Bonanza should have been a better marketplace. They literally could have taken half of ebay's sellers easily but the people running the place clearly have no idea what they are doing.
I believe a company committed to advertising and having better fee structure with the ability to cross post listings from eBay could dominate online sales in the preowned market. Thanks for your comments.
@@curiouscollection2626 advertising was always the major problem of bonanza. They expected the sellers to drive advertising for them and we all know a lot of us resellers are not particularly fond of social media. We just want to sell.
3:50 100% with the queen Mary example you have a few different things about the queen Mary and yes the hope is that someone might buy 2 or 3 or more of those items and without hope we have nothing. This strategy use to work VERY VERY well years ago but after ebay took over payments from PayPal they have really rigged there shopping cart to make it almost impossible for buyers to be able to combine multiple items into one shipment but a while back i did a trial and error with my buyer account and seller account to figure out why buyers were not able to combine more then one item to there cart i figured out why and changed some settings on my account (it seems like if you have coupons or running certain sales this will affect the ability for buyers to add more then 1 item to a shopping cart) and bamm buyers were once again like years prior able to put 5 -10-15 or more items in to there cart and pay for it in one transaction without having to either pay for them separately and have to ask for the refund of the shipping for the additional items (eBay has rigged there shopping cart this way so if someone wants to buy 10 items they have to purchase it in 10 separate transactions because eBay is making $4 in transaction fees on those 10 separate transactions compared to .40 on the 1 transaction with 10 items in it). I also think ebay does a very POOR job at educating there buyer on if they want to buy more then one item from a seller they should not use the buy it now button they should use the Add To cart button (it dumbfounds me that ebay still has a buy it now button they should just get rid that all together and just have the Add to cart button would make life a lot more simple for Us the sellers and the buyers as well) another great topic! Oh another trick to do too is accumulate a lot of the same or liked items (Themed cross category) then list them because if you can list 50 or 100 at the same time your more likely to get these multiple item transactions then if you were to piecemeal them out 10 here and 10 there i know don the auction professor does that i have been using that strategy for a very long time
Another solo Will video! Wasn't expecting anymore so pleasantly surprised. You're right on spot with finding multiple items of subjects for the repeat buyer. Buyers like to buy from the same sellers when they know they are a trusted seller. Like I don't buy from anyone with poor feedback or no feedback. I actually read the feedbacks. If if they ship me a $200 Barbie loose in an envelope (which happened to me) NEVER again. You guys are very trusted sellers so I can imagine (and hope) you get lots of repeats. Great video!
We try to bring our best to every item and transaction. Customer service is our primary focus. I once bought a replacement fork and they mailed it with a stamp. It didn't make it, needless to say. Just got an empty envelope. Stick with proven sellers and you won't be disappointed. Thanks again.
wow a $200 barbie in an envelope! that is 100% a boxed shipped item at minimum heck i ship happy meal toys in 6x6x6 boxes (been doing this ever since USPS got rid First class mail (items that shipped under 1lbs would never be mixed with items over 1lbs this is fact so it was safe to ship in bubble Mailers) but not anymore all ground advantage items are mixed together No matter the weight so a 5 ounce package could be mixed with a 70lb package yep sorry im putting that 5 ounce item in a 6x6x6 box surrounded by packing peanuts because if a huge package should fall on it i want to give it the best possible chance of surviving
@@bennystratton7734 I should add it wasn't a boxed Barbie. It was a loose one and they stuck it in a manilla envelope. Kudos to the post office as it wasn't damaged. The arms were poked thru but no damage. I couldn't believe it. I was not happy with that seller and blocked them after leaving a neutral feedback (my first ever) and sending them a message.
18:02 100% Because and i learned this early (started full time in 1998) that if your heart skips a beat and that item excites you there is someone else in this world (maybe more then 1) that it will do the same for them again it all comes down to how much patience you have and the smaller/flatter the items are the more patience we should have to wait for that RIGHT sale NOT the desperate sale
12:50 100% your actually able to HOLD a piece of History all of the things you showed are a PIECE of history its NOT like holding a book READING about it or even Watching something about YOU are actually HOLDING something that was there that is what makes people collect those things and as you mentioned a few times THESE things were never meant to be saved they were meant to be discarded or thrown out which makes them even more rare and scarce
5:45 that is 100% a cross over item politics, Movies (remember regan was an actor long before he was president) i would not price it less then $25 with best offer capped at $20 that is almost like techs $5 into $25 and depending on how many are available that would also make my price go up so say there was only like 5 listed id price it then at $50 with best offer capped at $40 this way its 20% for any buyer that wants to send a best offer but it also allows you to put it on sale for any % over 20 to make the sale special
btw Great JOB on the Solo Act! you did great! and NOT because i love ephemera (and its one of my categories i sell in) i truly think you did a great solo job!
also thing is with the stuff you shown it is 100% worth money to someone that collects it, this is not like clothing were STR is king IF ANYONE wants to get into this especially with these more rare pieces YOU have to understand you might sit on it for a while but if your paying $5 or less and going to sell it for $25-$50 OR more depending on the item and there FLAT and easy to store DO NOT give in to buyers set your offer threshold 20% off which is MORE then enough on $50 that is $10 off if that is not enough THEY SHOULD not be buying on eBay they have other things to worry about! Remember with this you have to Have patience i have sat on some pieces for 10 years but because there flat and do not take up much room TO ME its worth it if you buy something for $5 and 10 years later you make $100 there is no bank in America that you can go put $5 in and 10 years later have $100 waiting for you this is how ALL sellers should look at there inventory as investments. you have to have your bread and butter things that sell daily but these more rare and uncommon things its okay if you have to sit on them people there is nothing wrong with that
We do get a lot of the clothing mindset in the online communities. Flip it quick type mentality. If there are only a few people out there looking for something like we sell you have to be patient. Correct in that these are not need items. They are must haves for the right collector.
I believe the term world war 1 wasn’t used until after ww2. At the time it was called The Great War or the War to End All Wars. Interesting image. Thx for showing.
Correct. I believe the cards were labeled some time later. The two shown were the same family, same ink on several pieces with words to describe the people like Aunt and Uncle. A baby postcard was also included appears to be soldiers son.
I buy this stuff!! I love making junk journals and I've always been a fussy cutter. I'm wanting to make a "money is music to my ears" themed junk journal.
That's Awesome. I see a lot of Junk Journal vendors on WhatNot. All the items are so interesting to me. I love bringing history into our daily lives. Thanks for watching and commenting.
I started reselling because I was given a massive amount of golf apparel I didn't know what to do with. I stuck with it after all that was sold. On a platform that's geared towards women I sell just as much men's clothes on Poshmark as I do eBay. I share my closet about 4x a day. Morning around lunch and Evening. I also share to the 10pm party. I send out 10% + shipping discount offer once daily and make daily sales. I like Poshmark a lot.
Definitely agree! Selling on just one platform is almost impossible unless you're have a huge operation. I'm getting setup to add Whatnot to my selling spaces! Keep up all the great work!
Don't worry about about the business and house while you are gone, Cinnamon. I will help Will put the fire out when he tries to bake something for dinner.
Ok Will, I will give you a topic so you do a video! Yeah some of us are here for Cinnamon's jewelry but we like listening to you also LOL. I knew people collected postcards but honestly had never even heard the word "ephemera" until I found your channel and don't know anything about it. Maybe a little video explaining the different types of things you look for and how do you know what is valuable or rare? just age? condition? subject? How do you have a clue on if something is rare or valuable? What are your customers looking for the most? You could share your knowledge and wouldn't have to spend time researching a topic as you are already an expert. Unless you did that before I found you guys?
Those were some great pieces! Keep up the good video's. I don't sell very often right now but buy sometimes and enjoy watching the video's. You guys always have great stuff!
I don’t offer returns and I don’t think it’s affected my business too much. In the end , a customer can force a return if they want to, but I think it does keep those compulsive shoppers that are notorious for returning stuff at bay. I may consider returns during 4th quarter. I’m actually more concerned right now about how eBay has made easier for the customer to cancel orders. Sellers on eBay aren’t Amazon or Walmart so I’m not sure why were expected to provide that kind of return policy.
Everything with jewelry can be perfect and the item can be returned. I worked POS at USPS and we had a customer that would return 15 or more pieces of jewelry a month at our counter (QVC, HSN, eBay). If I sold jewelry on eBay, I would block all users who returned items. eBay penalizes sellers on returns, not to mention return costs. Keep your return policy, but block your losers.
Excellent video. All good points. When I get a return within a week of purchase I’m okay with it. When the return comes on the 30th day I suspect the buyer’s credit card bill came due or the item was used for a one time event/use. Ebay almost forces the 30 day returns. Etsy 14 days returns are better. Mercari 3 day returns?.
Thanks for sharing this info. The thing that stands out to me the most is you showed that you had two item not as described returns and that's with free shipping and free returns. That's frustrating because a buyer has nothing to gain by opening a return as an INAD based on your return rules (assuming you offer free returns for any reason such as "didn't like item"). I am a clothing seller and have about a 4% return rate but one of the reasons I stopped offering free shipping is that despite offering free shipping and free returns I still got some INADs.
Buyer's do not understand that it hurts sellers. To them it is just any reason to get the money. Unfortunately eBay uses this against sellers. Almost like they are trying to get sellers to not want to accept returns except INAD's.
@@curiouscollection2626 Over 5 years of selling clothing I have learned how to fight INADs successfully because like you said, a relatively small portion of buyers will make up any excuse for one of two outcomes. They want you to give them a free item or they want to override a buyers shipping/return policy. Sellers need to stop letting buyers do this. If I am wrong, I own it. Only 1 out of my last 20 INADs have made it into my service metrics and that's because the buyer didn't return the item after I told them how I was going to handle it. They let the return request time out.
thing is that most forget or do not even think about with returns as the saying goes its a cost of doing business and with any business costs it 1000% can be used as a tax right off at the end of the year as business deduction returns can be used as business deductions so say you make $100k for the year gross and you have a 3% return rate that would be $3k that came back to you in returns that you had to refund well you can deduct that $3k from your $100k gross to bring your Self Employment tax liability to $97k instead of $100k
@@curiouscollection2626 yep exactly it does suck to get returns but as long as you can keep them low % wise its not the end of the world like you said hopefully the ones that do not come back can offset the ones that do $ wise
It's NOT just ebay that's dead - I sell on ebay, poshmark and etsy and all 3 are DEAD and have been for quite a while (I've been a reseller for 20 years so I know what I'm doing!). I believe it's a culmination of several things but the main culprit is the economy. My honey hole thrift store never used to be crowded, some days I would be the only one there, now it's packed with families buying clothing and household stuff they need (they are not resellers). So that's quite telling of the current economic situation... unfortunately I really don't see anything changing anytime soon. Thankfully reselling has always been 'fun' money for us and I do not dependent on it!
We noticed starting in May that ever sale is like a tooth extraction. Painful and hard to get. Returns are significantly higher and sales currently down close to 4% for the year as of the end of August. This doesn't account for inflation which is stated around 3 percent. Meaning we are actually down 7%. Inflation and layoffs are taking a bite out of us all.
That's why I always consider Amazon pricing but sometimes prices are impossible to beat both on Amazon and ebay if it's a giant book seller they could charge 4 bucks free shipping You will only then make the sale because you charge the bare minimum + shipping and provide photos of the actual product where as the big book stores will only have a stock image That's if the buyer cares to know exactly what they are getting also 1ST edition or signed by author things that set your book apart will always be a plus.
What does holding items cost you? This is one thing that I have really dove into this summer.. If you have $40k cogs in inventory and are making $4k profit (cinnamons pay and taxes are profit) then that means every month your inventory is sitting there it is costing you 10% of the cogs in opportunity cost. Our numbers actually were 0.7% per day! I’m hoping it will increase to about 1% per day now that I am focusing on it.. Dropping a price from $14 to $13 on Amazon is meaningless if it means an instant sell when it’s only a 10-20% drop in cash gotten back. That’s only 10-20 days of opportunity cost for us.. I can expand on this further; however it is one of a few reasons why we are about to have our best 3 month span over the 5.5 years we have been selling. These three months are 3 of our best 7 months ever.. including last November/December. Heck, even May was in our top 10-15.
We absolutely agree. Move items as quickly as possible but we need to get a return in the process. We have other outlets that will not require us to lose money on the PEZ deal. Thanks for watching.
I've learned a lot about the psychology of pricing from you guys and I had already considered myself pretty well versed on this topic. Primarily how $20 is the sweet spot for people right now. I've been able to get it up to about $30 but $20 is definitey favored by the customer. I've had to learn to be more flexible in my pricing during this downturn and summer slow down. I've been taking offers I normally would never take, but it's been moving product. And whats the point of aiming for a higher ASP if customers aren't willing to pay? I hope it doesn't stay like this because I firmly believe it's hard to change a pricing structure. IE. you have a brick and mortar and your pricing is fairly cheap but then you want to sell higher priced items, it gets tricky to move from lower to higher priced, you can always go lower but hard to go higher(im not really talking about just ebay but business in general as ebay is just one part of my business model). Thanks for the insights as always.
Thats why it's so important to try to sell what is not being sold or what is not available on other platforms especially on Amazon UNLESS it's your item that listed on ebay first and then listed on the other platforms. It also depends on the item too I know many books where there are only 10 or less listed if I'm listing it on Amazon I do not play the race to the bottom game I'm going to play my own game I'm going to have actual photos Amazon buyers can look at (99.9% of Amazon sellers do not pit any pictures of the actual item they are sending) this always gives me a leg up on Amazon every think about this would you rather buy an item fro a seller on Amazon that uses actual pictures of the item an you can see the item your going to buy or buy an item from a seller that uses stock photos???? Sorry I'm going to go with the Amazon seller that has actual pictures of the item I'm buying if that means paying an extra $5 or $10 so be it......BTW that book if your using it for your business you can use that purchase as a deduction off your self employment tax burden
Yes. We purchased the book from our business checking. It is definitely a business resource. One auction house we frequent has nearly 100 identification books for all types of collectibles. Great point that should not be overlooked.
@@curiouscollection2626 That is awsome about the auction house you frequent and the identification books over 25 years sourcing anytime i see an idenfificaiton book i always pick it up one because i reseller books (one of the many categories i sell in) and i know majority of them are on the rare side so if i ever wanted to i could put them up for sale but they are all in my PC collection or Business collection i guess lol even if its something i do not sell (yet) a look at it that if i ever sell that type of item ill have a book to help me identify things! your 100% correct those identification books come in so handy and helpful and will give you a 1 up on your competition NO doubt. i do agree with the Comping other platforms Not just ebay with mass produced items so we all have differences of opinion on what we think a lot is but if there are a bunch like 25 or 50 or more yes 1000% see what others or selling there like item for on other platforms and with all things be willing to go lower then what your asking but you guys already know this all starts with the buy you make your money on the buy as long as you can keep that Buy Price as los as you can to $0 the more you can work with your buyer on price!
For some reason Amazon is able to beat most sellers prices especially on eBay and books. The eBay seller @ $20.00 may not be making but a couple of bucks. If you are a 1 person operation then you might make a small profit, with employees he won’t be making money at $2.00 profit. A good employee will cost you a minimum of $15-18.00 an hour. Minimum wage is around $8.00 a hour and you don’t want them for sure. I always look at a dealers page to see what they are niched down on if anything. Ha I never try to compete with Amazon prices for the most part.
Thats a huge issue and i think could be beneficial for everyone is to price comp on Amazon and Ebay but to be fair almost everyone only comps on ebay and that seller may have though 2 bucks off is a great price as its the lowest on ebay but likely never even looked at amazon for pricing. I need to start doing the same myself
My rule of thumb i have best offer on almost all my 17k items i habe all items $10 and under set to automatically accept offers of 30% or less offers over 30% are auto declined items priced over $10 i set auto accept to 20% or less any offers over 20% are auto declined i have saved time and avoided many headaches over 2 decades of using this method Yes. So if it was $30 with best offer I would have not accepted anything under $6 off or 20% and my flat shipping for books is $6 no matter if you buy 1 book or 100 books
Wondering how competitive the $30 price was on eBay? Were there multiple copies of the same book in same condition? I'm one of the unicorns who's never shopped on Amazon. Not that I never would but would likely do it sparingly without paying a prime membership.
The reference book was the cheapest shown on eBay. There were several higher. It is very easy for us as sellers to just look on eBay and forget there are options for buyers.
