I’ve been talking on and off with one of the regular readers of The Auction Rebel over the last couple months about researching small antique/collectible sub-niches on eBay. During the course of our conversations he has sent me the user IDs of a few eBay sellers who are doing some different things and asking what I think of their approach.
For a number of reasons, two of the user IDs he directed me to caught my attention and I’ve been looking more closely at what they are doing, and how they are doing it.
While their individual approaches are slightly different, basically what they are both doing is buying vintage magazines, dismantling them, and selling the individual advertisements, articles, stories, and illustrations individually. While selling individual full page ads from magazines is nothing new and there are many people doing it, selling the articles, stories, and illustrations is an approach not often seen. It’s also one that some of you may be interested in exploring.
Both sellers are listing the majority of their items in an eBay store, and then using a small number of auctions each week to drive traffic their stores. You can take a look at each of their stores and see what they are doing - History-Bytes and Steven and Margie’s Vintage Ads.
The primary difference between the two is that History-Bytes deals almost exclusively with items from the late 1890s into the early 1900s, while most of Steven and Magie’s Vintage Ads offerings begin in the 1940s and extend into the 1960s and 1970s. Of the two, I think History-Bytes is the more interesting.
Here’s why I think what they are doing has potential, particularly with turn of the century magazines:
- There are a good-sized number of these magazines, missing their covers, floating around in antique shops and flea markets. They also show up frequently at estate auction sales. Since they are missing their covers, they have no value to collectors. When seen in shops or at flea markets, they can often be purchased for $5 or less. They would be even cheaper buying them in bulk at estate auction sales’
- On average, one magazine would provide between eight to as many as 15 or more individual articles, ads, and illustrations to sell. That means, that over time, an investment of $5 or less has the potential of providing $100 or more in sales. That’s a better return on investment than most people selling on eBay ever see.
- A large number of individual items can be stored in very little space.
- Packing and shipping each item would be quick and easy. In fact, since shipping for most items would be less than $1, you could very easily bump your asking price by a dollar or two, and offer free shipping on everything.
- Although you could sell the ads, by concentrating on the articles, stories, and illustrations from the magazine you would have very little competition.
Are there potential draw-backs to this kind of business model? For some people there would be.
- While the articles would cover a wide range of interests, individually they wouldn’t have a large number of people looking for them. This means they may have to be re-listed a few times before they sell. However, in an eBay store, even if many of them took as long as a year to sell, you would have less than $1 in listing fees tied up in each individual item. Still plenty of room to get a good return on your investment in each magazine.
- For the same reason, you would need a large number of individual articles listed before you could expect steady sales to come in each week or month. Due to this, there would be some time invested in scanning and listing that many items. However, by using the same format for each listing, you should be able to sit down and list a large number of items in an hour. Or you could pay one of your children or grandchildren $5 to list them for you and still come out way ahead per magazine. Additionally, once an article was listed, as long a the “until canceled” option was used, there would be little maintenance involved until it sold.
- There would be a time investment involved in finding the magazines. How near you were to antique stores and flea markets would also be a factor. However, if you are already visiting these places looking for inventory, neither of these would be a big factor.
What could you make a month from this business model? Based upon the research I’ve done on each of these two sellers, with a little work, I don’t think $500 to $1000 a month would be an unrealistic expectation after six months. It could be quite a bit more than that if someone really applied themselves to it. It wouldn’t be that much the first few months because they would be building their inventory, but after six months their inventory should be high enough to produce decent results.
As I said, this wouldn’t be for everyone. But, if you are looking for an eBay business model that will provide between $500 to $1000 a month within the next half year, it may be something you should look into.
I’ve decided I’m going to try it out in my eBay store and will be talking about my results over the next few months.
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February 26th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Gary,
Very interesting business model, that’s for sure!!
However I did a little research on History-Bytes sales using the last 30 day period and they have/had listed 1084 items and sold 57 with gross sales of $790
If I had to list that many items to make $725 it wouldn’t be worth the effort in my opinion. How do you post that many listings and have time for anything else??
However, I’m not knocking the success of another eBay seller, Good for them!!
It just shows what you and i already know…MAGAZINES ARE GOLD!!
February 27th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Stephen,
Actually, between their store and auctions, they have more than 6000 items listed. But they aren’t actually listing anywhere near that many each month. They’ve been doing this for a long time, and their inventory has built up over that time. Once they list an item, it automatically re-lists without them having to do anything unless they want to adjust the price on an item.
I’ve been watching them for a while and what they sell can vary quite a bit from month to month. Some months they average close to $100 a day. In others, their average dips down to less than $20 a day.
I purposely didn’t talk about the number of items they have listed, or what their monthly sales are, in the article because they have been doing it for so long that it wouldn’t paint a true picture for someone who might consider trying this approach. As I’d said, it would be a few months before anyone could expect this to begin bringing any regular steady income.
I’m going to play with it and see what happens. As far as listing the items is concerned, there will be some time involved, but I plan on paying my two 15 year old granddaughters $5 or $6 an hour to do the bulk of it.
Gary
February 28th, 2007 at 2:29 am
Gotcha!!
That makes sense, I can see where it would work!!
Maybe I can get my son motivated to spend time listing with a 50-50 split?? It does seem like a cheap way of creating an additional income stream!!
You’ve got me thinking outside the box even more now!!!
March 4th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Hello Gary…this is Margie of Steve and Margie’s Vintage Ads. First let me thank you for mentioning us in your blog…it is nice to know that people are out there looking at what we are doing. I would like to make one small correction - more than 75% of our items are pre-1930, with the remainder a “niche within a niche” for the most part. We have been very fortunate to find an item and an approach that works well for us and for our many and varied customer. It’s great to connect with a writer’s great grandson, or the daughter of someone in a very difficult-to-find ad, or to meet the needs of someone working on a book, working on their doctoral thesis, creating a museum exhibit and on and on and on. The thing that we have found that is most important - no matter the size of the sale or the temperament of the customer is to be upright and honest. Offer a consistently high quality product and an accurate description of it…and offer a fair shipping rate!!! Whether you add the shipping into your selling price or add on at the end of the price - be fair. Steven and I work together from purchasing of items - and there is a ton and a half of it out there, to selection of what to sell, to scanning and writing stores and auctions, to shipping. My best advice is if you are going to work with someone, make sure it someone you can work with. Kids, grandkids, spouse, best friend, whomever - make sure you each have something to offer to the job and trust that person’s instinct. You get bogged down by yourself when you start handling tens of thousands of pieces of paper - and it’s not fun any longer. When we lose track of something, (it happens once in a while) we’re up front about it - with a total refund and a promise to ship the item anyway when we do find it - all for free. The other truly great thing about what we do is that no matter how many people are out there doing it along with us, we are almost all certainly offering a different product. Our concentration may be completely different from someone else’s. Our reputation based on feedback, return sales, and word-of-mouth advertsing speak for the uniqueness of our product and the satisfaction experienced by our customers. It’s a darned big world out there - and interests are varied. Take advantage of that - and offer what you know and enjoy the most. People will know that when they buy from you. Good luck and good selling.
Margie Morawiec
Steve and Margie’s Vintage Ads
March 7th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Margie,
Thank you for explaining in some detail who your customers are and how you and your husband operate your business.
I could see that it was working for you folks, but just wasn’t sure how you were doing it.
Thanks again,
Gary