Rolling with the Punches

It has been a rough few weeks. I was rear-ended by a distracted driver at a red light when Mom and I were running errands a few weeks ago. We were both fine, but this was quite a shock to me. My car was totaled, but I was thankfully able to get a new (to me) one when I received money from my insurance company. I had a 2015 Ford Fiesta and was able to replace it with a 2017 Ford Fiesta with very low mileage. I like this car because it is compact and easy to drive. I often joke that driving my Mom's car is like driving a tank.

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In other news, my income from reselling nearly doubled in June. I've been putting a lot of effort into my Poshmark closet and I am definitely seeing results. I have also been exploring other sourcing opportunities as the weather has not allowed for many yard sales. It has been a very stormy summer! I discovered that the Salvation Army near me makes their color of the week $0.99 on Thursdays, so I have been making that my regular Thursday sourcing trip. I've been able to get about thirty more items each week this way.

One of my goals this summer was to get a routine down to amp up my productivity. This is what has been working for me lately...

Sunday = Take Photos
Monday = List
Tuesday = List
Wednesday = List
Thursday = Source Thrift Stores
Friday = Source Yard Sales (Weather permitting)
Saturday = Source Yard Sales (Weather permitting)
Sunday = It starts all over again with pictures!

My biggest hang up with reselling is taking pictures. I hate taking pictures, and I'm not ashamed to admit it! This is why I do all of my inventory for the week on Sunday. I make a day of it and get it all over with so I don't have to do again until the next week. I pick an audiobook to listen to, bring an exorbitant amount of drinks (water and tea), grab my tape measure and hide out in my room until all of the photos are finished. I include measurements in my photos because I find it easier than pulling the item to answer questions later.

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Speaking of audiobooks, I'm still enjoyed the app Scribd. As I mentioned in a previous post, the app has many bad reviews but I am still loving it. It's $8.99 a month and has unlimited books and audiobooks. The reason it has bad reviews is because it pauses your usage if it thinks you're reading too much. I have yet to hit that wall and am still very impressed with it, especially for the price. The only thing I don't like about it is the limited selection. This wouldn't even bother me that much, but it's annoying when they only have the first (or first few) books in a series and don't have the rest. Other than that it has five stars from me!

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I read a comment on my Mom's blog, Frugal Workshop, this week that really bothered me. One of her readers commented that she was told that she was stealing from the government by using the library. As someone with aspirations to be a librarian and who genuinely loves the library, I would like to share this photo I found floating around Facebook.

This shows just a few reasons why libraries are still relevant today, and I wholeheartedly agree with all of them. I think libraries are also great for building communities, aiding college students, and fostering a love of reading in children. I often attend a monthly book club that is held at my local library and I've found that they offer many free resources such as coupon classes, computer classes, Zumba, resume building, etc.

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"I'm in a tank, pal. Come and get me!" - Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls)

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Over and out.

I Opened My Ebay Store!

I finally took the plunge! One of my goals for the summer is to really step up my Ebay game, so I finally signed up for an Ebay store subscription! Earlier this month, I dogsat for a good friend of mine while she was in Paris (Lucky!) for a little over a week, so I had to end all of my Ebay listings in favor of extending my handling time. This meant that when I returned home from dogsitting, I used up all of my free listings by reactivating the ones I ended. So...this was a good opportunity to go ahead and sign up for a store subscription and start getting a lot more listings each month. I chose the Premium store subscription because that is the level that I am trying to achieve this summer, and I didn't think that the Starter or Basic subscriptions would cover it.

I was still able to source while I was dogsitting. The sourcing was actually great because my friend lives in a a larger city than us and there were plenty of thrift stores and yard sales in the area. I've already gotten most of the clothing items listed, and my goal for this weekend and early next week is to get all of the hard goods listed. Some of my favorite finds included a large box of toys that I paid $10 for. This box included many action figures, and Disney Cars toys, etc. I also found my first Tory Burch item for $10! It was a pair of moccasins that were in very good condition, and they sold within less than an hour of listing them for $50!

My goal for June is to get my active listings up to 500, so I have been listing constantly for the past few days. I think as long as the yard sales are good to me, I should be able to meet this goal and I'm very excited about it! 

I watched a lot of YouTube videos while I was dogsitting, and I'm always inspired by other resellers' inventory systems, and they make me want to revamp my own. One thing that many of them do is put their items in plastic bags and write a SKU number on the bags. One seller mentioned that she buys 100ct. bread bags for less than $3 at Walmart and uses them. I think there would be several benefits in organizing my inventory this way, but I've ultimately decided that the cons outweigh the pros.

Pros: 

~I could fit more items in each bin.

~Shipping would be easier. 

Cons:

~TIME 

~It's just not necessary.

~The plastic bags are terrible for the environment. 

Ultimately, the first and last con really nixed the idea for me. Writing SKU numbers and putting my items in plastic bags would add too much time for each item. Also, the plastic bags are bad for the environment. I feel terrible when I leave my reusable grocery bags at home, I definitely don't want to be responsible for a ton of plastic bread bags floating around! In my current inventory system, I have a letter on each of my bins, and I put this letter at the end of the description in each listing. This system works well for me, and I really don't need to fix what isn't broken. 

Poshmark is still doing really well for me as I share my closet several times a day. It has quickly risen to be my second best platform, under Ebay. Mercari has been dead for me for a while. I've had about one sale a week on Mercari for the past couple months, whereas I was having a couple sales a day at one point. This is a total bummer, but I feel that Poshmark is picking up the slack, so I'm trying not to let it get me down. I've read other Mercari sellers' posts on Facebook mentioning slow sales, so perhaps it isn't just me. This is why I think it is so important to have my items cross posted and not rely on one platform for my business. 

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Image Credit

I've been reading a really great series this month called Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire. It was recommend to me by my library friend who I dogsat for, and I can not stop listening to it. I really enjoy the writing style in this series, and it's been refreshing as I haven't been enjoying the books I've been reading lately. She recommended it to me because I enjoyed Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children so much, and I have to say that this series is actually better so far. 

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Off to another week of listing! Fingers crossed that the yard sales aren't rained out this week!

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“She was a story, not an epilogue.” ― Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway)

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Over and out. 

Reselling Updates ~ Poshmark & Best Offer

A few days ago, I received an offer from Ebay for one hundred free auction-style listings. I always take advantage of these free listing offers from Ebay because I always use up my fifty listings every month. However, I receive this hundred free auctions offer every month and I have decided that I am not going to be using these anymore. The reason for this is that when my Ebay store is full of auctions,  I find that my daily sales drop significantly. Also, most auctions (at least in my experience) don't get any attention and rarely get bids. If they do get bids, it is usually just the one and it usually happens the first day of the auction so the buyer and seller have to wait until the end of the auction for the item to be purchased. I believe that most people shopping online do not want to wait for an auction to end to purchase their item. They also do not want to hit Buy It Now on auctions because the auction price is cheaper and they will feel like they overpaid. With this being said, I am only running auctions on particular items and not using these free auction offers.

Speaking of Ebay, I have also decided to take Best Offer off of my "bread and butter" items. As I've previously mentioned, I follow States Place on YouTube and Instagram and take most of her advise on how to run a successful Ebay store. Recently, she mentioned that she had taken Best Offer off of her listings and that it was one of the best things she had ever done for her store. I have been frustrated by the Best Offer feature on Ebay for a while now, so I have decided to give this a try as well. It has only been a couple of days, but I am pleased with the results so far. I will continue to update on this topic as I go.

States Place also has weekly webinars with a new topic each month. I purchased this month's batch of webinars because the topic is BOLO (Be on the look out!) brands, and I feel that more knowledge in this area is beneficial to me. So far, I have watched the dress and blouse webinars and I love watching them, however, I fear that the brands she is mentioning are not brands that I can find in my area. This makes sense though as she lives on the other side of the country. This information is still beneficial and if I ever do happen upon these brands, I will know that they are worth a grab!

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Another YouTuber/Instagramer I have been following is Solange Mina. She focuses on Poshmark rather than Ebay and I have been able to gain some valuable information from watching her videos. From her I have learned the value of self-sharing on Poshmark rather than spending time sharing other people's closets. She tells her followers the importance of sharing your own closet constantly to gain sales. I have taken this advice to heart this week and have been using The Simple Posher to share my own closet multiple times a day especially at peak times (during parties). This has been working really well for me! I've had almost daily sales on Poshmark since I started aggressively sharing my own closet, and this is definitely something that I will continue and implement into my daily routine.

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"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle." - Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning)

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Over and out.