Thursday, September 18, 2014

Doldrums: eBay ups and downs

The last two weeks have been so-so with regards to eBay. What I have discovered is that listing daily DOES stimulate sales. Two weeks ago, I slowed down on my listing and my sales reflected it. This week, I start red my daily listing of at least 5 items, and already the cha-chings are happening.

 

Last week, we were busy researching vehicles to purchase and making trips to dealerships to try and drive. Most of my free time was spent on the internet communicating with different dealers and haggling over prices before we even visited the dealerships. It was a bit exhausting! We did finally find the vehicles we liked and purchased them. So glad that ordeal is over!

 

Now, let's talk about eBay stuff!!

 

 

This is a game I purchased at GW for $1.99. Games by Avalon Hill have a lot of pieces and as games they sell pretty well. When I bought it, it was open and I knew I would have to count pieces. When I opened the box and saw how many pieces there were, I actually thought about taking it back!!

 

But, I did a little research on completeds and saw that the game pieces were selling. There are 9 ( or 10, I will have to double check!) countries represented in this game and each country has approximately 65 pieces.

 

I broke each set down into 20 piece sets which provided three sets per country.

 

Each set is priced at 15.99 (free ship). Surprisingly, three sets of game pieces have already sold!! A customer in California bought one set about two weeks ago, and just yesterday he bought two more!

 

Just this morning I had another from this game. These are all the tokens that are included. I counted them and at the time I thought I was wasting my time!

 

Sold for $29.99 ( free shipping)

Needless to say, I am pleasantly surprised! I have bought a couple more games at GW and have listed parts and pieces of them as well. This may become a serious niche for my store.

 

These backgammon pieces are from a vintage 1973 Plesantime game.

I don't know of they will sell as quickly as the Axis and Allies game pieces, but it is worth a shot.

 

 

Here are a few pictures of a Monopoly game I bought this weekend. The game is from 1961 and it is in Arabic.

 

At first I was pretty excited to find it and instantly threw it in the cart and bought it. Then when I got it home, I figured out that it was missing the deed cards! Duh!!

I don't think that there is much money to be made on the remaining pieces so I will probably be taking it back to GW.

 

 

 

I have a few more games to part out and list. Truth be told, it is therapeutic to separate and coordinate the pieces.

 

Happy Thrifting!!

 

  • Do you part out games and sell the pieces?

 

 

Monday, September 1, 2014

Revisiting My July Goals: Hello September!!

I set a lofty goal of $3000.00 gross for my eBay sales in July of this year. Did I reach that goal? Ahhh.....no but it sure was close!! My gross sales were $2225.00 or 74% of the $3000.00 goal.

Last month my gross sales were $1086.00 or 36% of the $3000.00 goal.I had a 49% increase over last month.

I also set a goal to get my listings up to 1000 by the end of the year. At the beginning of July, they were hovering at 500. As of last night, they were just over 650. I have been listing at least 5 items daily. I truly believe this has helped my sales. Listing, listing,listing, even if it is a few items a day has definitely helped me to reach my goals.

 

Here are a few of my sales from last week:

I don't usually look for concert t-shirts. Last week was the exception. I found two Pantera shirts. At first, I had no clue if this was even a band. But I checked completeds on eBay and determined that the shirts were worth the $1.49 investment.

 

This shirt sold within a day for $49.99. Free ship

 

Again, I usually don't buy random dinner plates. But I found the name John Zak on the back and I recalled he designs dinnerware for Disney.

These plates were $0.50 each. And they dingy looking,covered with utensil marks. Bar keeper's friend works wonders on cleaning the utensil marks.

A set of two sold for $34.99 shipping paid by customer

 
 
 
 

 

 


Last week was a pretty good week on eBay!

Here is how last week went:

Active listings: 647

Cost of items sold: $29.00

Number of sales: 15

Total sales: $574.00

Amount spent on new inventory: $45.00

Average selling price: $38.00

International sales: 2

Returns: 0

Feedback: all positive this week
Hope your week was awesome!!