The fifth week’s auction ended Sunday night with 24 of the 35 qualifying items selling for a total of $535.45 and a sell-through rate of 69%. I don’t remember my reasoning, but I put a BIN of $24.99 on one of the items and that sold within 24 hours for the BIN price. Amazon sales accounted for an additional $110.73.

Most things this week ended pretty close to where I’d expected them to except for the premiere issue of Domino magazine which could easily have brought another $40 to $60. Overall though, a few other items did a little better than expected so it pretty much washed out.

After the fifth week of the Challenge here’s how things look:

I don’t have any auctions running this week because I’m leaving for a week’s fishing in Canada on the 13th. Purchase from last week and this week will go live on eBay on the 14th and end on the 21st after I get back.

Popularity: 64% [?]

Whether you realize it or not, at one time or another you have likely been exposed to a plastic canvas Kleenex box cover. They can be found in millions of homes across the country. And, while those Kleenex box covers may never be big sellers on eBay, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world addicted to the plastic canvas craft.

And, these crafters aren’t making just tissue box covers. They are stitching away on purses, doll houses, refrigerator magnets, coasters, along with things you would never even think of. They spend a lot of money on patterns for their next creations and are constantly on the lookout for new patterns.

The most frequently seen patterns are four page leaflets although you will also find pattern booklets ranging from eight or ten to two dozen pages in size.

Used patterns can be found at garage sales, thrift stores, and book sales, often for $.10 or less per pattern. These patterns can be turned into nice profits on eBay if you know what to look for, how to buy them, and how to package them.
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Popularity: 74% [?]

This coming Saturday, the convention center in Grand Forks is holding the 1st Annual Anything Goes Garage Sale, Flea Market, Swap Meet in it’s main arena/convention area.

They had originally hoped to attract 200 people to set up. They stopped taking registrations several weeks ago when 347 people had registered because they ran out of room to put them.

I’m wondering how many hundreds of people will be waiting in line at 8 am Saturday morning when they open the doors to the public. Will there be some people who will actually camp outside the entrance Friday night so they can be one of the first few in line?

It should be an interesting event and it will also be interesting to see how it affects the general garage sale situation in town both this weekend and for the rest of the summer.

Normally this time of year there would likely be between fifty and sixty fresh sales starting this weekend, so it will be interesting to see how many people want to compete with this sale. It will also be interesting to see if that many people taking part in the event will dramatically decrease the number of sales we see throughout the remainder of the summer.

Popularity: 71% [?]

The auctions for the third week of the 2009 Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday night with only 11 of the 29 qualifying items selling for a sell through rate of a dismal 38%. While that is better than last week’s 29%, it’s still far below the 65% to 80% I’m accustomed to. I can’t remember ever having two weeks in a row this low before.

Part of the problem may have been that the auctions all ended on Sunday evening which was right in the middle of the 3-day Memorial Day weekend. Previously I’ve always with 3-day holiday weekends I’ve always ended my auctions on Monday evening but, I forgot that Memorial Day was early this year and the auctions were live before I realized it.

All the vintage Avalon Hill and 3M board games sold, but If it weren’t for them the week would have been a total disaster. The only auction that cracked the $50 barrier was a lot of four Avalon Hill war theme games that sold for $51.

Here’s how things look at the end of the third week of the Challenge.

Popularity: 74% [?]

The auctions for the second week of this year’s Garage Sale Challenge ended Sunday night with only 13 of the 45 qualifying items selling for a sell through rate of a dismal 29%. Neither the Meiwa Art Christmas dinnerware nor the Holmes & Edwards flatware attracted much attention at all. Since those two things made up more than half of the total listings, they pretty much killed my sell through rate.

None of the auction items cracked the $50 barrier. The highest priced item brought was the lot of 26 Quiltmaker magazines that brought $29.51. Helping my total sales out were three fixed price listings that sold during the week. Two romance paperback lots for $39.99 each and a lot of 4 Krystonian series books for $29.99.

Here’s how things look at the end of the second week of the Challenge.

The $17.67 that appears under Incidental Fees is my out-of-pocket postage cost since I had listed the three fixed price items that sold as “Free Shipping”.

Here are my Challenge purchases made during the week.
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Popularity: 35% [?]

An experienced garage sale shopper/flea market seller walks into a moving sale in an older neighborhood of Grand Forks last Saturday.

One of the first things he spots is an old John Deere pedal tractor from the 1950s sitting in one corner of the garage. He walks over and looks at the price tag - $200. He estimates he could make between $100 and $150 profit on it.

Now the thought process begins. He only has a limited amount of cash for the day and paying $200 for the tractor would mean he’d pretty much be headed home for the day right after the purchase.

While he’s considering buying the pedal tractor, he starts looking around and finds several other things he’d like to buy all priced considerably less than the tractor. He opts for several other purchases that come to a total of roughly $90.
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Popularity: 32% [?]

The first weekend of the 2009 Garage Sale Challenge has come and gone. There are fourteen people taking part this year and many of them, along with myself, spent part of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday digging through what was being offered at local garage sales and thrift stores. You can read about how some of them did on the 2009 Garage Sale Challenge blog.

Friday I went to seventeen garage sales, a Friends Of The Library (FOL) book sale, and all the local thrift stores. On Saturday morning I went to another ten fresh garage sales and revisited all the thrift stores.

Nearly everything that I purchase for the Challenge was books and many of those came from the FOL sale.

Here’s what my expenses look like after the first weekend.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Roughly six months ago eBay launched Fixed Price Format listings. In eBay’s New 30 Day Fixed Price Listing Format I talked about two possible ways I saw to take advantage of the new format.

I’ve been testing both over the last six months. While both methods have proven to increase sales to a degree, a third approach to using Fixed Price Format listings has shown itself to regularly increase my profits with certain kinds of items on a regular basis.

This approach works best with items that appear fairly frequently on eBay in both the auction and eBay store format. I’m going to use an example of something I sold a couple days ago to show what I’ve been doing.
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Popularity: 25% [?]

In two weeks, on May 11, 2009, the US Post Office will be implementing rate increases for several classes of mailing along with extra services such as Delivery Confirmation and insurance.

Their new price list is available on-line in PDF format. It includes a lot of information that the majority of sellers will never use, but you may want to print out the sections that pertain to your business and keep them next to your computer for quick reference when writing auction ads.

You should also remember to begin using the new rate chart when writing any auction listing that will end on, or after, May 9th, along with any new store or fixed price listing you are getting ready to write.

Now might also be a good time to begin updating any eBay store or flat rate listings that will need to be changed to reflect the new rates.

Photograph by Kok Leng Yeo.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Just a few miscellaneous thoughts about my first weekend of serious garage saling.

Friday began at 5:30 am when I left the house for the 110 mile drive to Barnesville, Minnesota for the first day of their Spring City-Wide Garage Sale. It was a little cool when I left in the morning but by the time I got to Barnesville it had warmed up enough so that the shorts I was wearing were comfortable all day.

The “official” sale list and map showed 60 sales, but there had to be at least another 20 to 30 people who didn’t bother to get their sale on the list. While I didn’t buy as much as I did at their Fall Sale last year, there was still plenty of interesting stuff available. It took me between six and seven hours to cover them all and I came home with enough new inventory to definitely make the trip worthwhile.

Saturday was a little different. My list of new sales in Grand Forks contained only three sales. Saturday was a jeans, sweatshirt, and vest day and when I left home at 7:30 in the morning I had to brush the snow off the car windows before I got started.
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Popularity: 19% [?]