Scavenger Life

Happy Holidays everyone! It feel like the year has zipped by…but also that a million different things happened. As people who worked for themselves, the highs and lows are equally inevitable and important.

Good week for us on eBay. Our best sale for a Disneyland pin from the 1970-80s. Ryanne found it in a pile of junk. Sold for $125. Insane. We’re happy to add to someone’s collection.

On the forum, Mark has been talking about his plan to cross-list to multiple platforms including Etsy. According to him, Etsy has really grown and should have better sales. I’m still skeptical if sales will rise for the amount of extra time it takes to list in multiple places (even with the crosslisting fancy tools). But I’m always happy to be wrong. We barely have time to list on eBay.

It is interesting to see Youtube videos and Facebook groups centered around reselling. It’s definitely become a job/business that people can now choose since there’s a clear template to follow. People are so organized and logical. There’s 24-hour zoom hangouts where people list together and talk. Ultimately the fundamentals haven’t changed: always be listing + find a process you can live with day in and day out.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week December 18-24, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9277
Items Sold: 27
Gross Sales: $1,493.07 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,198.43 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $122
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $125 (vintage Disney Land button)
Average Price Sold: $44.38
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Quieter week of sales. From our history, holiday sales have never been meteoric for us since we sell such weird stuff. I think sellers who do well during the holidays specialize in electronics, jewelry and new items (retail arbitrage).

If you’re looking for a unique gift, think of giving the gift of coffee 🙂 We’re shipping until next week. Hope everyone is having a fun time on their way to New Years.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week December 11-17, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9271
Items Sold: 23
Gross Sales: $962.15 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $796.40 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $103
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $85 (vintage lamp)
Average Price Sold: $41.83
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

We had a really good week of sales. They were coming in fast and were relatively high dollar. Lots of fun items that we were amazed sold. Shipping was annoying.

Sometimes we do miss doing the podcast because we always have thoughts about our week selling on eBay. A couple of podcast listeners came into our cafe last week that were fun to meet. They drove through our small town from Philly and just wanted to say hi. We also met up with another local scavenger, Donna, who used to listen. Ultimately we needed the time that we used to spend on the podcast to work on other things.

It’s nice to hear that our podcast was down-to-earth. This is the highest compliment because we hated seeing all the videos that promised quick money and easy riches without doing much work. We just wanted to share our experience that scavenging can be fun…but has many pitfalls, takes a lot of work, and is mostly very unglamorous. The only secret is being consistent, which is easier than it sounds.

Let it be known that our eBay business is still an important part of our financial life. The $3k-$5k that we make each month pays our daily expenses so we can invest in our other adventures. We’re just now starting out on a new project that will hopefully be done by the end of 2023. Our scavenging income gives us the confidence to gamble on ourselves.

Hope you had a good week.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week December 4-10, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9298
Items Sold: 36
Gross Sales: $1,621.13 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,305.68 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $89
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $120 (necklace)
Average Price Sold: $36.26
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $50
Number of items listed this week: 60
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

We were in Vermont to buy a truckload of green coffee beans. Shout out to our friends at Mocha Joes who have a direct relationship with coffee farms in Cameroon. It’s cool being part of a global trade route between small producers.

But since we had our store on Time Away, sales were slooooooooooooow. We sold half as much as the week before. If it wasn’t for a jacket that sold for $300, it would have been our worst week in a long time. Thanks for big sales.

Otherwise, life is good. Hope you guys are well.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week November 27-December 3, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9199
Items Sold: 21
Gross Sales: $1,006.42 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $762.23 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $42
Cost of helpers: $0
Highest Price Sold: $300 (winter coat)
Average Price Sold: $36.29
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 40
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

We had a good week of sales. Our highest sale was only $75, but we simply sold more items than usual. It feels our store is humming along.

Our current challenge is needing to more stuff to sell. Our helper has been working through a huge backload of unlisted inventory that we amassed…which is all now listed. We do a little scavenging here and there in our daily life since junk is everywhere, but we have not spent a full day at an auction, flea market, or estate sale in a couple years. We enjoy hearing your adventures scavenging because it tells us there’s still a deluge of stuff being discarded out in the world. We’re making plans for our new scavenging adventures.

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week November 20-26, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9199
Items Sold: 35
Gross Sales: $1,528.25 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,239.74 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $169
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $75 (vintage wool blanket)
Average Price Sold: $35.42
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

This was our week of $15 sales. As much as we like to fill our store with “high dollar” items (aka $30+), we do have a number of lower dollar items that build up over time. About half of this weeks sales were $15 or less. Mainly clothes we’ve had listed for a long time.

Looking at our inventory of 9000 items, we have about 1400 items that are $15 or less. Why? Some of these items are just remnants from our early days of eBay. You know we never delist items since everything eventually sells. We also do still list low dollar items when we purchase box lots at auctions. We might as well just list the little trinkets that are hiding at the bottom of boxes. It’s like bonus money.

What we don’t do is purposefully scavenge low dollar items like clothes. When we started selling on eBay in 2008, our entire store was just $10 clothing items. That was a grind to squeeze out profit. We’d come home with trash bags full of clothes and start the long slog of photographing and listing. Even if those clothes were free, it takes the same amount of work to list a $10 item as a $100 item. This is why we do our best to pick and choose what we scavenge. If we can only list 100 items a week, we want them to be the best value items we can find. This is just how we’ve evolved. Some sellers have perfected the grind of high volume, low dollar clothing/DVDs/books/etc sales.

Hope you guys are having a good week and getting ready for family/friends at Thanksgiving (if US based 🙂

Check out our coffee! ► broadporch.coffee
Join the conversation in the forum>> HERE

Our Store Week November 13-19, 2022

Total Items in Store: 9215
Items Sold: 29
Gross Sales: $976.21 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $758.79 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $48
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $200 (bread slicer)
Average Price Sold: $26.16
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)