Can your attitude about money create lengthy detours, or even road blocks, on your road to success on eBay?
Two separate conversations I had with friends over the weekend got me thinking about how peoples attitudes toward money and financial events can dramatically affect how successful their eBay. and other Internet endeavors, will be.
The first was a phone call Friday evening from someone I became friends with shortly after I began dealing in antiques more than twenty-five years ago. He’s a long-time collector of just about anything from the Arts & Crafts era, and he called just to check if I’d found anything really good lately.
During the course of our conversation we started talking about several flea markets and antique shows in Minnesota that have always proved fruitful for each of us - for him to add to his collection and for me to buy items for resale. One of these is Gold Rush Days held in Rochester/Oronoco which is roughly an eight-hundred mile round trip from Grand Forks.
He hasn’t missed this show in all the years I’ve known him, but he told me he had decided he wasn’t going to go this year. When I asked why, his response was, “With gas at $3.20 a gallon, I just don’t see it being worthwhile.”
As we talked more it became clear that our views on the cost of the trip differed considerably. He saw the trip costing him about $130 for gas. I saw it as costing me about $40 more than it did last year.
The second conversation was Saturday morning at a garage sale a retired gentleman and his wife were having. I met him about two years ago, shortly after they moved to Grand Forks. He sells books on Amazon that he buys at local garage sales and thrift shops.
He asked if I’d found any good books that morning and I mentioned a couple titles I had bought. One of them was a little weird and he asked what made me buy it. I said, “it was priced at a quarter and ScoutPal showed it should bring $40 to $45 on Amazon.”
His responded with, “I’d love to be able to get that, but I can’t justify the $15 a month expense.” He’s been saying the same thing for the last two years. Again, it’s clear our views on a service that costs $15 a month differ completely. He views it as an additional monthly expense he isn’t sure he can afford. I see it as an investment I make each month that easily gives me a two to three thousand percent return on my investment month after month.
How do you view the costs of doing business on eBay or anywhere else?
Do you look at them as roadblocks, or just as small bumps in the road? Do you see them as expenses, or as investments in your business? Will you look at the next eBay fee increase as costing you $.45 to list each item, or as a nickel increase in doing business?
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July 17th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Gary,
I agree with you!!
All our business expenses are tax deductions at the end of the year they are just the cost of doing business.
And like you pointed out, the return on the investment is WELL worth it!!
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am
Gary I think I can see a distinction between the two ’sellers’
Your Arts And Crafts interested friend strikes me more as a collector than as a true seller. In the case of increased prices for gas, every penny spent on necessities is that much less available for a discretionary purchase. So your collector may have been looking at his total costs to attend the show versus what he could spend there and decided quite logically that for him it wasn’t worth it.
Also if your Arts And Crafts collecting friend is getting to be a certain age (or older), he may be divesting himself of collectibles more than acquiring new ones. Some folks do this voluntarily and some by necessity (like to either have less stuff to move into a smaller more managable home or to pay for medical expenses). So he doesn’t strike me as “being blocked”.
The gentleman who is selling books on Amazon however strikes me as someone who is more of a seller than a collector. Like you I tend to agree that spending the $15 per month for ScoutPal could be more helpful than hurtful and may in fact be costing his business money. So unless he’s happy with hobbyist level money, I would tend to agree that he is blocking potential business growth.
Interesting post.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:43 pm
S.E.,
Actually, my Arts and Crafts friend is both a very serious collector and a seller.
For years, he’s been buying quality pieces of Arts and Crafts furniture, pottery, linen, and metalwork in the ND, MN, WI, SD, and IA areas. He sells quite a bit of pottery each year at the American Art Pottery Convention each year. However, most of it stays in the warehouse until he has a semi-load and it then gets shipped out east to Dave Rago Auctions or one of a couple other large auction houses out there.
Over the years his approach has made him a lot of money. That’s why I was surprised by his reasoning for not going.
By the way, in the end, he changed his mind and went. Two really nice pieces of Grueby and one Saturday Evening Girls piece put a smile on his face and, I think, made him forget about the cost of the gas for the trip.
Gary
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Well I’m glad your Arts & Crafts collector friend did finally decide to go. And that he found three good pieces to justify the trip.
Still though I’ll bet back in the 80s and early 90s he could have bought a lot more quality pieces for lower prices (Arts & Crafts didn’t really take off nationally and in a mainstream sort of way until later in the 1990s…people got interested in the vintage turn of the century houses made in that style, houses which are much plainer than the Victorian homes and furnishings which dominated the 1980s, and if you were restoring a Craftsman type home to its original state, you wanted to buy the right furnishings and pottery etc). That coupled with the fact that gas has been high compared to what it was back before Arts & Crafts got popular (I lived in Texas during part of that time, right after the bottom dropped out of the oil & gas market worldwide and believe me the state was hurting with gas in the $10-$20 per barrel range) made it cheaper and more fun to go to collector shows.
For those who are unfamiliar with Dave Rago, he’s David Rago of David Rago Auctions and an Arts & Crafts expert who appraises pieces on the US version of The Antiques Roadshow. Rago really knows his stuff and has done a lot to popularize Arts and Crafts objects in the USA.