Again & Pantry Reset

My husband hates a particular habit I have. I'll rearrange a whole room, live with it for a week and then decide I can't stand it a second longer, then proceed to have him help me put it back to where it was before.

Well that is what I (mostly) did with my blog. While I'm rearranging I'm mopping under furniture and dusting knick knacks - and with my blog I did some house cleaning too. So it was not all a loss.

I started this blog as an eBay journal, and the new format wasn't conducive to "journaling" - so here we are back to basics and I'm totally excited about it.

The past couple weeks have been busy. We went on vacation. I've been listing consistently and have about 1020 items currently listed (about 20 on auction on my personal account are all my kids outgrown clothes). I've been having typical summer sales. I got a negative feedback (which I was expecting after the back and forth with the buyer). It was one of those, "if you aren't happy with the item send it back for a full refund," but since she'd already told me in another message that the (jacket) was "so cute" she obviously didn't want to send it back, and I gave her a partial refund, which she rewarded by leaving a negative and saying something to the effect that the jacket was horrible and smelly - I made the mistake of saying "excellent" when I missed a small stain. I did try to call and have in removed but in the end I know I misrepresented the item. Oh well.

I have been selling lots of shoes. I got about 30 pairs for $3 at an online estate auction! It was about a 45 minute drive to go pick them up (and the rest of the contents of the closet) but well worth it. I spent $28 total for an entire closet of stuff. It's been work, and it's only a third listed, but about 6 pairs of shoes have already sold including these Skechers Shape Ups:

Sold $27 paid $.10

I don't think they are manufacturing these anymore.

New In Box sell for up to $100!

 

Keurig Replacement Lid sold for $12.99

Sold the tank for $26, and another part for $6 too - all within three days,

I got the broken Keurig from my grandmother for free

 

Winter Jacket size 6XL

Sold for $100 to a buyer in Australia. Paid $10 at DAV

 

I've also sold several pairs of jeans recently too, so fall clothing sales are starting!

 

PANTRY RESET CHALLENGE:

 

 

After our vacation money is pretty tight this month, so we've decided to do a pantry challenge. You take an inventory of everything in your freezer and pantry and eat it all before buying more (we're anticipating this taking us a month). We uncovered about 35lbs of meat from the depths of our freezers and pounds of rice, pasta, and beans from the pantry. Luckily both my husband and I are decent cooks, but I have a feeling the last two weeks will be the real challenge when supplies dwindle! We'll limit our grocery spending to milk, fruit, and veggies. No store bought bread until we can't make it out of our pantry! I have a feeling I'll be logging lots of kitchen hours this month but that's okay it will be fun to see how much we can save by doing this. After reading many frugal cooking blogs, and other pantry challenges I do truly feel blessed to have a months worth of food in our pantry.

 

Have you done a pantry challenge before?  

 

 

Mid-Week Update

Things have been busy and we have a short vacation coming up at the end of the month - here's a quick mid week SOLD items update:

 

This mixed lot of mid-century stainless/composite flatware

sold for a Best Offer of $25

These Rocco Dispirto Signed cookbooks sold for a best offer of $30

Paid $6

These vintage 80's NFL pencils sold for

$49.99 Free Shipping

I paid $2 on an online local pick up estate auction

This unusual camel sculpture sold for $30ish

Paid maybe $2

Photo Collage for Multiple Views on Main Photo

 

There are some items you may want to show multiple sides of in the main photo

For example the pen above is a high priced item (listed for about $75) - so I could justify spending a few minutes on a photo collage. This particular pen has a little carriage on it that I wanted to highlight. So I headed on over to picmonkey.com and made the above collage. It is an intuitive site and you should have no problem with this. You may have Photoshop already I only have it on my more powerful desktop - so it's nice to be able to do this "in the cloud" on my laptop.

 

Click on Collage on the Pic Monkey homepage

 

You will automatically be prompted to load your photos (not pictured).

 

Then pick the collage layout you want,

I like these side by side squares under "ducks in a row"

 

Then click back to the photo icon

Drag and drop your photos wherever you want them

Edit the photos (Zoom in or out) using the hovering edit button

 

Click save

You'll have the option of three file sizes, pick what suits your needs, and you're...

 

ready for listing in approximately 3 minutes or less!

This uniform top has great detail on the back,

but I hate putting the main photo as the back of an item. This solves the problem!

 

Do you use a similar method? I'd love to hear about it.

What items do you think it is helpful to display this way?

 

 

 

 



A New Look

If you're reading this from a computer you'll see that over the weekend I revamped my blog! I dusted off the corner of my brain that used to write HTML code regularly and do web design for an area based non-profit Physicians for Peace - and got to work. Yes at times my head was close to exploding.

Here's an inside glimpse at what went into The New Look: This design is a template that I tweaked. It's more colorful and should make finding old and related posts more accessible. Godaddy is running a $.99/year domain name sale so I'm also the proud new owner of www.beachthrifter.com!

I created a new banner at picmonkey.com a fun site that you can do all kinds of quick/easy photo editing on.

You may notice that my ads aren't showing - because it will take a few days for adsense to approve my new name. If you've had trouble with this before, or plan on using a custom domain in the future here is a very helpful video on getting your ads turned back on:

 

Having a new domain also cleared out My Blog List :( I'll try to get them up again ASAP. Please comment with your current blog URL to make the process quicker.

 

I'm also including some amazon affiliate links. If you ever are interested in something I mention you can support this blog by buying it through these links - like the ones below:

 



This computer is my everyday go-to listing friend - it also did all the revamping.

I absolutely love it

 

So it's still the same old blog but a little prettier! And I promise not to bombard you with irrelevant ads and links. As always thank you for reading.

 

 

BubbleWrap, Paypal, Weekly Update

Hope sales were great for you this week. I had a decent week - no complaints. I'm up to 920ish listings. I had a fraudulent Paypal charge this week - the rep I spoke to said she could tell the number was pinned in somewhere. It was strange, but luckily I noticed the email from Paypal about my recent "Debit Pin Transaction" and knew something was up because I hadn't used my Paypal debit card in days.

  

This sold for about $13 this week I listed it as something like

Vegan/Vegetarian Thanksgiving Humor Cross Stitch 

Paid $1

Any guesses what it's really about? Is it really vegan humor? I don't know.

 

Arbor Rose/True Rose pattern mixed lot

Sold for $35.99

This has been listed for about a year

as you can see from my old photo set up (on an ironing board)

Probably paid $4

 

These pants sold on auction for $76 and then I got the dreaded "I accidentally bid" message.

I relisted them BIN $75 and they sold a few days later to a costume house in California. Maybe they'll end up in a movie! Not bad for an item I found in the trash.

 

This plus some fish tank plants which sold for $5ish make my trash sales this week around $80!

 

I sold two of these (one black, one pink) I bought them at Marshalls on clearance for $10. They sold for $26.99 F/S - a profit of about $13. Not great, but not a total bust. I thought I could get more as the MSRP was $110-$120 on them. I still have one to sell.

 

In eBay and shipping related news:

 

A new and sustainable bubble wrap will be available within the year

Sealed Air Corp Goes Green(ish)

 

Here's a link to a blog explaining why Amazon sends bubble wrap in a box with Kraft paper

Stupid Shipping Gang Not So Stupid

 

 

Let me know how your week was in the comments!

 

 

900 + Weekly Update 7/4/15

Hope you're having a great day. Sales really picked up for me - maybe because I finally hit 900 listings. I've been home (listing) more this week and not at the beach at all. I will not be a victim of the first shark attack this year in VA. My heart and thoughts to those who have been injured and lost limbs recently. It's very scary.

 

Here's some eBay sales from the past week:

 

An interesting sale this week was these handmade felt and sequin church ornaments

That's how I listed them anyway, because I am not actually sure what they are. If you know please comment.

Sold for a best offer of $20

I THINK I paid $2

 

I sold $49 worth of these Accodata binders this week

Picked them up at the GWO for $.59 a pound, so maybe $1 for the box

Vintage office always does well for me

 

Also a GWO find 50x30 Oshkosh Overalls

sold for $62 on sale

paid by the pound probably $3.50

 

These two garbage find uniform tops sold internationally for $25 each

The one on the left is an old special warfare (SEALS etc) uniform top, the one on the right is a Navy "Johnny Cash" uniform top - neither are current uniforms and I assume the person throwing them out figured they didn't have value anymore.

 

I sold $88 worth of garbage finds this week!

 

Let me know how things are going for you!

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly Update 6/27/15

I had steady but low $ sales this week. That is okay at least there were sales. This phone was my best sale.

 

Bakelite Monophone 40 - WW2 Era Shipboard Phone

Sold for a best offer of $130

 

I'd had this phone listed for a year at $300 best offer. I finally accepted $130 as I thought it was fair and I needed the money. I had another very similar phone - and I accidently sent the buyer that phone! Oops. Long story short we spoke on the phone (an eBay first for me), he ended up buying the other one too, and I shipped the correct phone too. So now he has both the phones and I have $160.

These were both found in the trash by a roommate of my husband's over ten years ago.

 

Island Teak Carving

Sold for best offer of $80

 

I've had this listed since the fall for $200. I obviously priced it too high because I was getting tons of views and watchers and nothing - I accepted this offer again, because things have been slow and I thought it was fair. I paid $10 at family thrift.

 

These two sales made up the majority of my income this week. The rest were items like this:

 

Sleeveless Hawaiian shirt sold for $9.99

paid $.80

 

In non-eBay news, yesterday we were swimming at the bay and then a man came and was crabbing from shore with raw chicken legs about 20 feet from us. (This is a extremely rude and dangerous to do on a beach where others are swimming). He'd been setting his traps for literally one minute and we called the kids out of the water sensing the danger that raw meat can cause. The man who was waist deep got out of the water and told us "Shark, there's a shark." At the exact moment the kids got out, we saw a fin and movement only a few feet off the shore, then the animal surfaced coming almost the whole way out of the water. It was a huge Manta Ray. It was about 4-5 feet and had the distinctive celphalic horns. It was really incredible, although we packed up and left because it left us all a little shaken. It very easily could have been a shark! Rays don't eat fish or chicken, so it was probably a coincidence that it was there one minute after the traps were set. (Unless a predator chased it who was frenzied from the chicken?)

 

Here is an incredible video of rays LEAPING in Mexico.

 

How was your week? Let me know in the comments.

 

 

Defect Rate Humor

I can see the humor in this..

But next month I better get TRS back!

Ramblings & FREE Audiobooks

Clever Ad for a Virginia Beach yard sale,

found on Craigslist and brought to my

attention by reader and commenter extraordinaire Ree Cee

 

I rarely stop at yard sales anymore. Not enough bang for the buck - and while I know I am missing out on some items, there is an endless amount of stuff in the waste stream.  I'd much rather go somewhere like a thrift store, estate sale, church sale, or flea market where I can source a bunch at once.

 

I know most of us like to keep our ears busy while we clean, photograph and list. I recently found Loyal Books a free public domain of 7,000+ classic books on audio! I'm excited about finding this website, and hope that you can pass some hours listening to it too.

I added a new page to the top of the blog, Listen While You List - a compilation of some podcasts and radio shows that I listen to regularly. A new find is What I Wore When - a Glamour Magazine podcast, these are short but interesting interviews with public figures reminiscing about what they were wearing when...

I've had all kinds of time to find these new podcasts because eBay has been  S-L-O-W - I've been listing like crazy, and am up to 826 listings. Of the 50+ items I've listed this week, 40 of it was winter clothes, so those items are not selling (yet). I've been to the GWO frequently lately and I am finding LOTS of winter clothes as those are not selling at the Goodwill right now. I'm hoping that starting in Sept all these corduroys and leather jackets will fly out of my store. Maybe in the winter I'll find lots of summer clothes? I'm not a huge clothes seller - but I love classic GAP Sweaters, vintage jackets, and quality jeans.

Lamb's wool/Alpaca blend GAP Sweater

Paid $1 at the GWO

I've been so hungry for sales that I created a few sales this week that were big %s off. I even put all the items in my store that had 5+ watchers on sale for 30% - so far two of those items have sold.

I don't have any interesting sales to report. How are things going for you this week?

Mid-June Update

I did not post a weekly update earlier this week because I didn't have anything exciting to report. I listed like crazy, and my store had at the highest 780 items and is now down a few. 1000 is within an easy distance and my goal is to reach that number by the end of the month. These are some sales over the past 10 days or so.

 

Vintage JCPenny Helicopter Toddler Sweater

I got this sweater for $3 at Family Thrift

Sold for $24.99 to someone in Brooklyn who I imagine is very hip.

 

This silver plate set of serving utensils sold for best offer of $54

I paid $8 at Family Thrift - They have been listed for about a year

 

This vintage Naval Academy sweatshirt sold for $30 dollars

I got it at the GWO, so I probably paid $1.50

 

I got this switch plate at the GWO,

so I probably paid $1, as it's fairly heavy

Sold for $18

 

I love to listen to different podcasts while I work, and have been listening to Straight Talk with Ross regularly for a few months. (Contains explicit content).  It is hosted by Ross Mathews - "Ross the Intern" from Leno, also from E!s red carpet, and Chelsea Lately. So if you're looking for something new check it out:

 

If you're politically minded this episode with guest Meghan McCain might be a good place to start - or if you're a recovering N*SYNC fan you might like this (my personal favorite episode so far) with Lance Bass.

 

Sales have been "normal" lately, although I did had one no-sale day this week.

How is eBay life treating you? Have you found any new podcasts lately?