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I 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.
I guess at least my negligent buyer wasn’t sending back dishes. That’s crazy. What were they thinking?
I’m still trying to determine what is the root cause for the low traffic/sales.
Zebra works fine for me with Windows and eBay shipping (as well as Pirate Ship). I picked up an older model on eBay for about $100 a few years back and print directly to 4×6. About the only maintenance it’s needed is an occasional cleaning to the print heads.
I haven’t used Vendoo, but I use SixBit and cross-list to Shopify, which has integration to my Facebook Shop (which I have set up to also post on Facebook Marketplace).
The integration between SixBit and Shopify has been pretty easy, but so far Facebook Marketplace has been a total bust. I had a few sales in the first week and 400+ clicks on my listings per day for a few days, but now it seems my listings are not even visible on Marketplace.
Literally, I can type in the exact name of one of my items that is showing as active on Marketplace and it will not show up in Marketplace search results. No sales in almost 2 months. I only average maybe 4 clicks per day (which might be coming from my Facebook Store instead of Marketplace).
I contacted Meta support, but it is an outsourced company that seems worthless. It’s been a month and they still haven’t given me any reason for why the items don’t show in Marketplace search.
Anyway, maybe you’ll have better luck with Vendoo, but my experience cross-listing to Facebook via Shopify has been a waste of time and money so far.
I also cross-list to Etsy using SixBit. I’ve had good luck with Etsy. It accounted for about 20% of my profit last year. That platform is friendly to vintage goods.
I’d price it at least $100. This one of a kind lamp will likely be a long tail regardless of price, so you might as well mark it high so it is worth your time to store, pack, and ship it.
Yeah, I could see it being a bit confusing, but the dropdown selection when purchasing clears that up. I think you handled it well. Low-value items aren’t worth protracted arguments with customers.
When you are selling something like Monster’s University party plates, this is probably a parent trying to give his/her small child a special birthday party. Some parents can get really mean and nasty when things like that don’t go as they envisioned.
If you have a store, you might want to create your own custom Store Categories. I assume this data would show up in the CSV files as well, but I don’t have it in front of me to confirm.
Managing your eBay Store | eBay
As for Excel, it can do amazing things, but you need to learn formulas. As Debitendcredits pointed out, Google will be your friend. Here’s a formula I came up with to classify whether your items are Madras Bottoms or Not Madras Bottoms. Obviously, you would need to do additional work for other categories. This formula assumes the title of the ebay item is in column A.
=IF(AND(COUNTIF(A2,”*madras*”)=1,OR(COUNTIF(A2,”*short*”)=1,COUNTIF(A2,”*pant*”)=1)),”Madras Bottoms”,”Not Madras Bottoms”)
In English, here’s the simple translation. If your title (in cell A2) has the word “madras” AND it has either the word “short” or “pant” in the title, then it will show “Madras Bottoms.” If the title doesn’t meet that criteria, it will show “Not Madras Bottoms.”
