Scavenger Life

Our highest sold item was a sink faucet we recently scavenged for free. A woman posted locally about needing to do a clean out and willing to give away stuff if we picked it up. We arrived in our truck and loaded furniture, home goods, ladder tools, etc. We’ve sold almost $1000 of items in the first couple weeks. Some stuff sold on Facebook Marketplace and some stuff on eBay.

We really don’t like to pay for inventory. The sales are even sweeter when we know we scavenged the items for free.

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Our Store Week August 6-12, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9469
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales: $871.01 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $690.89 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $43
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $200 (sink faucet)
Average Price Sold: $34.54
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $30
Number of items listed this week: 30
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Our big sale experiment is over. With a 50% sale, we doubled our normal transactions for one week…but then quickly came back down to earth this week.

What did we take from the experiment?
–In a 10,000 item store, some items are price sensitive.
–Running a deep sale is like doing steroids. The juicing gives quick results but also disappears once the juicing stops. I imagine that it’d take more and more juicing to get the same results week after week.
–We still think our time is better spent scavenging items we enjoy finding, and being patient on sales.
–Our way of selling still works for us. The main goal is to continue listing.
–Whatever works for you is whatever works for you!

Hope you guys had a good week!

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

Our Store Week July 30 – August 5, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9337
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales: $1,057.08 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $814.32 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $66
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $220 (vintage lamp shades)
Average Price Sold: $32.57
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

A couple weeks ago, Craig suggested an experiment. We really love his contributions here and appreciate his insight on how he runs he store. His suggestion? Run a 50% sale.

I’m always skeptical of big sales since we don’t think our weird, vintage items are very price sensitive. Either someone wants them or they don’t. We have “make offer” on everything if an interested person wants to negotiate our price. We mostly don’t sell popular items. We sell the kind of items other people throw away. That’s our jam.

So how did the experiment go? We sold about twice as many items as we normally do. 55 items instead of about 23 items. We made $2100 instead of $800-$1000. Nice! but nothing gangbusters.

Maybe there were some buyers who didn’t want/know to “make offer” and needed the deep discount to purchase. Maybe we priced too high so the lower priced items popped up in people’s searches. We sold a lot of items for $10 or less, but we also sold some items for over $100 (that had originally been priced $300+). Any experiment that makes us money is a success in our book, but we’re still mulling over if there’s any long term strategy here. Selling items for $10 and less isn’t exciting. A race to the bottom seems like a losing game, but maybe we have to be more realistic on pricing.

We mentioned that we just finished a house renovation. Here it is. We purchased this place in October and did a gut renovation over the past ten months. Maybe Ryanne will share some before photos. We really like how it turned out!

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

Our Store Week July 23-29, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9341
Items Sold: 55
Gross Sales: $2,621.92 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $2,100.22 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $188
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $220 (vintage lamp shades)
Average Price Sold: $38.18
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Things are selling. That’s good news. Shoes and cooking pots and wooden drawer knobs and old software and vintage xmas cards and weird folk art and used t-shirts and camo gift wrapping paper. It’s wild. No one but you and us would believe you can make money off this stuff. Most people would have just thrown this stuff away. We love it and glad someone else did too (and paid us for it).

We’re currently doing an experiment where we deeply discounted our entire store. Will everything sell? Is our weird stuff price sensitive? Tune in next week.

We also just finished gut renovating a house we’ve been working on the last ten months. It was a beast. We’ll share photos next week.

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

Our Store Week July 16-22, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9363
Items Sold: 23
Gross Sales: $1,182.40 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $960.36 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $97
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $100 (vintage christmas cards)
Average Price Sold: $41.75
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

For anyone still keeping up on this adventure, we’re currently in the “passive selling” mode of our eBay store. For the past two or three months, we’ve been busy working on other projects. Haven’t been listing much and very little active scavenging. Good news is that things keep selling.

Over the fifteen years of selling on eBay, we’ve been through these periods of up to six to eight months where we depend on our large inventory to carry us. With almost 10,000 items, things are bound to sell each day. Are sales good? Are sales bad? The answer is that this method is sustainable for us.

Running and maintaining an eBay store over the long haul can be a chore. Life happens. This is why many/most eBay sellers drop off over time. Family issues, job opportunities, or just the boredom of listing gets in the way. We built up a huge inventory (aka “the pipeline”) so we can focus on other things (lkie a coffee shop!) and not burn out. When our newest projects are completed, we can jump back into scavenging with fresh energy. In the meantime, we’ll take these weekly sales. Felt petty good this week!

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

Our Store Week July 9-15, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9397
Items Sold: 23
Gross Sales: $1,390.22 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $1,103.15 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $122
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $165 (pair of vintage boots)
Average Price Sold: $47.96
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 0
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

We’ve been enjoying reading the “Scavenge of the Week” that Craig started. Going out and never knowing what you’ll find really is then lifeblood of this lifestyle. Retro Treasures is still at the top of his game when it comes to finding caches of treasures.

I know when we go out flea market, thrift store, yard sale or auction, there’s never any guarantee we’ll find anything. It’s just the excitement that we might. Thanks to the continued abundance/waste in our country, we rarely come up short.

Summer slow down has affected us. Mainly selling a lot of clothes. You never know.

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

Our Store Week July 2-8, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9415
Items Sold: 23
Gross Sales: $983.34 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $804.47 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $46
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $70 (Antique book)
Average Price Sold: $34.97
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Boy was eBay slow for us last week. Sloooooooow. Probably our slowest week since we started selling in 2008. Very few items sold and most low dollar. Good news is we already surpassed last week yesterday. Ups and downs.

Ryanne has now trained two roasters to handle daily coffee roasting for our business. We’ve quintupled the amount of coffee we sell (served in our cafes, purchased online, and wholesale) so our roastery is almost a full-time operation. She’s done a great job building processes and teaching how to roast, ship, and invoice. All that eBay experience translates well!

Happy 4th everyone.

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

Our Store Week June 25 – July 1, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9419
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales: $507.18 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $346.70 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $22
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $70 (decorative tray)
Average Price Sold: $26.66
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)

Last week was good for us on eBay. This week (so far) is deadly slow. We’ve been very busy on a couple non-eBay projects that we may post here soon enough.

Good news is our cafe is having a phenomenal summer, likely because we’re a known quantity now in our town. Locals know we’re open everyday and tourists find us on Google Maps. It’s a good feeling walking in to a busy scene.

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

Our Store Week June 18-24, 2023

Total Items in Store: 9429
Items Sold: 20
Gross Sales: $1,256.71 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $992.76 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $79
Cost of helpers: $80
Highest Price Sold: $250 (lamp)
Average Price Sold: $49.63
Returns: 2
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 10
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(Your numbers can be found here: https://www.ebay.com/sh/performance/sales)