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Love the sale of the vintage copper and turquoise breadbox, called a Beauty Box, sold for $100!
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Trash to Cash. A podcast about making a living on eBay.
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Love the sale of the vintage copper and turquoise breadbox, called a Beauty Box, sold for $100!
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This week we took some time to remember why we started selling on eBay back in 2008. Quick answer: to live a low stress life. Longer answer has do with enjoying challenges and getting lost in our work, but only when we get to choose what work it is we do.
We also discuss how eBay is the cash engine that helps us renovate rental houses. We’re just about done paying off a $12k metal roof and brick chimney for our River House. This time around, it’s also helpful that we have the extra income from the Farmhouse that we renovated with eBay money. So it’s not just about endless selling on junk online. For us, it’s about investing our money in things we’re proud of and generate more income to give us the low stress life we crave.
We just interviewed Molly in Silverlake, Los Angeles who renovated a bungalow behind her home to rent out on Airbnb. She does a good job expressing her goal of quitting her grinding job and running her own business.
Here are the links we discussed in this episode:
Our week of sales stated very slow but ended with a big bang. Hope you had a good week.
Our Store Week March 13-19, 2016
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Amazon: $342.12
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I always love finding vintage Pop Swatch watches. They’re usually pretty cheap at thrift stores because the battery is dead. Easy enough to buy a cheap battery on ebay and replace.
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We’re finally back to being healthy after a week with the flu. But you want to hear even better news? Our taxes are done and we’ll all paid up. This was the first year we paid our quarterly estimated taxes on time so now we’re reaping the benefits of “no stress” tax season. Any self-employed person knows what we’re talking about.
Our Amazon FBA experiment continues as we sent in about 250 more items into their warehouse. We’re finding that fees for FBA and shipping is deeply eating into our profits. We’re still suspicious if the final net profit for FBA sellers is really worth it, but we’re going to keep bulking up our inventory to give the experiment a fighting chance.
Here are the links we discussed in this episode:
Our Store Week March 6-12, 2016
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Amazon: $185.61
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Some great sales this week. One of my favorites was the Fitz & Floyd art deco salt pepper shakers. A great find!
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Greetings from the Sick House. Both of us got the flu this week, which laid us out. Very little work was done, but plenty still sold. We’re just grateful we have health insurance to see a doctor, get medicine, and the time to recuperate.
Hope you had a better week.
These are the links we discussed in our conversation:
Our Store Week February 28-March 5, 2016
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Amazon: $293.80 ($173 net profit)
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One of our coolest sales this week was a vintage Russian officer’s hat that we purchased at an auction with a bunch of other stuff for $5. A fun find!
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This weekend we did some hard-core scavenging. That means taking the truck out, driving by all our favorite places, and digging for deals. This time we bought twenty-six Mid-Century fiberglass chairs for $40. A good example of someone just wanting to get rid of stuff that takes up storage, and we’re willing to go all in. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies with a truckload of chairs and trash bags of junk. We were in heaven.
Overall we had a great week of sales. The buyers came in random cycles but we were glad to have them. Spring time is just around the corner.
Here are the links we discussed in this podcast:
Our Store Week February 21-27, 2016
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Amazon: $220 ($130 net profit)
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eBay’s new Seller Dashboard has been out for a couple months. Didn’t seem like that big of a deal. A cleaner look with some semi-interesting stats about our sales. But one of our listeners (thanks Len Pettis!) pointed to the new “Growth” tab that shows how your items compete with similar items on eBay. If you’ve opted into the new Dashboard, check it out here.
We played around with the new feature which lets you basically reprice items. It gives you a percentage of how likely your item will sell. Amazon has a similar feature that let’s you quickly reprice items to compete for “the Box”. Unfortunately with eBay, you have to open a new window and click multiple times to reprice a single item. Didn’t seem very usable to quickly deal with multiple items.
Of course if you sell weird, vintage items like us, being the cheapest price isn’t always our goal. On eBay, buyers are not just looking at prices, but the photos and condition. The Growth tab is still a cool tool that at least gives us an idea of the competition. For those sellers worried about slow sales, this is the tool to see how competitive your items are.
This is an open thread. Our sales have really taken off the last couple days. No real rhyme or reason why.
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A cool sale that happened, that I wish I could hold onto, was the Brother P-Touch Label Maker. I love a good label maker!
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