My Top eBay Moments This Week

I had 46 sales this week. Only 10 of those were shoes. I'm starting to feel a little bit panicky about the level of my shoe inventory. I am currently at about half of the most shoes I've ever had. I seriously need to get out for a road trip. One good road trip can get me anywhere from 30-70 pairs of shoes, depending on where I go. I didn't have ANY deadbeat buyers this week! I didn't have to open ANY unpaid item cases. What a breath of fresh air! I did have a woman buy a puzzle and pay for it, and then she immediately wrote me and said never mind, her son already has that one, so she needs to cancel. I also got notified of 3 pending returns. One was absolutely my fault. Turns out the "S" in a shoe size means "Slim" and isn't just part of the style number. Oops.

My favorite sales this week weren't necessarily high dollar amounts, but I'm happy about them for one reason or another:

This vest was my daughter's. She hardly ever wore it. It's really cute, so I'm not sure why we never put it on her. I would have stuck it in the yard sale for 50 cents or a dollar, but I thought I'd give it a shot on eBay. I wasn't sure how it would do, since it's not a brand name (I think it's Walmart, in fact). It sold for $8.99 with free shipping. Shipping was only $1.92, so I came out pretty far ahead of where I'd been by putting it in the yard sale.

Honestly, I couldn't care less about the sale of this game, but I wanted to share the backstory. This was part of a big lot of board games I bought at an auction for $3. There was absolutely nothing exciting in the box. Pictionary, Scrabble, HuskerDu, Yahtzee, blah blah blah. Run of the mill games, but for $3, I bought them. I have sold 6 of them for $54.96. That's why I wanted to write about this game. If you can get a box full of games for cheap, even if they are super-ordinary games, go for it. People will still buy them. I listed these low ($7.99 - $12.99) so that they would sell quickly. Because my investment was so ridiculously low, selling these games at rock bottom prices has still netted me a very nice profit. Oh, and the auction was in August, so they've almost all sold in a month and a half.

I'm sharing this sale as an idea of what NOT to buy. I paid a dollar for him. He's a Mt. Vernon George Washington bear. I thought for sure he would be a good seller, but no - not at all. I listed him for $9.99 + shipping and got VERY few hits. After the first couple months, I changed it to $12.99 f/s and he sold immediately. So I guess that's not terrible, but hardly worth the storage space.

Remember this yard sale? I paid $6 for this one and sold it for $26. Not quite as high as I wanted, but with all the stuff I bought at that sale, I'm going for a quick turnover, so I took the offer. I bought 6 NWT Jansport backpacks for a total of $31.75. I have sold 3 of them so far for a total of $90.99. So I've tripled my Jansport investment and still have half of them to sell!

Here's one of the other ones. Paid $7.50, sold for $30. Again, not fabulous, but good enough for me. The retail value on this one was $65, so I'm sure I could have held out for more, but they are bulky, and I quadrupled my money. Sometimes you just have to take the quick nickel instead of waiting for the slow dime.

The broken NES system that I mentioned here ended up being an unpaid item. I relisted it (accidentally at auction again) and had no bids. Then I remembered I could do a second chance offer since there was more than one buyer the first time it sold. I contacted that buyer and he said yes, he definitely still wants it, but he's out of the country right now and could he buy it on October 2nd? I told him yes, I will relist it on the 1st. He also told me he would pay $30 for it (the original winning bid was only $27, so naturally I was fine with $30). On October 1st, as promised, I relisted it, but I was skeptical, because it had been about 2 weeks since our conversation. But on October 2nd, also as promised, he bought and paid for it immediately! So I paid $15 for the whole Nintendo lot. I sold 3 Mario games for $23, the other 22 games for $51, and the broken console & accessories for $30. I got a total of $104 out of that $15 investment. Not bad :)

I was literally just wondering why these hadn't sold yet. Clairol Kindness is always a good seller. The Clairol Kindness Deluxe usually does better, but this one still should have sold. But I hadn't even gotten any offers on it. The day after I wondered why it hadn't sold, it sold. I paid $1.95 in May and they sold this week for my full asking price of $39.99!

I was very excited about this sale! This is a set of 22 Help Me Be Good books by Joy Berry. It's not a complete set. The complete set has 29 books, so I wasn't able to get top dollar for them. I bought 21 of them for $5.99 and then found another one a couple weeks later for 50 cents. So altogether I paid $6.88 (tax) for them in June and sold them this week for $45. I had free shipping on them, but media mail shipping was only $5.06, so I still did well!

And this!! I didn't even look this up on my phone before I bought it. It was only $2.99, so I figured I could make at least some sort of profit. Imagine my excitement when I saw the current listings! When I just got that link, I see that there are some listed for higher than mine that weren't there when I listed mine. No matter! I listed mine for $69.99 or best offer. I took an offer this week for $59.99 plus shipping. It's going to New Zealand, to a mother who is "desperate to find this" for her daughter's first birthday. Oh, and it was listed for 3 days!

How'd you do this week?

Have you visited eBay Underground this week?
And have you heard all about our new EBUG Classifieds? It's pretty bare-looking now. Come and post a few things for sale so we can get that filled up and exciting-looking.