Week sixteen of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge ended Sunday evening with thirty-four of the fifty-three items listed selling fora total of $856.46. The sell-through rate was 65%.

Similar to last week, the sell-through rate for re-listed items was 45% this week.

Last week I did some of my garage saling in a different area. I had a family function in Duluth, MN on Saturday, so I drove to Duluth late Friday afternoon and spent a couple of hours going to a few garage sales in Duluth Saturday morning.

There certainly didn’t seem to be any shortage of sales but I didn’t make it to that many because I was pretty much flying blind as far as knowing what streets were where and every sale required time spent with a map I had figuring out how to get to the next sale on my list.

I concentrated on what was an older, more affluent, area of the city hoping to snag something really good. It didn’t happen, but I did pick up a few things that don’t often show up back in Grand Forks.

After sixteen weeks of the Challenge, here’s how things look:

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Popularity: 13% [?]

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Apparently the no insertion fee promotion eBay held on August 15th was a success in eBay’s eyes because they are doing it again. The only difference is that this one will last from August 29 to September 30.

Similar to the previous promotion, you must start your item at $9.99 or less and you must pay $.35 for the gallery photo option. They have also added in some other features such as a 25% reduction in listing fees if your starting bid is more than $10.00 or more. And of course there are the normal exclusions, etc.

If interested, you can read all about it here.

Popularity: 7% [?]

It’s Tuesday which means it’s time for ‘Weekly Winners.’

This is your chance to do share with other readers some of the items you sold on eBay last week and do a little bragging in the process. By contributing you will also be helping others broaden the scope of what they can be looking for when they are out on the hunt.

These don’t have to be three or four-figure, mega-buck, items. Did you sell something for $20 or $30 that you paid one or two dollars for? These are the week-to-week, bread and butter items, everyone needs. I encourage you to share them with other readers.

The guidelines remain the same as before.

• Use the comment section of each week’s Weekly Winners post to tell everyone about your winners.
• Please limit yourself to four items a week.
• I encourage you to include a link to the completed auction (if you don’t know how to do this, see below).
• Share some information about the item with everyone - what it is, where you got it, what you paid for it, what it sold for, etc. Remember, links to closed auctions disappear after a few months, so the more you share regarding price, condition, item description, etc., the more useful your information will be to others once eBay deletes the item from their database.

To insert a hyperlink to your eBay auction simply insert the following code (with your auction URL and item name) where ever you want it in the comment box.

<a href=”CUT AND PASTE THE URL TO YOUR AUCTION HERE”>INSERT DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ITEM (i.e. 53 Dr. Suess Books)</a>

Popularity: 28% [?]

Tom Murphy of the PGA-Auctiions blog has recently developed a serious interest in ephemera and has been sharing his exploration of the subject with his readers for the last week or two.

Today in Ephemera Related Websites, Tom includes links to three sites that will be of interest to sellers interested in exploring the broad field of ephemera.

Selling ephemera on eBay can be hugely profitable, but because ephemera includes such a huge range of different material, it can also be pretty daunting to someone interested in learning more about the various kinds of ephemera that regularly sell well on eBay. If this is an area that interests you, I recommend you spend some time reading all of Tom’s recent posts about the subject.

Here are a few to get you started:

• Ephemera Definition
• Ephemera anyone??
• Ephemera Collecting - A Growing Field, Hard to Define
• Postcards are Ephemera too…

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Week fifteen of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge ended Sunday evening with eighteen of the thirty-three listed items selling for a sell through rate of only 55%. Total sales were $356.60.

Of the eleven items that were re-listed from previous weeks, five sold for a re-list sell through rate of 45%. These five items were part of the twenty new items listed the previous week, and when combined with the eleven that sold the first week, the sell through rate for the twenty items works out to 80%.

Since an 80% to 90% overall sell through rate is about what I would expect from items purchased at garage sales, the reason why the Challenge is lagging behind where it should be to reach my goal of $10,000 isn’t that the items I’m buying aren’t doing well as much as it is that there just aren’t the number of sales this year that there have been in last year.

Here’s how things look after fifteen weeks.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

It’s Tuesday which means it’s time for ‘Weekly Winners.’

Once again, the idea is to provide readers a venue to do a little bragging by sharing their eBay triumphs from the previous week. Hopefully, at the same time, others will be able to pick up some ideas for new things to keep their eyes open for.

These don’t have to be three or four-figure, mega-buck, items. Did you sell something for $20 or $30 that you paid one or two dollars for? These are the week-to-week, bread and butter items, everyone needs. I encourage you to share them with other readers.

The guidelines are:

• Use the comment section of each week’s Weekly Winners post to tell everyone about your winners.
• Please limit yourself to four items a week.
• I encourage you to include a link to the completed auction (if you don’t know how to do this, see below).
• Share some information about the item with everyone - what it is, where you got it, what you paid for it, what it sold for, etc. Remember, links to closed auctions disappear after a few months, so the more you share regarding price, condition, item description, etc., the more useful your information will be to others once eBay deletes the item from their database.

To insert a hyperlink to your eBay auction simply insert the following code (with your auction URL and item name) where ever you want it in the comment box.

<a href=”CUT AND PASTE THE URL TO YOUR AUCTION HERE”>INSERT DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ITEM (i.e. 53 Dr. Suess Books)</a>

Popularity: 28% [?]

At times readers can add a great deal of value to various posts through the comments they leave. Such is the case with a comment made by Lisa to Saturday’s P. Buckley Moss Cross Stitch Pattern Booklets post.

Since I feel the information Lisa provided is valuable, and I’m not sure how many readers check comments over time, I am going to share with you part of what she said.

“Another hint on cross stitch are Prairie Schooler patterns. Even for the ones still in print if you can get them for .25 or .50 each buy. The collectible ones go for 50.00 plus. And anything Charlie Brown from the 80’s. Just Cross Stitch Christmas ornament collections 1997-1999 can bring upward of 75.00 each. And Judith Kirby houses in cross stitch can generally do very well also.”

Just as it is with P. Buckley Moss patterns, not all patterns in the categories Lisa mentioned sell well individually. But enough do to make it worth your while to picked them up when you see them for a few cents each. And, as Lisa went on to say….

“Like you say whatever isn’t highly sought after, do very well in lots.”

Here are links to completed sales for the patterns Lisa mentions to give you some idea of what they can bring. These are sorted ‘highest price first’ so you can see what brought the most money in the last two weeks.

Prairie Schooler patterns

Judith Kirby houses

Early Charlie Brown

Just Cross Stitch Christmas ornaments

Thank you for greatly adding to the discussion Lisa.

Popularity: 12% [?]

One of the things I bought this morning at a garage sale was a group of nineteen counted cross-stitch pattern booklets. Each is based on one of P. Buckley Moss’s popular paintings.

P. Buckley Moss has developed a large following for her artwork, much of which depicts the people and landscapes of the Amish community. Because of her popularity, cross-stitch patterns based upon her work have become popular also.

Two or three years ago the nineteen patterns I purchased would have brought between $20 and $40 each. As often happens though, as more came to the market prices have declined. Today only the hardest to find patterns still command those prices.

My group doesn’t contain any of the difficult to find ones, but offered as a lot, they should still bring a fairly nice price.

Often, when found, these patterns can be picked up for $.25 or $.50 each and if you have the chance to buy several of them at once, they are probably worth picking up.

Popularity: 15% [?]

For several years disgruntled sellers have been expounding on the future of eBay. Their forecasts have, for the most part, been somewhat gloomy. I’ve never paid much attention to them, viewing their pontificating as nothing more than the babble of a group of people who probably weren’t going to be successful on eBay anyway.

But within the last months a few things have happened that, when combined, have caused me to give some thought to the direction eBay is headed and to ask - what is the future of eBay? Will it be around five or ten years from now?

The first was a stop on the way home from a fishing trip at a fair-sized flea market that I hadn’t visited in more than two years. The other things were included in several different eBay related newsletters I received over the last couple months.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

Week fourteen of The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge ended Sunday evening with twelve of the twenty-two listed items selling for a sell through rate of only 55%. Total sales were $379.57.

Actually, only eleven items sold via the auction format. After the auction ended, the winner of the book ‘Across The Wheatgrass’ wrote and asked if he could also buy ‘Your Neighbor’s Story’, which hadn’t sold, for the opening bid of $9.99. Since the sale was the result of the auction listing, I’ve included it in the total sales for the week.

Similar to the last few weeks, the number of garage sales this last week remained low for this time of year compared to previous years. As a result, while there are thirty-three Challenge items currently on eBay, only twenty-two of them are fresh items, with the remaining eleven being re-lists.

Here’s how things look after fourteen weeks.

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Popularity: 14% [?]