Moving Right Along

Last Monday my listings were at about 454. Right now I am up to about 480 give or take. Planning to surpass 500 this week and attempt to get ready for the fourth quarter. My weekly numbers are at end of post.

 

Here are a few things that sold this week. Fire King Jadeite grease jar,salt and pepper set. This is from my personal collection. I use to have an abnormal obsession with all things Fire King.

 

Listed for 200.00 ( probably about two years) on sale for $180.00,accepted best offer of $150.00 buyer paid shipping. I paid more for the set YEARS ago when Jadite Fire King was the rage. It's time to let it go and move on.

 

I always pick up Amber colored glass. These were two heavy goblets, I think I paid $1.99 for the pair. Sold for $26.99 buyer paid shipping.

 

These are a recent purchase from Goodwill. $2.99 for the pair. Sold for $20.69 buyer paid shipping to Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

Six Flags Texas Giant mug with 22k gold by Culver. Paid .99 and sold for $14.99 the same day it was listed. Buyer paid shipping.

 

 

 

Goodwill had a plastic zipper bag of 16 pairs of pantyhose for $1.99. I picked it up last week and already one pair sold for 10.50 buyer paid shipping.

 

 

There were several pairs of Victoria Secret Panty hose in the bag, almost all of them have watchers. Makes you wonder why people are "watching" pantyhose.

 

This is a pic of me and Peyton. Peyton was hit by a car which broke his leg. Right before we could get him scheduled for surgery as he came down with Parvo which is a deadly virus if not treated.

 

He was treated for 10 days and is doing well. He is using his brok leg which has kinda healed. It may be too late to fix it now. But, he has a loving family that will take great care of him!

 

If you visit my store, you will see some of my listings benefit LEASH INC, ( throughout eBay giving works) a non profit very dear to my heart.

 

I invite you to help shelter dogs by selecting LEASH INC through eBay giving works. The funds raised help dogs like Peyton. At the very least, can you make it one of your favorites?

 

LEASH INC also sells on eBay under the name weloveshelterpets.

 

 

Sales last week:

$350.00

Items sold 9

Average selling price $39.00 ( the fire king sale kinda skewed those numbers)

 

• How was your week??
  

 

 

List It and Forget It

Not too long ago I purged a huge amount of my eBay listings. It was close to 150 listings ( a mix of everything) items that I either re donated to the Thrift Store or gifted to a friend or two.

 

This morning a listing that I have had up for over two years sold. These two blue Mickey Mouse votives sold for $29.99 FS. I probably paid $2-$3 dollars for the set.

 

Notice the "quality" picture, blue towel on top of the grill with my old car in the background. Yep, that is a great eBay picture. Not.

 

This listing always had several watchers and usually and eventually anything Disney will sell. And many a day I would scroll through my listings to see which one I was going to improve or pull,this one was always on the list. Anyway, it just proves that eventually most things eventually sell even with a crappy photo.

 

 

I like to sell dinnerware but I am not a big fan of packing it up to ship. This time I used pool noodles to secure the plates and keep them safe durning shaping.

 

I cut a pool noodle down one side, then on the opposite side of the cut I take my scissors and cit in hash marks about every two inches or so. This make s it easier to wrap the noodle around the plates. Then I put them in a Large Flat Rate Priority Box and off they go.

 

These plates are Warren Kimble Coastal Breeze dinner plates. I both the set probably 12 months ago. When I say set, I mean the plates, salad plates, soup bowls, coffee cups and four sizes of teal blue goblets. Average price of each item bought that day was 0.83.

 

Sold for $29.99 buyer paid shipping. Cost $1.66 per set.

 

 

Here is a list it and forget it failure. Again, I probably had this mug for 18-24 months. It never had any watchers so I deleted it. I THOUGHT I pulled the listing when I deleted it. Apparently not.

 

Last week it "sold" for 24.99 FS. It's an understatement to say that I looked Everywhere!! Because I looked Everywhere!!! I had to refund the buy his money. I hate when that happens.

 

Oh well. What are you going to do?

 

• How was your week?

 

• Do you list it and forget it?

 

It's Been Awhile

Yes, it's been awhile since I have posted. I have been following my favorite blogs during my absence, Lorraine is always my first stop. I then jump around and catch up on Kim, and so many others.

We have been out of town for a few weeks on vacation, so my store was on vacation as well. Here are a few sales since we got back.
Five Forest Green 11 oz Tumblers sold for 74.99 paid 2.99 for set

Georges Briard Mosaic Glass Mid Century Tray sold for 34.99. Paid 2.99

Oneida Lady Hamilton 1985 Serving Pieces sold for 31.84

I bought the whole set ( forks,knives,etc.) and each piece cost about 0.20 cents each.  I sold a fork in December 2014. . I have had the set for over a year, in fact I was going to get the forks out and add them to my utensil drawer. Not now!

I was up to 700 listings but about two months ago I did a huge purge! It felt great :-) now I am at about 470 listings. Time to get listing and build up inventory.

I Went To This Garage Sale.....

My church ladies know I sell on EBay and are always looking out for garage sales for me. This particular sale was in a small mobile home park. ( 7 homes). The gentleman that owned this was deceased and his family was selling his treasures.

The front driveway,the front porch were full of stuff. Literally overflowing with his lifelong collections.

 

These pictures were from his 60 foot long shed in his backyard. The building was neat and orderly and contained a wide variety of Toys! lots and lots of toys. Talk about being overwhelmed!! I was!!

 

 

There was Disney toys and collectibles......

 

 

All types of transportation...........

 

 

 

And somethings I had no idea what they were..........

 

 

Dolls............

 

 

 

And then there was this in his backyard.......Mickey Mouse on a giant spring.

 

He stood at least 6 feet tall.

 

I did pick a bunch of stuff and will share what has been selling in my next post.

 

Motivation Is Improving

My eBay motivation is improving. There for a while I was losing the listing battle. And that lack of motivation was reflected in my sales. I am not beating myself up for it.....it is what it is. :-)

 

This week I have been listing almost every day and it has stimulated my sales which I am happy about. You have to list daily to keep the sales going, at least it is what works for me.

 

Hear is a few of the items that have sold:

 

Lady Hamilton 1985 Dinner Fork Oneida Community Cube VTG Silverplate Flatware $14.99. I paid $0.20 for each piece.

 

Vintage Fisher Price Sesame Street Clubhouse Green Round Door Goes Round $8.49. I paid $4.00 for the whole clubhouse and some little people.

There is still a few more pieces available.

 

 

Disasters of Cape Cod. In pre-owned vintage condition. No major rips or tears, but there are a few small rips and some creasing/dents. Best offer of $50.00 accepted. I paid $0.25 for it.

 

 

 

Axis and allies game pieces. This was a German set for $13.89. I paid $1.99 for the whole game so the cost is insignificantly low. I have sold other country pieces a couple of weeks ago.

 

 

 

Here's to staying motivated!

 

 

 

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?

 

 

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!!

 

 

 

 

Revisiting July's Goals and Hello August!

I set a lofty goal of $3000.00 gross for my eBay sales last month. Did I reach that goal? Ahhh.....no. My gross sales were $1086.00 or 36% of the $3000.00 goal.

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 600.

I am still working on tweaking my categories and sub- catagories. Here is a link to my mug category and it sub-categories. I think I need to add another sub-category titled " made in Japan". I have a lot of vintage mugs that are made in Japan.

I also wanted to raise my average selling price to the $35.00 - $40.00. Of course I would love to sell a bunch of items in that price range, but truthfully many of my items are not priced that high. I source many low cost items ( mostly mugs) and try to flip them quickly.

Packing and shipping mugs via the FOMO method is quick and easy work. So I will be happy to sell a bunch of mugs and boost sales that way. To do that I will keep the price the same unless I need to add a but to compensate for free shipping. And I will run frequent markdowns in that category to stimulate sales. Whatever works!

For August the goals will stay pretty much the same. Strive to reach $3000.00 in gross sales, increase my listings to eventually reach 1000. (hopefully by the end of the year)

Raise average selling price? Well, at this point a sale is a sale. :-)

Money Monday: A Slight Improvement

Last week was definitely a little busier on eBay. There were sales almost daily. Woo Hoo! That has not happened in a long time.



I was hoping to get my listing up past 600 this last week but that did not happen. What I did work on was my bookkeeping. For the last four months all I have done was collect receipts and write down mileage. It took me about two afternoons to get it all together. I hate bookkeeping :)
But Lorraine at Clamco inspired me to get it together. Here is her post on how she keeps track of her numbers. I fell so much better about that. Whew!!

Here are a couple of my sales from last week:

I saw on one of the Facebook groups that this cooler could be profitable. I paid $4.99 and it sold for $37.19, shipping paid by customer.

 

I paid 0.99 cents for each mug. The pair of these Disney mugs sold for $89.99 f/s

I was running a sale in my store,the original price was $99.99.

 

 

Here are the numbers for last week:
Active listings: 579 (574-last week)

Cost of items sold: $20.00
Number of sales: 15
Total sales: 500.00

Amount spent on new inventory : $25.00
Average selling price: $33.00

International sales:1
Returns:0
Feedback: all positive this week

I am still listing my Fire King collection. I hope to get most of the jadeite listed this week. It will be a relief to get it all listed. I never realized how much I had accumulated.

 

Hope your weekly profits were awesome!

 

Money Monday: Slow.....but Steady

I have been steady listing, but I know I can do better. I have about 120ish free listings left for this month and I am going to try like heck to use them all up. That will get me pretty close to 700 items listed.

In order to work eBay more like a business than a "hobby" I will be keeping track of my actual eBay time I spend listing, packing and cleaning. Trying to avoid the distractions of working from home is not always so easy.

My plan is going to be to document by signing in and out on a piece of paper ( just to keep me honest) when I am working and when I am at lunch, etc.

This morning was moderately successful. After a two mile walk at 6:00 AM, I came home, fixed breakfast and started to work at 8:00. I finished out the morning with listing and packing until 12:00.

Then is was time to get cleaned up, load of car to go to post office and run a couple of other errands too. I think I can get in another solid hour this evening.

I think this little experiment will help me be better organized and more productive.

My sales for the last two weeks are slow but consistent. There were a couple of good sales. I posted pictures below.

Here are the numbers for the last two weeks:

Active listings: 574 (512-two weeks ago)
Items listed last two weeks :62

Cost of items sold: $13.00
Number of sales: 14
Total sales: 353.00

Amount spent on new inventory for two weeks: $75.00
Average selling price: $25.00
International sales: 5
Returns: 1
Feedback: all positive this week

Who knew Bicycle shirts were so valuable? Goodwill for $2.99. Best offer of $80.00 FS

 

I found this Chinese dictionary at GoodWill for $1.99. It sold for $93.99 buyer paid shipping. I estimated the price. I saw some on Amazon for about 60.00 bucks. I just decided to go for it and list it high. You never know....

 

 

Mug flip of the week. I found this Dracula mug at a local Thrift for 0.50 cents. Sold for 24.99 FS

 

And yes, another $1.49 care bear sold. And now it is on its way to Norway!

 

 

Hope you all had a great week of sales!

 

 

Friday This and That

A few things to finish out the week.

I have just about finished listing the items from the estate sale. There is a copper cookie cutter, one of the Revereware pans, the ice tongs which are Bakelite, a Vera scarf, a lil oscar cooler, the westmoreland plate and the line dance videos.

 

Yesterday I had a mini-meet up with with an eBay specialist and for me meet-up coordinator from New Hampshire. She moved to Florida in January and is going to start her meet-ups again.

 

I missed her first one which was the same day I had the new windows installed. So through Facebook, we agreed to meet at a local Goodwill and thrift it up! Bobbi is a wealth of information and such a sweet lady! We had a great time exchanging ideas and info over dinner.

We both had a blast!

 

Today I called eBay to request an increase in my listing limits. It was getting to the point where I was about to reach my max. The call went well, and the CS rep increased my dollar amount and my listings amount. Have you had to call to increase your limits lately?

 

Happy Friday and I hope your weekend is full of sales!

 

 

Estate Sale: How I Spent $50.00

This weekend, our church had an estate sale in their basement. The belongings were that of a member who recently went to live with family members and Maine. Her family had already gone through everything that they wanted and decided to donate the rest of the items to the church and all proceeds from the sale will go to the church.

Last thing I need to do is to go to an estate sale, thrift store, or Goodwill and spend more money. But, I am weak, I admit it. I had to go.

I went Sunday after church and pick the items that I wanted. I put them in the cleaning closet so I could pick them up later on this week and that was yesterday.

Here are a few pictures of the items that I picked up at the estate sale. I was able to get most of them listed yesterday. This was made easier by the fact that they were multiples. The blue glasses each design had 12 and a set. So there were 12 cordials, 12 sherbets, 12 goblets, and 12 tumblers.

The pattern is Indiana teal blue king crown thumbprint glassware.

I have them listed in sets of two with prices ranging from $19.99 to $24.99 with free shipping.

Next I listed Warren Kimble coastal breeze by Sakura dinnerware.

These are listed BIN with prices ranging from 19.99 to 29.99 includes free shipping. The prices might be a bit high, but the dinnerware is heavy and I need to make sure I can cover the shipping.

Of course ther are mugs. I think the most interesting one is the National Security Agency one. I priced that higher at $34.99 as it is a bit unusual and hard to find.

The needlepoint is beautiful, and then there is the vintage ice bucket! I love it, it's round and has penguins on it.

There are a few more items to get listed. Several Revereware pots and pans and about three really heavy forks. I have no knowledge on flatware so this will take some research. A couple of vintage scarves and a cross stitch table cloth. I will get those listed and share with you. **Here is the last bit of the haul**

Over all, I think it was a pretty good haul for $50.00!!