Monday Musings (Tuesday Edition)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about buying the inventory of a closed Christian bookstore.  Well, I finally got the last of the cassettes listed. The finally tally was 38 boxes, mostly Medium Priority Mail boxes, for an approximate total of 2100 cassettes.  I’m still working on all the CDs and books.

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Speaking of the books, many of them are wonderful, practically new, Christian non-fiction and gift books, many with multiple copies.  Unfortunately, most are worth only $.01 on Amazon.  So, I had this bright idea to list them on eBay.  I’ve started running listings as buy one, get one for a friend, all for one price and one shipping charge. It helped beef up my listings total, and maybe will beef up my bottom line ever so slightly. 

For the rest of them, it’s either donate, or take them to local bookstore for credit.  We took five boxes yesterday to the bookstore, and got about $170 credit.  Sounds good, but the hitch with this particular store is that you can only use credit for half the purchase price of a book (i.e., book costs $6, but you can only use $3 credit toward it).  

On the other hand, maybe it’ll help, in some small way, to keep an actual brick and mortar bookstore, a dying breed, open.

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The stereo transmitter and the nine speakers that I picked up from Goodwill for $100 work perfectly.  I’ve got them listed at $100 each, which is half off retail.  Hopefully, they will sell soon.

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I hate not being able to find something in my inventory.  A customer purchased a card game, and I searched high and low for it, to no avail.  When this happens, I usually find another source for the item, and have it dropped shipped, even if I have to take a loss, rather than cancelling an order.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an exact match.  So, I had to refund the money.

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At a recent yard sale, I picked up a small box of cosmetics labeled Nu Skin.  Inside the box were four unopened, and one opened, but unused, boxes of Nu Skin Galvanic Spa Pre-Treat and Treatment Facial Gels.  A quick search on eBay via my Droid showed big money on Nu Skin products.  The seller reluctantly let the box go for $3, saying she spent a lot of money on it.  The items sold for $125.99.

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Aliens and monsters sell, at least on eBay.  On subsequent days, I sold a plush Alf and a new, but vintage, Gremlins record set.  I’ve had the Gremlins record for a while, but the Alf was a recent purchase (thanks, by the way, to everyone who has pointed out that Alf merchandise is BOLO).

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Ella will be visiting relatives in Ohio this summer, and has this grand idea about sharing our online sales strategies with several of her kin who are out of work.  Since Ella is not really knowledgeable about the behind the scenes activities (listing, packing, and shipping), she wants me to create a step by step book, so to speak, that she can pass around, as if I don’t have enough to do already.

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My list.  It’s a running joke around my house when Ella asks me to do something. “It’s on my list,” I always say.   Ella’s book is now on my list.

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T-shirt seen at Goodwill: Geek wielding a light saber with the expression “Come to the Dork Side.” If it had been my size, I would have bought it.

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Ever get jealous of another seller, especially when you see him/her pick up something that you absolutely had no interest in until you saw it in his/her hands?  Me, neither.

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Memorial Day weekend was slow, yard sale-wise, around here, so we stayed in bed a little longer, and hit a few sales a little later, not finding much.  On Sunday, it was the same story, but I did pick up this:

It’s an actual Marshall battery-powered guitar amplifier, complete with belt clip, that is only about five inches tall.  It looked like a toy, and was only $1.  It’s missing a knob, which will reduce the sale price, but eBay completeds show it selling in the $20 range.

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Hope everyone has a great week thrifting, listing, and, of course, selling.