Since March has been a sluggish sales month so far, I decided today to start a Promoted Listings campaign on Etsy. Check back in April for a monthly sales report and ROI on this new campaign!
1 Year Later
It’s been a little over a year since I decided to actually pay attention to my hobby business and the results are in. I’ve been on and off flipping thrift store stuff since I was a teenager (35 now). With the encouragement of a good friend, I decided to make 2016 my benchmark. Financially, Etsy, my newest channel saw the most dramatic growth at roughly 500% YOY for January. Ebay is up roughly 20% YOY for January. One metric that I regret not tracking is listing count at the beginning and end of the month. Focusing on getting more listings up every week drove the annual growth of both platforms…
Fun Etsy Sales Map
Super fun app to check out, get it here.
Setting Your Ebay Store on Vacation & Handling Times
It has been some time since my last post but this one hit home for me recently and pretty hard. I’ve been selling casually on eBay for 15 years. In 2016 I decided to formalize my effort with eBay and Etsy to make a solid stream of side income and so far in 2016, things have been going great. I’m paying for an eBay basic store subscription and have had one in the past, it works out OK, I’m a Top Rated Powerseller and make the most of the FVF credits/discounts and the USPS Shipping discount (this actually helps my business model to exist). So, we’re 8 months into 2016 and…
New Year, New Accounting
Since the flipping game came back into my life in 2015 in a bigger way than expected, I vowed to clean up the books for 2016. I launched Etsy in late September 2015 and by year end had gross product sales of $544.11, eBay for the year was decent. Now that its 2016 I have to deal with it tax wise. My accounts were co-mingled in 2015, I was buying from the bins with our points credit card, buying personal & household stuff out of the Paypal account and generally being negligent to this business which could be profitable. I knew late in 2015 that this had to change. I…
Resolving a Negative Feedback on eBay
About once a year, I get dinged with a negative feedback on eBay. Fate swooped in on my 34th birthday and dispensed me one just yesterday and I figured that I should post about how I resolved it. Math up front. On average I sell 15-20 items per week and though I leave feedback for all my buyers, I usually receive a 10% return feedback as a seller and am luckily still running at a 100% positive. I offer free shipping (which I bundle into the Buy it Now price) and 14 day returns on all my items which gets me into Top Rated/Powerseller status and that fly final value…
Free Reporting Tool for Ebay, Etsy and More
Just a quick post here. A few months ago, when I started getting back into the eBay flipping game I wanted to have a visual report to identify trends and show sales progress for free. The solution I ended up going with is called SumAll. SumAll is pretty cool in that you can plug all kinds of online engagement/sales channels into one interface and track trends for free. Of course they offer a paid suite that is probably super rad though for my activity that isn’t warranted. Check out the screen shot of the “Classic View” below which shows my last 12 months of activity on eBay, Etsy, YouTube &…
Lessons learned from my failed e-commerce startup
When Jenna and I were living in Pennsylvania, we frequented the oddball grocery stores in the Philly suburbs always looking for something new. One of the more interesting spots was the West Norriton Farmers Market. More of a grocery store than a farmers market with a geographic layout, this place has an interesting selection to say the least. I’ve always been into hot peppers, and the Caribbean and African section of the store had some tempting/daring products to offer. One of these was the best dried pepper product I’ve ever tasted. That product (2 cases of which are still in my closet) became the template for an e-commerce shop called…