Everything's Better In Summer!

Except online selling that is...

I've decided to kind of "Give Up" for the time being! We are just too busy playing to have extra time to list items and I'm not home much right now so I would have to have my husband ship out any items I sell anyway and we are taking a big long 2 week trip down to the Southwest in August so listing for items to sell during that time would be a bad idea! I'm going to end all of my items before we leave on that trip so that I don't risk selling something and being unable to fulfill my shipping agreement.

That being said, I have had a few awesome sales lately! Most of those were on Etsy surprisingly! I usually only sell about 1 or 2 items a month on Etsy but the last 2 weeks brought 4 really great sales so I thought I'd show them to you!

OH! and for those of you wondering, Wall E made it to Israel as per the shipping tracking info but I still have yet to receive any feedback or communication from the buyer. Its past the 2 week return period now but the last Israel issue I had came 60 days after the sale so I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be ok with this one!

 This is a beautiful mirrored tissue box that I picked up for $3 at a yard sale in May. Its kind of an old Hollywood design and that is pretty popular right now. It took a month but it sold for $45 plus buyer paid shipping! After fees my profit is $40! It's out for delivery today so I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one too that it arrives safely, shipping a mirrored box is something to make you bite your nails over so I made sure it was packaged very well before it left, hopefully no cracks!!

This is another craft kit I purchased when I got started buying them its a retro kind of pillow Crewel kit and it sold within a couple months for $15 + buyer paid shipping. After fees my profit was $12, I like selling on Etsy so much better. The customers are generally nicer and the fees are sooooo much lower to sell on there.

 

I pulled this cute little Dala horse out of a toy box at a yard sale for a quarter. It was a little beat up but the maker sticker was still on the bottom and in very teeny tiny print it read "Dansk Designs" and its made in Denmark! The 2 "D"s! Dansk and Denmark are 2 words that I always like to see together! Because of her semi-poor condition she took a couple months to sell but finally did for $26 + Shipping! I already have a positive review and my profits were an awesome $25 from this quarter toy box find! You never know what yard sale treasures you can find in such random places!

 

This one is the best flip I've had in a while! This is an Arabia of Finland Emilia dish. Usually with this pattern we see it only in black and white so I had a feeling when I picked it up that it might be something good. I dug this out of a big box of dusty junk at a pickers heaven garage sale a few weeks back. I paid $4 for a whole armful of stuff and I think it ended up working out to be about a quarter or 2 for this dish. Its on its way home to Finland, hopefully its made it safely there already actually, and the buyer paid $75 plus shipping for it! After fees and the shipping my profit was an awesome $67 - this is why I will never be able to stop "Treasure Hunting" as I call it!

 

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I'm also happy to announce that I've already made my sales goal at the Antique Shop this month as well! I worked my shift and made rent so I'll have a nice check coming in August! I'm hoping for the rest of the month to bring in even more sales. The weather here has been amazing so its bringing people out to shop and I hope I can profit on that! The shop does a big tent sale in August to celebrate the historic house's birthday and the owner says that during that month is probably the best sales dealers see all year - lets hope that's true! I'm already starting to gather and price items for the tent.

 

I'm really enjoying this booth thing as much as I thought I would. Its fun to source items for my space and ebay at the same time and I'm actually hoping a bigger space opens up before fall so I have more room to bring in bigger pieces and stuff I would hate to have to ship! Here is me working my shift last week!

 

 

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In the meantime, we are playing and having fun this summer and I'm not worrying about much else! We've been picking berries, camping, taking road trips and enjoying life as much as we can while the weather is good and we have no schedules to keep! Hope you all are doing the same!

27 Hrs

I wish that there were like 3 more hours in the day. I could really go for that these days because I feel like I have just NO time to get everything done in the day; I've been up and running early in the morning and working til late in the evening almost every day and still feel like I'm under a mountain of editing! I shot a wedding a couple of weeks ago and have a 6 week deadline to get almost 1400 images edited on top of all my other sessions that I've set up as well. Plus I want my kids to have summer fun and not be stuck at home while Mom is working all day every day! I guess I can't complain too much because it was a great pay check for me and my family and will allow us to do lots of fun summer activities but I've just recently decided that after this year I will no longer offer wedding photography. Its just too much work and pressure to make it perfect; I much prefer the family sessions and newborn sessions that take about a week or two to edit after and are so much fun to complete.

Needless to say I have had ZERO time for eBay or shopping. I was able to hit up a charity yard sale before the wedding last Saturday and loaded up with some good items for my booth and fall consignment sales for CHEAP but alas nothing great for eBay so here it sits with 27 measly listings and nothing much in the pile to get listed. I do have a few mugs and stuff waiting but with it being the summer slump and us traveling so much I think I'm mostly going to concentrate on getting the current inventory out & just wait to list everything else I may buy until we get home from our big vacation at the end of August. I did just go through this morning and lower some of my prices in hopes to move some items out the door this week.

We went camping over last weekend and it was nice to come home to a few sales. June was my worst month since February and I think July will be the worst of the year since I'm not going to list anything new unless I find something amazing that I'm sure will sell fast. My booth sales for last month weren't great either but I at least made rent for July so I'm not in the hole. They have finished up with the road construction right in front of the store so please let that mean that July is going to be a great month; fingers crossed, I'd love to see a $200 month!

Here are the few things that sold this week:

New with Tags Tommy Bahama T-Shirt - sold for a best offer of $30 to Hawaii - I paid $5 for this at a yard sale so after fees and shipping it was a $16 profit.

My plush stash has dwindled down to almost nothing which is nice but the last hold outs would be nice to see to new homes! I bought Flower for $1 back in March and she finally sold for $20 so only about $10 profit after fees and shipping. One less thing to store!

I shouldn't have bought this Tommy Bahama shirt. I did because it was the 2X size which usually does well. However it was linen which wrinkles very fast and it ended up having a small stain on the bottom so it took a long time and finally sold for $22 after a couple of months. I paid around $8 for it though so only about $6 after fees and shipping. With TB items I will only buy the shirts now at a very low price and only if they are 100% silk and have one of the fun pictures on the back like the Tiki Bar shirts or something like that. Those seem to be the only ones that do very well anymore.

Oh Wall-E! I bought him for $4 at a charity thrift store in April and he's sat for a couple months now. He finally sold this weekend for $30 and I was excited until I saw that it is headed to Israel. UGH! I vowed never to ship there again and thought I'd updated my settings to reflect that but I guess I hadn't saved it or something so the buyer was able to purchase it. I emailed the buyer (who has a VERY low FB rating) and told them to please cancel the sale within 12 hrs if it was purchased by mistake. This is what the scammer told me last year when I went through the Paypal fraud issue, that they never ordered the item. Well I did not hear from the buyer and since I didn't want to get a ding on my rating for canceling the sale I reluctantly shipped him off. My fingers are crossed that this is a genuine sale and doesn't come back to bite me in the rear in a month or so but only time will tell and you better believe I updated my shipping preferences so this doesn't happen again!

Well, that's all for now folks!! Have a very happy 4th of July and here's to good summer sales, if that is even possible!