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Closing An Ebay Store-Part One

gronesy-blue.jpgIn case you haven’t checked out my About Me page, let me give you a run-down of how I got into business running an eBay store.gronesy-blue.jpggronesy-blue.jpg

I had been down-sized from an IT position in early 2005. After months of job-searching, I came upon an opportunity to purchase a large collection of vintage childrens books. Most of the books were from the Golden, Whitman and Western publishers.

I have been selling them since early 2006 and now the portion that I have for sale has dwindled to just over 50 titles from over 200.

I have been successful at this venture and actually have been credited by other sellers for making the market for Whitman Tell-A-Tales, my primary product. I have almost 1700 positive feedback and my rating percentage is 100%. I have a small email list of devoted fans and have made some very good friends during the last two years.

However, the amount of time necessary to unbox, photograph, edit, list, re-list, pack and ship thousands of books leaves little time to start any other ventures. Luckily, I came upon an eBay listing tool called GarageSale which cut my listing and re-listing times down to about 30 minutes from almost 4 hours. This allowed me time to start researching other internet marketing opportunities and I can’t say enough good things about that product.

One of the things I realized fairly early on was that these books were going to make a decent amount of money but would never make the kind of money I desired. The other thing that occurred to me is that I can’t be making money while I’m emailing, invoicing, doing customer service, packing and going to the post office.

I estimated that I had about 2 years or more of product. Because I would be in a start-up mode for practically the entire time it would take me to sell off the collection, I didn’t have a lot of money to put towards broadening my product offerings. Nor did I really want to.

So, I decided I was going to be the best Whitman Tell-A-Tale store that ever was. I had other items I sold from the collection but that was my core offering. When I take a look at ebay and search on Tell-A-Tale and see how many other sellers have set their initial bid prices and shipping charges to compete with mine, I see I’ve been very successful at achieving that goal.

I’m very proud of this and don’t mind saying so.

In September of last year, I decided to prepare an estimate of the amount of time that I could continue selling these books until it wouldn’t be profitable any longer. I looked not only at the number of books but took into consideration how popular each title was. I took that estimate and decreased it just to be on the safe side.

I figured that I definitely had enough popular inventory to get me through to the end of the year.

Somewhere in the middle of December the bottom fell out!!!

Oh no, what was I going to do?

Join me for part two of this report to find out the answer to that question.

Jeff

[tags]childrens books, ebay store, whitman tell-a-tale[/tags]

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Lisa Marie Mary says

    at

    I can relate to so much of this post, Jeff! I sell personalized letters to children – and I focus on encouraging literacy. I am not, however, making money when I’m doing all those things ..just like you talked about. With my USP being so near and dear to my heart, it’s hard to not do it. And I just love reaching out to the children like I do, and hopefully helping them to become readers, as I have my own children. But all that other stuff…packing, post office…ugh…

    Anyway, yeah, I get ya. 😉

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