I tried a new experiment, sending out at least 15 offers to watchers every day this week, in addition to listing at least 3 new items every day as I have been, and it all led to a nice week of sales. A coincidence or meaningful data? No clue, but I was surprised to see how quickly — often within a few minutes — interested buyers accepted a 10% or 15% offer. I had 4 sales from offers tonight (out of about 50 offers sent) and 2 on Thursday afternoon out of about 20 offers sent. It’s a reminder that with the eBay app, a potential sale can happen very fast. All it takes is a push notification and a few taps of a phone screen. So send those offers, run those sales, create those coupons.
2/13/2022 – 2/19/2022
Total items in store: 3349 (down from 3363)
Items sold: 62 (34 via best offer, 14 via seller initiated offer)
The sales tab also says that I sold 19 via promoted listings, which can’t be right since I’ve never used promoted listings before. Unless I got auto-enrolled somehow…?
Gross sales: $3622.01 (up 30% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2551.37 (up 35% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $5.49 — Joe Staley rookie card
Another sale from aggressively cutting prices on low dollar items — in this case, a rookie card of an offensive lineman who spent his whole career with the San Francisco 49ers. No surprise that the card’s going to live out the rest of its years in sunny California, where it belongs.
Highest price sold (net): $253.04 — Hilary Knight Topps Olympics autograph
Talk about a very small niche — the extremely high card prices of the best cards of athletes in obscure sports, like Hilary Knight who is one of the best women’s hockey players. This sale worked like many of my best sales do — I bought this card before the Olympics (on a message board of all places), and sold it during the Olympics. Ryanne’s influence on how to price unique items helped make me some extra profit, as my price was above the highest sold listings, enough to get a snarky “why is this priced so high?” message from an “interested” buyer which I ignored because I rarely respond to price fishing messages and I knew my pricing logic was sound.
There were no other Hilary Knight Olympics autographs listed when I created my listing, so I figured there was a chance someone would hit the buy it now if the US won the hockey gold medal. They lost to Canada and got silver, but my card sold for full price anyway. I kind of understand why — almost all pro athletes in mainstream American sports sign hundreds to thousands of autographs every single year for dozens of sets, but Hilary Knight only has autographs in a few sets. Maybe 1000 total? And I believe this is her earliest one, from 2014. $300 is a good sale, but most of her autographs go for $100 and up, which is why it was a no-brainer purchase for me at $70. I didn’t expect it to sell quite this fast, but timing is often really important in sales of rare items.
I had a few other interesting high dollar sales this week, my favorites being this card with a piece of the player’s jersey from the NBA Finals and this autograph of one of the top young football defensive players. The jersey card was listed for just a day or two before the buyer sent me an offer that was maybe 15% off my BIN price, and the autograph was listed for a year and a half without a lot of offers. I accepted a counteroffer which was 30% off ($75) from my $250 price.
There was probably merit in holding onto both cards for longer, considering their relative scarcity (10 copies or less of both cards) and the quality of the player and card. It’s likely that one or both will be worth more in the next 6-12 months. I particularly liked the NBA Finals jersey card and completely understand why someone who buys cards for collection or “investment” would pay up for one of those.
But offers over $150 are hard for me to pass up. It used to take a lot of hours working for someone else to make that much money. I’m at about six months of doing this full-time, no other gigs, and every week of doing these numbers is a reminder that as long as I put the time in and continue to adapt and learn and grow, this is my life now. No more working for someone else, or watching the clock, or wasting time and energy at a job I hate. It’s pretty amazing.
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