My Best Sales This Week

Sandra Boynton Mug. Paid .49. Sold for $22.95 plus shipping. I always pick up Sandra Boynton when I find it. It usually sits for a while but sells for a good price. Right now I also have a Boynton table cloth in my store but in the past have sold pillowcases and greeting cards. 

This vintage light globe. I had this forever. I was going to do something with it myself but never did. I don't remember how much I paid for it but I'm sure it was less than $5. Sold for $37.99 plus shipping.

I've heard that these old hand held games are good sellers but never came across any before. I found three at an estate sale last week for a dollar each. One ended up not working. The other is a Yahtzee game which is still listed and this Solitaire game. Paid $1 Sold for $39.99 free shipping.

And last these sundae glasses. Paid a couple dollars and sold for $19.95 plus shipping. 

Tip of the Week

Walgreens is having a sale on packing tape right now (at least as of yesterday). I cleaned out three stores! The Wexford brand small rolls in the dispenser are usually over $3 and are now 99 cents. I love the brown colored as I use it to cover up things on my shipping boxes that I don't want to show…like liquor brands, UPCs etc. They had clear too but not as much. Of course the brown can also be used to seal your boxes. Just doesn't work very well for taping on postage :)

Best Church Sale Ever

We went to a church rummage sale yesterday unlike any other sale I've been too. When we walked in a man came up to us and told us they were raising money for their youth group. Nothing was marked you paid what you wanted. Oh my god! I paid $10 for 2 boxes of stuff. It was hard to decide what to pay. I didn't want to rip them off but also wanted to take advantage and get a good deal. I hope I did okay. They seemed happy when I offered $10. 

How to Customize Global Shipping Program

Did you know you can customize your Global Shipping Program and to some extent choose the countries where you want to use it and those you don't? When the Global Shipping Program first came out I didn't opt in because I wasn't sure I'd like it and really didn't want to use it on every country. I thought it might turn buyers off because of the higher upfront costs associated with buying an item and I didn't like that you could not offer First Class International. The reason I DID want to use it was because there were certain countries that I was not shipping to which with the GSP I could ship to without fear. Namely Russia and Mexico. These were two countries I didn't previously ship to because of things I'd read. Very long times to arrive..stolen packages. There are a number of other countries I exclude from my shop because they are not covered by insurance. But eventually the GSP changed. It now allows you to customize it and use it for some countries and not others. This was exactly what I wanted to do. It took me a while to figure out how to do so. 

Below I've created a little tutorial to show how. You can't actually choose by country in most cases..Mostly it goes by continent or region. You'll see what I mean below. 

It was a lot of work to set up initially because I wanted all of my current listings to reflect the change. I had to go in and individually revise each listing. Going forward from there it knows what I want and new listings reflect my settings.  The reason I like this is because the countries which I opt out of GSP can still choose First Class International Shipping if they want. This is a lower cost option and I hope it leads to more sales. I've used it for a long time and never had a problem with FCI. I insure it through Shipsaver. But now I also sell to Mexico and Russia and have no worries.

Step 1: Go into your account settings and click on Site Preferences. You will see the screen below. Click on Show by Shipping Preferences.

Step 2: On the Shipping Preferences Screen click on Offer the Global Shipping Program. 

Step 3: You must have checked the first two checkboxes: 'Use The Global Shipping Program' and 'Allow Me To Customize International Shipping By Country'. Click Submit. That's the first part.

Step 4: At this point you've chosen Global Shipping Program and it will be applied to all of your listings. What you need to do is modify your listings if you want GSP applied only to certain countries. Each listing is set up separately. Go to one of your listings or start a new listing and go down to the shipping section. Below I show what the International Shipping looks like before you modify it and how it looks after. You can see in the 2nd screen that I have check-marked certain countries. This means I've opted out of Global Shipping for those checked. Global shipping will only apply for Mexico, Europe and Asia. Like I said before it took me a while to get all of the listing I had current at the time set up but now when I start a new listing it by default uses my preferences as seen below. Hope this was helpful!

My Best Sales This Week

I didn't really have 'big' sales this week individually but sales were UP! and it was a good week. Most of these items have been listed for a while and I didn't record how much I paid for them so I'll just list what they sold for. Not all sales are big but they add up. Although not big dollar I thought they were all interesting/fun sales. The kind of thing I like to pick up. 

Wallpaper Border sold for $17.99 free shipping.

Vintage Leather Coin Purses

Purchased for .75 and sold for 9.99 plus shipping

Italian Glass Pitcher. Sold for $27.95 free shipping

Vintage Snap Card Game. Sold for $13.99 free shipping.

Vintage Tape for Label Maker. Sold for $14.99 plus shipping.

This and That

Optimizing your Listings for Mobile Devices

In my eBay April Seller Newsletter I found out that 17.8% of my sales were from a mobile device. I thought that was interesting and it was higher than what I expected. For several months now I've made changes to optimize my listings for mobile devices. Some of the things I changed were: I quit using Seller Sourcebook templates with lots of html. I started using bullets in my description to make reading easier. I changed the size of all my photos to meet eBay's new requirements. I took their advice to keep descriptions short and sweet.  Before I made changes and was still using a template my listing came up all wonky on my android smart phone. Seeing that was good incentive to quit using the template. Now my listings look normal on my smart phone. eBay has some examples of how your listing may look on a mobile device if not optimized.  I think this is important. I don't shop from my phone but I do research on it and if a page isn't loading fast enough or I can see it's not loading correctly with text all screwed up I back out of it right away. I don't have patience for that especially because they load slowly anyway (my phone is a few years old). Look up some of your listings on your own mobile device. How do they look?

The New Storefront

I learned from eBay Scavengers that all store subscribers can now elect the new storefront. See my new storefront above. I am loving it. I have some work to do on my banner. I just created something basic because I don't know much about designing banners but even so I think the storefront looks so much better. I  took advantage of being able to pick the four featured items shown first (could we do that before?) and I chose a yellow theme so it looks cohesive. I'll change these out once a week but stick with some sort of theme. Do you have a store? Have you changed to the new storefront? How do you like it and what changes do you like most? 

Sales Are Up This Week

Sales have finally picked up. Praise the lords. I hope they continue to rise.  

My Best Sales this Week

Sales have continued to be slow. I attributed it to tax week when I listed hardly anything. Maybe one or two things a day if any. I learned a lot about doing my business taxes though and felt proud and relieved to get them done and in on time. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be but it will certainly be easier next year if I keep better records this year. I've started logging trips to the post office and thrifts and recording purchases as I make them in a spreadsheet. Also recording sales as they happen. I always assumed everything would be saved in ebay and paypal for when I needed it but those records only go back so far. I think for sales on ebay it's only three months. So I had to do quite a bit of digging to complete the taxes but I got it done!

After I got the taxes out of the way I started listing, listing and more listing hoping to get the sales moving again and it worked! Yesterday I had a $133 day which I haven't seen in a while. I've got a lot of shipping to do today including a typewriter. My favorite thing to ship…not. 

So on to some of my best recent sales.

The aforementioned typewriter. I think I paid $8 for this one. Usually vintage typewriters go for more so I was willing to pay that. This one turned out not to be such a popular brand/model. But still a decent sale.  Isn't it cute? It sold for $47.49 plus shipping.

I purchased this Liz jacket off the Halloween rack at the GW after Halloween for 75% off. I guess they thought it looked costumey. Not sure what one would 'be' wearing this jacket. Any ideas…post um in the comments :) It was $3 or $4 and sold for 34.95 with fs

And another curler related sale. I bought these perm rods for $3 and they sold for $47.49 plus shipping. 

There were over 100 in different sizes in this lot. Definitely pick these up if you see them for a good price. I'd known of this BOLO for a long time but this was the first time I found a large lot.  Do people still get perms? I had many a perm in my early years. I can recall that smell instantly. I'm glad I left that phase behind never to return.  So those were my best recent sales. I'm hoping the uptick continues! The weather is finally warming up in Wisconsin so garage sale season is just around the corner. Hoping to find some interesting items this summer. Oh. I wanted to mention. Yesterday I was at Goodwill and saw my first ever book scanner working the books. He had a cart with a bunch of books in it and was scanning each one. He was a young guy. What I noticed the most is that he looked so furtive. He kept glancing up like he was going to be stopped. It looked stressful. If I ever take up book scanning I'm going to remember to try not to look that way. Heck I think if he hadn't been so nervous he would have looked like he worked there and was doing something official. His presence did keep me away from the books though. I felt like he'd probably caught all the sellable ones. Good strategy book guy!  Have a great sellin' week. 

My Best Sales This Week

Things picked up this week which was great.


Upwords Game purchased for about $2 sold for $19.99 plus shipping

Barbie Newborn Set. Purchased a big bag of barbie items for $2. I've already sold many of the items so this I consider free to me. Sold for $19.95 plus shipping. 

Vintage Wool Tie Made in Peru. Paid $1 and sold for $23.74 plus shipping.

My favorite are these vintage metal curlers. Purchased for $1 sold for $40 best offer plus shipping. Aren't they cool?

How was your week? Are things picking up? 

BOLO - A Game of Thrones 1st Edition

The other day I was doing some research in the Anitquarian and Collectibles Books category on ebay. One thing I want to learn more about is how to correctly describe a books condition. When you sell books and you are asking a good amount of money for a book you need to be able to accurately describe its flaws.  In order to do that you need to know the parts of a book, how books are rated and what the terms are which are used to describe flaws…some I've learned are 'bumped', 'foxing', 'rubbing'. 

The most I've ever made on a book was $100 on an early edition Walt Whitman that I chanced upon in a very small thrift store. The buyer left feedback and said the book was better than I described. I think I was so afraid of not representing it accurately that I probably overstated its flaws. I'd rather do that than the other way around. 

It's fascinating to read the descriptions written by experienced collectible book sellers. And it is amazing the books that are sold on ebay. Very rare books that go for thousands of dollars. So the other day I decided to spend a little time perusing the category and quickly noticed a BOLO which surprised me, A Game of Thrones (my brain always reads this as A Game of Thorns). I've heard of the tv show Game of Thrones and I know it is really popular but that's as much as i know. I can't even tell you what it is about. Well it's based on a novel of the same name written in 1996. A first edition goes for $400+ dollars. You can bet I'll be looking for that from now on. It's got a silver dust jacket that should be easy to spy on a shelf of books and then a look inside will tell you if it is a first edition.

Here is a pic 

from this listing

and the sold listings. If it's signed you've really hit gold but either way a definite BOLO. Do any of you watch the show? Read the book? Maybe you have a first edition sitting on your own shelf?!