The auctions for items purchased during the twelfth week of the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday evening with 16 of the original 32 items listed selling for a total of $384.93 and a sell-through rate of only 50%. Two of the 32 items didn’t surive the week.

I ended the auction for the LeBlanc Noblet Paris wood clarinet when, in response to a question from an interested buyer, I found it did have a small crack in the wood. The description has been changed to reflect that crack and it has been re-listed this week. eBay ended the auction for the SPSS 13.0 Windows Student Version software, saying I was in violation of it’s VeRO policy.

Three additional items were sold Sunday evening. The other two Zippo Vargas lighters were sold via second change offers for $38.88 and $36.00. In addition, after the auctions closed, I received an offer of $35.00 for the Pen Sketches Of Nebraskans book that I accepted. These sales bring the eBay total for the week up to $495.80.

This weeks auctions were led by the 1998 limited edition Remington Wildlife pocket knife that sold for $101.11. Amazon sales accounted for an additional $469.26 in revenue this week from the sale of fifteen books. Amazon sales were led by three algebra textbooks that sold for $60+ each.

Here’s how things look to date:

Popularity: 26% [?]

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I’ve received several questions about auction management/listing services recently.

I’ve been using Inkfrog for some time now, but here are a lot of options available to sellers and I’ve only used a small number of them. I’d be interested to hear what you use and what you would recommend to others.

Do you use a full service auction management service? If so who do you use? If not, who do you use to create auction listings, image hosting, etc? What do you like and dislike about who you use?

Please share in the comment section of this post on the blog itself. No affiliate links in comments please - they will be deleted.

Photograph by Dominic Alves.

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Thursday, in a move that reinforces eBay’s Hopalong Cassidy complex toward Amazon and makes me wonder if those CareerBuilder television commercials may actually be filmed at eBay headquarters, eBay announced upcoming changes to Item Specifics in the Jewelry & Watches, Books, DVD & Movies, Music and Video Games categories.

In part, the announcement states:

“In particular media areas, we will introduce Condition values “Brand New”, “Like New”, “Very Good”, “Good” and “Acceptable” in place of the current values “New” and “Used”“

Does any of that sound familiar? If you sell on Amazon it should.

The affected categories will include fiction and non-fiction books, cookbooks, audio books, textbooks, children’s books, DVDs, VHS, and other video formats, video games, CDs, and cassettes.
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With the auctions that ended last Sunday the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge has reached it’s halfway point and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how this year’s Challenge compares to last year’s at this time. It’s also time to check on how this year’s Challenge is progressing toward my goals.

This year’s net profit of $5132.44 at the halfway point is higher than the $3785.21 at the same time last year. However, that increase is likely almost all attributable to the fact that I’m including my Amazon sales this year. Last year I didn’t include them. Amazon has accounted for $1783.59 in gross sales this year.

My actual sales from eBay seem to be very similar to last year. In fact, they are probably slightly less than last year.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

The auctions for items purchased during the eleventh week of the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday evening with 19 of the 27 items listed selling for a total of $366.07 and a sell-through rate of 70%. Amazon sales accounted for an additional $321.05 in revenue this week from the sale of twelve books.

Once again, there were no really exciting items sold this week. The highest priced item was the Pepsi-Cola advertising thermometer that sold for $46.95. During the same week I had two books that each sold for more than that on Amazon. When that happens, eBay didn’t exactly rip it up for the week.

For the third or fourth week in a row the garage sales in Grand Forks failed to produce anything really exciting. Probably the item for sale this week with the most potential is the Noblet clarinet I have listed. Two sales this past week did have nice selections of antiques but, in both cases, the prices the sellers wanted made it impossible to buy anything and expect to make a profit on it.

After 10 weeks of sales here’s how things look.

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Part of Grand Forks is undergoing a lot of street repair right now. A lot of streets are blocked off making getting around a challenge. One sale this morning was located on a short street that, due to the construction, was particularly difficult to get to.

An early start time along with an ad in the newspaper that would make any serious garage saler’s mouth water insured that all the die-hards were there early waiting for the garage door to go up. All except one that is. The ad mentioned books and one of Grand Forks’ serious book buyers was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, just as the garage door started going up our missing book buyer was spotted rounding a corner a block away on foot. After spending fifteen minutes trying to figure out how get through all the construction, he’d abandoned his car three blocks away and began walking.

The moral of the story - if you put the right words in your garage sale ad people will do just about anything to have a chance to buy what you have for sale.

The question of the story - everyone else was able to find a way to drive right up to the sale. Why couldn’t he? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he’s a college professor in the real world.

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In her most recent Lynn Dralle wrote about having $719.55 in eBay store sales in approximately a seventeen hour period earlier this month. While I haven’t seen that amount in sales, over the last one to two weeks I have seen more than a 600% increase in the number of sales made through my eBay stores.

Prior to July my eBay store regularly generated 2 to 3 sales per week. Over the last twelve days that number has jumped to 2 to three items a day. Sometimes more.

The only change I’ve made is adding a “Make An Offer” button to some of the items that have been in the store for a long period of time. But, those aren’t the items that are generating most of the sales. Only about 20% of the increase is sales that I’ve accepted offers on. The vast majority of buyers are paying full price.

Has eBay recently made a change in the way store items are shown in searches and I missed the announcement of it? Are any readers seeing a marked increase in their store sales since the first of the month?

Photograph by Kevin Dooley.

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The auctions for items purchased during the tenth week of the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday evening with 9 of the 14 items listed selling for a total of $365.10 and a sell-through rate of 62%. Amazon sales accounted for an additional $125.98 in revenue this week.

No one item really stood out this week, but the Hartz DeLuxe keywind coffee can for $83.00, the complete set of Time Life Civil War books for $90.77, and the partial set of children’s ValueTales books for $76.00 were the three best selling items.

This was another not very exciting week of garage sales in Grand Forks but I was able to buy some nice Stampin’ Up sets at one sale for $2.00 each. The same sale produced two Creative Memories scrap booking albums and a Creative Memories Tote Mate. I also bought several good books for Amazon at three different sales. Without the items from those four sales, this would have been another disappointing week.

Here’s how things look after the eleventh week of this years challenge.

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The auctions purchased in the ninth week of the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday evening with 23 of the 24 items listed selling for a total of $935.78 and a sell-through rate of 96%. Amazon sales accounted for another $118.42.

The majority of the money came from the partial set of Imperial Sterling flatware in the Joan Of Arc pattern. I broke the set down into fourteen different auctions. All fourteen sold for a total of $706.69. Not bad for a $20 investment.

Last weekend was the long 4th of July weekend and the garage sales in Grand Forks were nearly non-existent. For the four days from Wednesday to Saturday there were less than 10 sales. That means the number of qualifying items on eBay this week is pretty small with 14 items listed and 3 of those are re-lists from previous weeks.

Here’s how things look after Sunday’s auctions ended.

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The auctions purchased during the eighth week of the 2008 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday evening with 26 items selling for a total of $701.34 and a sell-through rate of 79%. Amazon sales accounted for another $139.91.

The highest priced item for the week was Alice Starmore’s Pacific Coast Highway (280239098308) which brought $103.50. This was one of three knitting books I had on eBay this week. The other two also sold - “Knitting In The Nordic Tradition” (280239098502) selling for $40.20 and “…And A Time To Knit Stockings” (280239098700) selling for $16.49.

The surprise of the week was a book titled “American Bottles And Flasks & Their Ancestry” (280239098293) that sold for $63.56. This was between two and three times what other examples of the same book had brought on eBay over the last three months.

Here’s how things look after last week’s auctions ended.

Popularity: 21% [?]