each their own.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275546976862?hash=item4027e1325e:g:P~AAAOSwt0djeVPz
I sold a vintage Cosmo Time Talker talking alarm clock. I had been sitting on it for years and I finally took an offer of $105.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/275546792671?hash=item4027de62df:g:Z70AAOSwcXFjeUeM
This vintage gas station mug from Casey’s sold for $40. I love selling weird items like this.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/285045470013?hash=item425e08b33d:g:BaIAAOSwCUljeVSb
I did some more research and possibly this is a 1936 cake plate, which was the first year the company existed. These were not marked.
https://www.happyheidi.com/antiques/Fiesta_Gallery/fiestaware_cake_plate.shtml
I clicked on the top 20 or so insanely-high-priced corningware listings and the vast majority were either relisted or entirely removed from eBay. Maybe someone is trying to artificially inflate the market?
Shopify has free integration with Facebook Marketplace (which I am doing). FYI: Facebook Marketplace has really sucked for me. Maybe if I ran paid advertising it would be good, but it’s pretty pathetic sales so far with just organic traffic.
And I think Amazon only works with Sixbt if you are “grandfathered in.”
But yeah, it doesn’t have those other sites you mentioned, unless you could find a Shopify integration tool.
Still, you could probably get your whole eBay store on Etsy in a day rather than a year.
If you are cross-listing to Etsy, you should look into SixBit. It is pricier than List Perfectly, but it’s a real time saver. Not only does it make cross-listing (relatively) pain free, it also manages your inventory. When something sells on one platform, it is automatically removed from your other platforms. And you can use it to track the location of each item in your inventory and print a pick list when you are getting ready to ship out. It’s so nice to know exactly where to find each item. SixBit has a learning curve, but once you figure it out, it is an amazing piece of software. I upgraded to the highest functionality plan, so I now sell on eBay, Etsy, and Shopify. If you are interested, let me know and I’ll give you my referral code.
After what had been a very slow year for sales, this last week sales were crazy. I had one sale for $1400, so that made up a big portion of this. It was for some new industrial AC drive motor (I’m honestly not sure what it is used for). Then I sold a lot of other random items, many of them over $100.
Nov. 13 – 19, 2022
(sales numbers include shipping)Total Items in eBay Store: ~2,180
eBay Sales: $2,900
eBay Orders: 13Total Items in Etsy Store: ~1,170
Etsy Sales: $366
Etsy Orders: 7Total Facebook Items in Shop: ~1,900
Facebook Sales: $100
Facebook Orders: 2Total Sales All Channels: $3,366
Cost of Items Sold (rough guess): $260
Shipping Cost: $152
Profit Before Fees: $3097I went to a yard sale one time where the guy advertised and had pictures of tons of vintage video games, most of it quite rare/valuable (like a boxed JVC X’Eye, if you are familiar). He said people were basically camped out at his house starting at around 5 am. I went at 9 am. I wasn’t going to fight that kind of crowd. And all that stuff was obviously already gone.
But I actually struck up a conversation with the guy and turns out he owned some really cool stuff he hadn’t put out yet. He had a Turbografx and CD add-on, as well as a bunch of Turbografx games (most still had the boxes), which he sold me for super cheap, even though he knew they were fairly valuable. I left him my number and later came back and bought a couple of pretty rare 1980s computers from him also. I made upwards of $1.5k on that deal (some still is for sale, though), while I only spent maybe $250.
About 75% of the time if I ask someone running a garage sale about old video games, they get annoyed and say I’m the 12th person to ask and NO, THEY DON’T HAVE ANY VIDEO GAMES. Then again, every so often someone will bring a tote full of old NES games up out of the basement.
I still use the Amazon Seller app for books, although more so for books without barcodes. You can use it to scan the front cover of a book. While I don’t sell on Amazon anymore, seeing how many copies of a given book are on Amazon and the asking price is pretty handy. It’s much quicker than searching eBay sold listings. I can quickly discard titles that have dozens or even hundreds of copies on Amazon. If it doesn’t show up on Amazon (or they don’t have any copies available), then it’s probably something fairly rare and then I search eBay prices.
As for my scavenging week, yesterday I attended some estate sales on the final day (75% off). These were at estate sale companies I typically do not attend because they have way too high of prices. Turns out, though, that I was able to find some deals. At one estate sale, they had boxes of stuff in a very poorly lit area of the unfinished basement. I turned on my flashlight and found a box with a vintage 70s stereo receiver. It looks it good shape and worth at least $100. They also had some brand new CD cartridges that you use in certain CD players. I negotiated on these unpriced items and paid $7 for all of it.
At another estate sale, I found all sorts of deals in the office section. They had ridiculously high initial prices on these items, which blew up in their face this time. I spent a little over $60 after the discount and picked up a prime 400mm lens that will work with modern Canon DSLRs, a Sony Mini-DV camcorder, a small red 1980s Magnavox cassette boombox in really good condition, and a higher-end Canon photo and negative scanner (possibly never used) made in 2018.
Earlier this week, I went to my favorite estate sale company (they price things very reasonably) and picked up a Luxman CD player and a BIC cassette deck. They let me test each of them before buying and they each had problems (CD tray would not open on the Luxman and BIC would rewind and Fast Forward but would not play), but they gave me a great discount because of that. Spent $100 on the BIC and $50 on the Luxman. I might be able to fix the tray issue on the Luxman, but I’ll leave the BIC as is. I should be able to sell these for parts or repair and at least 3x my investment.
After they discontinued the Regional Rate C, I continued to use those boxes. I just took a sharpie to the “Regional Rate C” part and shipped it as normal Priority.
I sold a vintage (but new sealed in the box) belt sander for $500 plus shipping. I only had $25 in it. Of course, I had to sit on it a little over 2 years. But still an amazing sale.
I have an odd addendum to this story. I checked my mailbox yesterday, and that same customer sent me another microphone via eBay returns. It is the same model of mic, but this one is in a bit worse physical condition. He sent it back in the same packaging that I sent him the mic originally, so at least this one was bubble wrapped.
I’m not sure why he sent another one. Pretty crazy. Twice now, this customer has done something I have never encountered before after almost a decade selling on eBay and 9,500 sales.
Anyone else encounter something similar to this situation?
Update: after over a month of back and forth with Facebook/Meta Business Support, they finally were able to fix the issue that was causing all my items to be hidden in Marketplace search (no, they didn’t tell me what they fixed or what was causing the problem). I’ve made a few more sales finally (one via Google Shopping and two from Facebook) and I’m getting some questions through Facebook Messenger from people about my products. I’m still only getting 20-25 hits on my Facebook listings per day, but I sell obscure vintage stuff that probably most people are not expecting to find on Facebook. If I can get Facebook/Shopify to generate around $250/month in sales, I would be happy for now. Hopefully it can do more, but we’ll see. Now that I’ve finished all the setup, it’s not that much work to cross-post to Shopify using Sixbit.
