When I first started buying items at yard sales and thrift stores I didn't have a good idea of how much was too much to pay for something that I intended to resell. Much of what I bought I sold on Ebay so the bidders pretty much determined what the sale price was unless I put a reserve on the auction to protect myself from getting too little for a high priced item. My original experience in retail I've mentioned is selling old US Postage stamps to collectors and the general markup rule there is you can expect to get 2-2.5 times what you pay for a stamp which makes the mark-up on average 125%. After my expenses I would net around 40% on every dollar I sold. I quickly found out that a 125% mark-up wasn't going to work for me if I wanted to sell other kinds of collectibles especially after I started selling most items at antique booths. I sat down with my scratch pad early and figured out my expenses and came up with the 500% solution. I determined that as a general rule I wasn't interested in buying something for resale unless I was pretty darn sure I could get at least 5 times what I paid for it retail. I do have some exceptions to this rule especially in the area of furniture and jewelry and some other high ticket items but for 90% of the items I purchase the 500% solution is the standard I work with.
Other dealers I talked with told me I was nuts for thinking I should expect to get so much for an item and warned me that I wouldn't be able to buy enough inventory if I hoped to buy stuff that cheap. Well I stuck to my guns and managed to buy enough inventory to stock 4 booths and 2 warehouses with inventory in the waiting with the 500% solution. One thing I'd learned after buying stamps for 30 years is how to walk away from a buy if the numbers don't add up to my advantage. I am patient and I don't panic while bidding at auctions and I don't fall in love with the merchandise. I fall in love with the numbers. Have I missed out on some deals that would have made me a fair and decent profit? Of course I have and have no regrets usually. I have often told a seller when they asked me to make them an offer on an item I'm eyeing that I will probably insult them but they want to hear anyways. I make my offer and you'd be surprised how many sellers will take that low ball bid. You have to remember a lot of sales involve either people who are moving soon and have a deadline to meet for clearing the house out, or they are liquidating an estate and are under similar pressure to make everything disappear or they just are tired of seeing it in their garage and don't want to haul it back in if it doesn't sell.
I often find that a good tactic for getting a low price especially at estate sales is to find a box and start loading it up with several items and then ask for a quantity discount or just ask for a price for everyting in the box. This works especially well on items from the garage such as tools, textiles and records or books. Getting to a sale later in the day of course helps you get a good price since the prices usually get dropped since the seller is fatigued and anxious to get the sale over with. Now I know getting there late reduces your chances of finding a set of Wedgwood China or any item that has a well known name and obvious premium value. But it's a good bet that those items were priced at a level that would have made it difficult to buy for resale anyway. I have purposely spent a lot of time learning about areas of collectibles that the average dealer doesn't know well so that no matter what time I arrive at a sale I still have a good shot at finding something worth buying with the 500% solution. I have studied Eames era and Danish modern items which you can still find a good deal of at an average sale or Italian and Scandinavian pottery and cookware such as Dansk, Krenit, Arabia of Finland, and many others that are many times ignored because let's face it a lot of it doesn't appeal to the average American. I currently have a Stelton Cylinda toast rack listed on Ebay which was designed by Arne Jacobsen. My oldest daughter scolded me for asking so much for a silly little toast rack and I had to explain to her that it was a designer piece and worth every bit of what I was asking as a starting bid. She laughed and said I'd never get it. Right now I'm having the laugh and it's still got more time to go higher.
Now my point here isn't to brag about how much I sell my items on Ebay or elsewhere for. It's actually quite the opposite. When you do this as a business or even as a profitable hobby you want to stack the odds on your side as much as you can. Booth rent isn't cheap and neither is gas and your other selling expenses. You have to factor in the time it takes to sell you inventory and if you have storage costs because you deal in larger items like furniture you need to have a sizable markup to end up with a decent net profit. You have to realize that the only areas that you have a major say in this business equation is how much you pay for your inventory and how much you will take for the final sale price. You don't want to be devoting all your time to this enterprise and find yourself just breaking even or squeaking out a small profit. I don't know about you but I don't want to do this just so Ebay or the owner of the Antique Mall makes the lion's share of the money.
Other dealers I talked with told me I was nuts for thinking I should expect to get so much for an item and warned me that I wouldn't be able to buy enough inventory if I hoped to buy stuff that cheap. Well I stuck to my guns and managed to buy enough inventory to stock 4 booths and 2 warehouses with inventory in the waiting with the 500% solution. One thing I'd learned after buying stamps for 30 years is how to walk away from a buy if the numbers don't add up to my advantage. I am patient and I don't panic while bidding at auctions and I don't fall in love with the merchandise. I fall in love with the numbers. Have I missed out on some deals that would have made me a fair and decent profit? Of course I have and have no regrets usually. I have often told a seller when they asked me to make them an offer on an item I'm eyeing that I will probably insult them but they want to hear anyways. I make my offer and you'd be surprised how many sellers will take that low ball bid. You have to remember a lot of sales involve either people who are moving soon and have a deadline to meet for clearing the house out, or they are liquidating an estate and are under similar pressure to make everything disappear or they just are tired of seeing it in their garage and don't want to haul it back in if it doesn't sell.
I often find that a good tactic for getting a low price especially at estate sales is to find a box and start loading it up with several items and then ask for a quantity discount or just ask for a price for everyting in the box. This works especially well on items from the garage such as tools, textiles and records or books. Getting to a sale later in the day of course helps you get a good price since the prices usually get dropped since the seller is fatigued and anxious to get the sale over with. Now I know getting there late reduces your chances of finding a set of Wedgwood China or any item that has a well known name and obvious premium value. But it's a good bet that those items were priced at a level that would have made it difficult to buy for resale anyway. I have purposely spent a lot of time learning about areas of collectibles that the average dealer doesn't know well so that no matter what time I arrive at a sale I still have a good shot at finding something worth buying with the 500% solution. I have studied Eames era and Danish modern items which you can still find a good deal of at an average sale or Italian and Scandinavian pottery and cookware such as Dansk, Krenit, Arabia of Finland, and many others that are many times ignored because let's face it a lot of it doesn't appeal to the average American. I currently have a Stelton Cylinda toast rack listed on Ebay which was designed by Arne Jacobsen. My oldest daughter scolded me for asking so much for a silly little toast rack and I had to explain to her that it was a designer piece and worth every bit of what I was asking as a starting bid. She laughed and said I'd never get it. Right now I'm having the laugh and it's still got more time to go higher.
Now my point here isn't to brag about how much I sell my items on Ebay or elsewhere for. It's actually quite the opposite. When you do this as a business or even as a profitable hobby you want to stack the odds on your side as much as you can. Booth rent isn't cheap and neither is gas and your other selling expenses. You have to factor in the time it takes to sell you inventory and if you have storage costs because you deal in larger items like furniture you need to have a sizable markup to end up with a decent net profit. You have to realize that the only areas that you have a major say in this business equation is how much you pay for your inventory and how much you will take for the final sale price. You don't want to be devoting all your time to this enterprise and find yourself just breaking even or squeaking out a small profit. I don't know about you but I don't want to do this just so Ebay or the owner of the Antique Mall makes the lion's share of the money.
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