Based upon last week’s poll, the majority of readers who voted would prefer to see another garage sale challenge.

Based on those results, I started thinking about whether this summer’s challenge should mirror last year’s, or if some changes might make it more interesting.

One of the changes I thought of was the possibility of having interested readers be able to set their own challenge and share their progress and final results with everyone on the blog.

That leads to a second question. If I can figure out some way to easily share your results with other readers,

Photograph by A. www.viajar24h.com.

Popularity: 28% [?]

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One year ago on The Auction Rebel I was just wrapping up the final $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge and was starting to make plans for The $10,000 Garage Sale eBay Challenge that began in May.

I hadn’t given much thought to doing another Challenge this summer, but several readers have written and inquired if there would be one this summer, but if enough readers would like to see something similar over the next few months, I’ll consider it.

To gauge the level of interest I’ve set up a simple poll and encourage everyone to voice your opinions.

Photograph by Indy Charlie.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I was a bit surprised that Midwinter Stonehenge Wild Oats pattern dinnerware I had on eBay didn’t do that well. Of the four auctions, only the salt and pepper set sold and that only for the starting bid of $9.99. I had thought both the coffee pot and the 4 plates would sell for sure, which just goes to show how smart I am.

The three unsold listings have been re-listed and are once again live and will end on this coming Sunday evening.

Overall, a total of eleven of the sixteen listings sold for a total of $518.58.

The best money makers were the two Zenith Trans-Oceanic radios that I paid $25 each for. The sold for $203.50 and $136.27. They were followed by the Canadian Pacific Railway plate which sold to someone in Canada for $78.77.
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Popularity: 31% [?]

It appears that eBay rolled out their previously announced Seller Dashboard sometime last weekend. The current version, dubbed by some as ‘Seller LIte’ doesn’t contain all the information that will eventually be included, but it does allow sellers to see what their Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) is over the last 30 day period of time.

For most sellers the portion of Seller Dashboard that will draw the most attention is Detailed Seller Ratings sectiion. The figures provided in this section are a 30-day average that is updated on a dialy basis.

Here’s what the currently functioning portion of Seller Dashboard looks like for my seller ID Paperpleasures46.

And a closeup of the DSR portion.

I don’t know if we will see it when the full version of Seller Dashboard is rolled out, but I think one change many sellers would appreciate is if the actual DSRs were displayed to two decimal points rather than only one as they re now.

While a rating of 4.87 might not cause much concern, if it dropped to 4.82 a seller could take steps to improve it before it dropped into the 4.7x range and possibly affected discounts and where their auctions appeared in ‘Best Match’.

I’m not going to go into a lot more about Seller Dashboard but for readers who would like more detail, Scott Wingo’s post eBay Releases Seller Dashboard (lite) For Tracking Those DSRs…. goes into quite a bit more detail.

I found his analogy of DSRs to the Bell Curve many teachers use for grading to be interesting and probably right on.

If you don’t know how to find your own Seller Dashboard just sign into eBay and go to My eBay. You will find ‘Seller Dashboard’ under ‘My Account’ in the left-hand sidebar.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Pyrex glassware can still be found at garage sales around the country for reasonable prices. With the garage sale season beginning soon, here are some links to recent eBay auctions for various kinds of Pyrex products to give readers an idea of what to watch for.

1. An early set of four nesting colored mixing bowls still in their original box sold for a Best Offer Price of $300. This set reached this price because it was Mint in it’s original box and because it was manufactured before Pyrex began marketing it as the 400 series.

2. Another set of four nested colored mixing bowls still in their original box sold for $293.88 with eleven bids. This is a later set manufactured after Pyrex began designating this set the 400 series.

3. A 32 piece set of Amber Visions cook ware sold for $285.00. Visions cookware isn’t actually Pyrex, but it was made by Corning as is Pyrex. Probably 50% or more of the Visions cook ware items on eBay have the word Pyrex in their headline, so I’m including this and one other example in this list.

4. A set of 4 pink nesting mixing bowls sold for $260.00 with 37 bids. Described as in very good used condition with some light scratches. The 400 series of Pyrex bowls are always a good seller and pink is the color everyone wants.

5. A set of four Cinderella gold butterprint bowls in their original box sold for $228.59 with 18 bidders. All Cinderella bowls (recognizable by the two pour-spout handles) are becoming more and more difficult to find.

6. An early Pyrex blue Flameware coffee pot sold for $152.50 with 17 bids. Clear Pyrex items can be a sleeper at sales. Most dealers think colors when someone mentions Pyrex, but many of their early clear glass pieces are eagerly sought by collectors also.

7. Another Visions piece, a 3.5 quart cranberry Visions dutch oven sold for $150.00 with 14 bids. Most individual pieces of Visions cook ware don’t bring much on eBay, but these large dutch ovens almost always bring nice prices.

8. An 8 piece pink refrigerator set in original box sold for $140.27 with 18 bidders.

9. A 1935 Silex coffee maker sold for $135.37 with 15 bids. While Silex was an independent company, during the 1940s and 1950s the glass parts of their coffee makers were made by Pyrex and are usually marked as such on the bottom of the glass. Several other manufactures such as General Electric, Universal Electric, and Cafex used glass parts made by Pyrex in their coffee makers. Die hards that they are, many Pyrex collectors avidly seek out these coffee makers for their collections.

10. A nice Moon Deco 2.5 quart casserole sold for a Best Offer of $130.00. I believe these were only manufactured for one or two years and they are difficult to find.

11. A 30 piece set of Pyrex turquoise banded dishes sold for $123.76 with 7 bids. Pyrex isn’t just about bowls. Don’t forget to watch for dinnerware at garage sales and flea markets. They made some beautiful dinnerware.

12. A nice set of four Cinderella bowls in the Friendship/Love pattern sold for $117.49 with 19 bids. Not all Pyrex four bowl sets had matching patterns. They also sold mixed sets similar to this one.

13. This set of four Cinderella bowls in the Amish Butterprint pattern sold for $113.57 with 19 bids. Not only did Pyrex sell mixed sets like the one above, but they also sold two color sets with the design and background colors reversed on every other size.

14. Pyrex didn’t always sell their cookware in sets of four as seen in this auction for three pink and white Gooseberry casseroles with covers. This set sold for $108.51 with 18 bids.

15. This Armstrong Perc-O-Toaster from the 1930’s is another example of ‘you can find Pyrex glass in the strangest places’. I don’t know if most of the bids came from vintage coffee maker collectors, vintage toaster collectors, or Pyrex collectors, but if you are lucky enough to find one, what difference does it make? It brought $104.72 with 7 bids.

16. This Amish Butterprint casserole with lid shows that you don’t need complete sets to get good prices. The pink and white color combination is almost always a winner. The casserole brought $103.50 with 9 bids.

17. Pyrex didn’t just make have mom on their mind when they made bakeware as this early children’s baking set shows. More than likely not complete, but it still brought $100.00 with 10 bids.

18. When mom wanted to make sure dad and the kids drank their orange juice in the morning she could serve it in this Pyrex juice set from the 1950s. Pyrex made juice sets in several designs. This one sold for a BIN of $99.99. Notice the word EAMES in the headline - a classic example of keyword spamming.

19. Pyrex made these polka dot mixing bowls in four sizes and various colors. Green is not one of the more popular colors but it still brought $45.89 because of it’s large 4-quart size. Complete 4 bowl sets with dots are somewhat hard to find and would sell well.

This Pyrex pattern identification guide may prove helpful when determining exactly what pattern pieces you buy are.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Tomorrow at 10am I will be leaving on my family’s annual trek to the Western Collegiate Hockey Association”s (WCHA) Final Five hockey tournament held at the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the course of the next three days we will watch five games between some of the best college hockey teams in the country.

This will be the beginning of nearly a month in which eBay takes a back seat to the WCHA Final Five and then the NCAA tournament ending in what will hopefully be the University Of North Dakota Fighting Sioux’s eighth National Championship at the NCAA Final Four at the Pepsi Center in Denver.

The hockey puck is essential to the game of hockey. And, like so many other seemingly mundane things, there is a hungry group of collectors out there looking for the special puck to add to their collection.
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Popularity: 34% [?]

Walk into the book section of any thrift store and what is most likely genre of book you find? If your area of the country is anything like mine, it is paperback romance novel. The same holds true for other common hunting grounds for the eBay seller such as garage/yard sales along with Friends Of The Library, AAUW, and other book sales.

Wherever you find books, you are likely to find that the paperback romance genre makes up a large percentage of the books you find.

They are completely ignored by 99.9% or more of book sellers and eBay sellers. At most sales, the people you see hovering over these paperbacks are almost entirely women and are avid readers who devour them at an alarming rate.

The fact that there is such an abundance of these mass market paperback romances should tell us something. In fact, each year, over fifty percent of all paperback sales in the United States are romance novels. People are buying and reading them in large numbers. And, if people are buying them, there should be some way that we, as eBay sellers, can exploit this niche and make money from it.

Fortunately, there is but most sellers haven’t yet learned how to go about. That’s fine, because it means that with just a little bit of knowledge you can take advantage of this huge paperback genre while having little or no competition no matter where you live.

This 11 page special report looks at five different ways you can market these mass market paperback romances on eBay to help insure your auctions get bids and to maximize your profits.

You can purchase The Auction Rebel Guide To Romance Mass Market Paperbacks for $10.00 through the button below.

Photograph by Jim Winstead.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Here are the links to the eBay auctions for the Midwinter Stonehenge Wild Oats pattern dinnerware I bought last week after reading about the pattern in Lynn Dralle’s newsletter.

I’ve also included links to the other eBay auctions I have running this week, along with where I got each item and what I paid for them.

The fifteen pieces of Midwinter Stonehenge dinnerware were split up into four auctions - the coffee pot, the salt and pepper set, four cups and saucers, and four salad/bread plates. I paid $5.00 for all fifteen pieces at our local Boys Ranch thrift store.

I I have twelve other auctions running this week which are:

A book titled Isabel Bloom: The Artist And Her Legacy. I paid $.50 for this at a local thrift store.

A 1996 Dayton Hudson Marshall Fields Santa Bear mug. Another thrift shop purchase for $.10.
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Popularity: 31% [?]

Yesterday Lynn Dralle’s latest newsletter arrived in my email box. One of her purchases that she wrote about was several pieces of Midwinter Stonehenge Wild Oats dinnerware she had purchased at a thrift shop.

Prior to yesterday, I’d never heard of Midwinter Stonehenge dinnerware, but this morning at the Dakota Boy’s Ranch thrift shop I found myself face to face with 15 pieces of it. A coffee pot, salt & pepper shakers, four cups & saucers, and four salad/bread plates.

I bought all 15 pieces for $5.00 and they will go live on eBay this coming Sunday evening. This is the second time in the last month I’ve bought something I knew nothing about until reading about it in Lynn’s newsletter. The first purchase was six Illy coffee cups & saucers. They bought me a net profit of about $200.

I don’t believe these will be that profitable, but it will be interesting to see where they end at. Once they are live, I’ll provide links to the auctions so readers can follow them if they wish.

Popularity: 37% [?]

A short time ago in A Trip To The Thrift Stores I described one of the local stores as pricing their books pretty high and as a result their turnover was very slow Because of this nearly all the people in town looking for books had stopped going there.

Just a few days after writing that I made another visit to that thrift store around 11:00 in the morning. When I walked into their book room the shelves were nearly empty. As I was leaving I asked the woman behind the counter what happened to all the books.

Her response was that most of the books that were on the shelves had been there for more than a year and they were getting rid of them and putting new ones out. I said the reason they had been their that long was because they were priced too high. She told me she knew that and when new ones were put out they would be cheaper.

At 3:30 that afternoon I went back to find the same woman pulling books out of boxes and putting them on the shelves which were now about half full. I started building a pile of books. Most trade soft covers were priced at $.75. Mass market paperbacks were $.50. Hardcovers were mostly in the $1 to $2 range. About an hour later, when I left, I’d spent a little over $80 for several boxes of books.

The following day I went back again and the shelves were now full. This time my purchases came to a little over $65. When I paid for them the woman who had been shelving books the day before was once again behind the counter. We started talking and in the course of the conversation she told me they had boxes of books in storage that had dates on them showing they had been donated as long as three years ago. She also asked what kind of books I was interested in and gave her a general Idea.

I’ve been back every day since and each day the holes I left on the shelves the day before are filled. Most days there are also one or two boxes behind the counter containing books pertaining to the subjects I had told her I was interested in for me to look through. I’ve walked out of there each day with several good books, although nowhere near the number I bought the first two days.

The majority of them end up on Amazon and I’ve already sold enough have made a considerable profit above what I’ve spent so far.

Eventually one of the other book buyers in town will walk in there and the word will get around that it is now a good place to buy books. But until that time, I’m enjoying my time there and buying good inventory.

Some might say I got extremely lucky, but I prefer to think of it as a case of being persistent enough to keep putting myself in a place where good books had a chance to find me, even if it took quite a while before they did.

How persistent are you in your search for inventory for eBay? Have you given up on local shops or stores that never seem to pay off? They never will if you give up too early and stop checking fairly often.

Photograph by Greg Hickman.

Popularity: 29% [?]