Category: ebay

Hot and humid. Some brain boiling sunlight. More hot and humid. Getting kinda monotonous. SOOOOO glad we have A/C.

Got up early and did my load in duty, as well as bringing in my own stuff that I couldn’t get out of storage on Friday. We did have a couple of people show up later. It seems like the show was well attended, but I’ll reserve judgement until we get a final count.

I did a good business, in terms of gross sales anyway. Moved a bunch of stuff I’d been dragging to shows for a while. Made some people happy by selling them the thing they needed. Found some stuff I’d forgotten I had. I should be able to turn some of it back into money if I get it up on ebay.

D2 was a big help and charmed them all.

Today we have an early breakfast get together, some awards, and then back to the show floor for a few hours. I might still make some more sales. I’ve been very disciplined about not buying stuff…so far.

Politically, I heard a lot of anti Biden sentiment. A lot of disbelief and snorting about the coming new wuflu variant. LOTS of mentions of how expensive everything is, and some about how their items aren’t bringing what they used to. If the stuff you are buying is getting more expensive and the stuff you are selling is getting cheaper, that’s a pretty big problem. At the show, people were buying but they were only doing so if the prices were right (lower than in the past.) It’s a hobby, or part time business for most of the attendees, so very discretionary spending. Food and gas come first. Then spending on the hobby. A lot of them are like me, just selling off stuff that isn’t their core interest, or is ancillary to their main collection. Some are pros though, making a living on the show circuit. At least a few of the pros were happy to have made good sales at the show.

I do get the feeling that people are pulling in, so to speak. Their area of concern is contracting, moving their attention closer to home. A lot of them live in low cost rural areas around the region, and there was/is a lot of “I’m glad I’m not in a city, and you should think about getting out…” too. Buying a country place for the future and moving away from the city and the Gulf got hearty endorsement.

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Today should be fun. Breakfast is a good time, and D2 has won door prizes more than once. My tables are paid for, I did ok for the show, and I sold much of what I wanted to, so I can relax and have a good time, being a bit more ‘social for social’s sake’ today. I’ve even learned more about my local guys, and a couple of them are more like minded than I thought.

Meatspace baby!

Local local local is going to matter a lot. Having reliable and known humans outside of local is going to be valuable. Heck, even having more cash will be valuable.

Stack up some friends. Stack some things.

nick

And yes, it is hot out. Likely to be humid too. And sunny. Because it’s summer. I was reading my rural electricity co-op provider’s magazine while at the BOL, and had grabbed one out of the stack from LAST summer. Guess what it said? Yeah, conserve electricity because of the high heat. Also they were raising our rates because of inflation. So this year is pretty much just like last year. Hot.

Somehow we forget. Like the pain of childbirth.

Despite the heat I ran a couple of loads to my local auction house. Picked up one lot I’d won in a more industrial auction. That was for resale. I will try to run at least one more good load to the auction today before heading over to my rent house to start work on it. The ceiling needs repair. I’m going to end up doing the patch in the wall, instead of the painter… and the porch floor has some rotten boards that will need to be replaced. I have to do that every couple of years.

Then I have to seriously consider what to do about the fence. Some of it is pretty worn, as I discovered when the strange neighbor drew my attention to it. I’m tempted to do the absolute minimum, just add a board so I can re-nail the rotten bottoms of the pickets. That will buy a couple of more years for the fence. I don’t want to put thousands or even hundreds of dollars into it. I’ve power washed it a couple of times though, and it’s pretty worn out. Western red cedar 5 inch pickets on pressure treated posts and rails is the default fencing here, and it holds up pretty well, better with washing and sealing, but it doesn’t last forever and that fence is over 15 years old. The joy of property ownership. It’ll be hot out, no matter what I choose to do.

I do think that having a revenue stream from a rental property is a good idea, and a decent hedge against inflation. As long as you can count on .gov to honor property rights, and insist that tenants pay you what you are owed, that is. We’ve seen that we can’t actually count on that in most places. Still a good investment in theory, and for us, in practice. I’d prefer to have some commercial rental property too. It’s easier to get rid of bad tenants, but if the economy goes south, it’s harder to keep good ones. Everyone needs a place to live, businesses can condense down to ‘home based’ if needed, or they go broke completely leaving commercial landlords with empty properties. Every investment involves trade offs, and different risks.

Even cash buried in jars involves risk.

The only way I know to reduce the risk is to diversify, and I don’t mean by holding 10 different stocks. Diversify your investments. Diversify your income. Diversify your suppliers and sources. Diversify what you stack. And hope that the whole thing doesn’t come crashing down all at the same time.

Even if it does, if you’ve stacked, you’ll still be able to eat. Stack it up.

nick

Cool, but warming.   We are supposed to get warmer through the week, and into the 80s.   National forecast has us clear today and rainy tomorrow.   There were very scattered and light spattering showers yesterday as we were on the edge of a rainy zone.

I spent time with a friend yesterday, and actually went thrifting.   He got some good stuff and so did I.  We had some time to talk too.  Then I spent some time sorting.

Today I’ll do more sorting, a couple of pickups, and I should be able to drop off stuff for one of the local auctions too.

Speaking of which, a commentor asked some questions last night and as I was writing the answers, it grew to post size.  I decided to put it here today.

So, some answers and thoughts about reselling, based on my more recent experiences.

@nick, when you bring items to one of your local auctioneers, do you have any input as to the starting bid? And what percentage of the winning bid do you wind up with if you don’t mind sharing? I have a few bins of ~$20-$30 items that I should be listing on eBay but never quite get a ‘round tuit’.

WRT starting bids at my auctioneer, he doesn’t like them to be too high. Buyers like to start low, even if it ends up high. I can insist on a minimum, but again he doesn’t like it (he has to manually manage the process). It comes down to you have to trust the buyers (and have enough of them.) For my side, it means curating what I bring him to be things I think his buyers will like, and accepting that something might go cheap. On the gripping hand, if no one ever got a bargain, they wouldn’t keep coming back, so the occasional item that goes too cheap is really an investment in the future.

WRT costs, my two favorite auctioneers take between 30 and 40% of the hammer price, plus they get a “buyer’s premium” on top of that paid by the buyer, not me. The actual percentage they take depends on my negotiating skill, and the quality of the stuff I bring them. Their labor is pretty much the same for a $10 item as a $100 item, so they prefer the bigger items. That said, the majority of their items seem to be $10-$40 sale price, with some higher, some lower. I shoot for $20-$50, with the occasional $100 item, and am sometimes surprised, and sometimes disappointed.

The upshot of selling at auction is that you ‘make your money’ when you BUY the item. It has to be REALLY CHEAP relative to the price you expect. That way you are covered if it sells at the low opening bid. If you pay too much, it’ll never sell at auction with a starting bid high enough to cover your breakeven.

There are lots of pricing strategies, lots of different ways to approach profit margin. If you are listing on ebay with a ‘buy it now’ you have more control over the price, but you will never have a surprise hit, like I did with an antique book. I’d have been happy to get $20, but it sold for $400.

I watch youtubers that will pay up to half the expected sale price for inventory. That’s nuts. You lose a third to ebay/paypal, shipping might eat into the profit, and you have time involved in packing and shipping. Plus if the item is a slow mover, because you’ve priced it at the upper end of the range, your money is tied up, you have to store and manage the item, and you might take an offer for lower, just to move the item. It’s easy to end up breaking even on a low cost item, or even losing money just to make the sale. And that is before counting your time, or the income tax.

There are exceptions. If you have a lot of identical items, and they are very easy to ship, you can either list them with a “select a quantity”  and sell singles or multiples over time, or you can lot them in multi-item lots so you have one sale of 4 or 6 and your margin on that one sale is high enough to be worth it.

Listing and Shipping (packing) are the biggest time sinks for me. Taking the stuff to my local guy saves me both of those costs.

Testing/fixing/cleaning can eat up a lot of time too, so I tend to put it off, and then do it in batches.

I plan to restart listing on ebay but only for items that will sell for $50 or more.   I’ll let my kids list the cheap stuff, and fulfill those orders too.  (yeah I’ll still be doing the work, but they’ll be learning the skills and hopefully my involvement will diminish over time.)    I was going to set my personal limit at $100 but decided I’ve got a lot of items with good profit potential at $50 that I might as well sell.   And I’ll only list items that I am sure won’t sell well in one of the local auctions because the pool of buyers is too small, or to geographically dispersed.

I should also mention that I got all the low priced inventory because for a while, people were only buying “smalls” for around $20.  My big stuff wasn’t moving and I needed stuff that was.   My  priorities have changed though, so it makes sense for me to concentrate on moving up the food chain a bit, and to not spend my time ‘grinding’.

Other people will make other choices based on their own calculations, or their emotions, or by reading sheep’s entrails, but I’m going to try it this way for a while.

I’m hoping to reduce my inventory, and increase my stacks…

Because stacking is good, if the stuff is good.

nick