A Practical Walk

Since, I’ve talked about ebay here, I thought it’d be appropriate to give you a little update on how my ebay selling is going, and how I’m changing my focus a little bit.

I’ve actually had lower income with ebay lately, which is strange, as I have more items listed now than I did before.

Is it that my best items have already sold?

Is it that the ebay algorithm was favoring me as a newbie?

Is it because I’m lowering my prices to get items out, so my net income is lower?

Is it multiple factors all working together?

I don’t know and I may never know. But it’s got me re-thinking how much time I spend on ebay, especially when one month I calculated that I had earned around $4 an hour that month.

This lower net income has coincided with my husband’s job picking up signigicantly. Therefore it seemed like a good time for me to change my focus a little and I decided I’d start helping out with his business.

Now I make phone calls and schedule his service calls for him, and snap pictures of the work receipts for QuickBooks. After having done this for a couple of weeks, it doesn’t take too much of my time and it’s a big help to him. We’re bringing more money in, because it gives him more time to go out and do jobs.

When your office is the living room…

I haven’t quit ebay. I’m continuing to sell, but I’ve shifted my priority to the handy-man business, and just doing ebay when I have extra time. I’m also getting pickier about what items I pick up to try to resell and working on getting the items I already have listed.

If you’re in dire need of a camel teapot, look no further!

What I love about this new set up:

1. I’m helping my husband. His least favorite part of the job is the scheduling and receipt recording. I actually don’t mind mindlessly sitting and recording the receipts. I especially love that I can do it as I have time.
2. I’m probably going to be contributing more financially by doing this, rather than ebay.
3. I’m dealing more with people. I have to say, one of my least favorite parts of selling on ebay is that all I was doing was selling stuff. I miss interacting with people, but now that I schedule service calls, I’m at least talking to people.
4. My ebay closet is getting full, so I think it’s good, that I’m not focusing on bringing a bunch more inventory in.

So while he’s up in an attic….

…or down in a crawl space, I’ll be at home taking pictures of receipts.