Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Turnover Tuesdays - Patience vs. A Quick HIt - Some Poor Posts and Where this Blog is Headed?


For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

Week 1 - First attempt at reselling
Week 2 - My second straight fail
Week 3 - My iPad mini collection
Week 4 - Bed Bath and Beyond
Week 5 - An iPad Idea for Your Staples Gift Card Collection








This week, the style will be quite different.  I want to talk a little bit about patience in reselling vs. going for the quick sell.  When should you choose one over the other?  I want to illustrate it with a few sales that happened recently.


Many of you have realized that I have been slowing down in the number of deals I have posted. There have been a few reasons for this.  Sometimes it is because I don't find a satisfactory deal, but that's not the majority of days.  I continue to find deals daily and I am on track personally for my best month so far, but I am unable to post the vast majority of deals I find on my own or others send my way.



Let's go through a couple of suggestions I made recently and see how they are doing (hint - not so well):


Microsoft Surface 64GB

On October 22nd, I recommended buying a Microsoft Surface 2 64GB for $300 on eBay.  As it says in the post, it was selling for $360 at that time.  I called it a no brainer.  Apparently I have no brain.

Prices have finally started to recover a little bit but the buy box is now at $307, a drop close to 20%.  That's not good at all.  If you sold at $307, your takehome would be $288.  A loss of $12 on a no brainer!  There are still 7 pages of FBA Sellers, yikes!

It's no longer the case, but the 64GB version was almost the same price as the 32GB version at one point!




WD 4TB Storage 



On October 26th I recommended buying the 4TB WD storage unit which was #1 in its category for $140.  I said that you could sell for between $192-$200

Buy Box is at $170 now.  5 pages of FBA sellers.  Ouch!




Toshiba Tablets

On October 19th I recommended buying a Toshiba tablet for $150.  It could be sold at the time for $180.

Buy Buy is at $170 now.  They were much lower and have recovered quite nicely. In fact after $169, the next FBA seller is at $179. Right back where we started.  Only 3 pages of FBA sellers.



iPad Air 2 16gb


On October 12th, I posted about buying iPad Air 2's on eBay (16gb).  They were selling for $380 on eBay and $425 on Amazon but I said that everyone is backordered until about $445.

These too went down in price but if you look now, they are back to $445 on Amazon for the Buy Box.






So what did we learn?  While reselling can be lucrative when everyone goes after the same product, the dynamics change significantly.  People panic when they see the prices drop and everyone starts undercutting everyone else.  Who wins? The consumer does with lower prices and we all hate that.  There are so many products out there to resell, we can't all focus on the same ones.

We also learned that iPads retain their value well (duh!).   Gold iPads (the last deal ended up being Gold for most people) sell the slowest of all the colors and the prices still recovered well. Other items do not retain their value or recover as well as iPads.





Did I buy all of these?  Heck yeah.  I buy almost everything I recommend.  It's not fair to readers if I don't and I also think that they are good deals when I post.

What should you do with these sales?

I sold my iPads at about $445, probably could have held out for more but that's fine.  I'm still holding on to everything else.  I'm excited by the price Toshiba tablets.  I think those will sell the fastest.

What about the Surfaces?  I'm still holding on to those too.  Will the prices recover?  I think so, but I can't say for sure.  Maybe won't recover all the way.



The longer I've been reselling (It hasn't been that long), the more patient I've become for most sales, especially the ones I post.  I let the glut of resellers panic and sell fast and the prices come back (sometimes I'm part of that glut and I look back a month later and realize I sold too soon).  Sure there are storage fees, but I'm usually much better off selling at a higher price.




Factors that affect whether I Lower my Price


My Inventory

The more inventory I have the less likely I am to price cut.  If I only have one, I only need someone to buy during the couple of minutes that someone doesn't undercut me.  Not a great business move for everyone else, but when I have one I am usually looking for a quick sale.


Other People's Inventory

How many other sellers are there?  The more sellers there are, the more likely I am to be aggressive in lowering my prices, unless I know that many people just bought, like from this site, then I'll wait.

When I know more inventory is coming because the same sale is happening again, I will likely be aggressive in my pricing.

Rank

The better the rank, the less likely I am to cut my prices.  When something is a good seller prices will recover.  When they are poor sellers, a bunch of resellers could wreck the market.


Deadline

If there is a deadline coming - like if you are selling Christmas Trees now - that will majorly affect whether I am patient.  Anything Christmas related you need to be patient.  Anything Thanksgiving related you need to be patient but not too patient.


Holidays


The holidays are coming.  I am willing to be much more patient now than 3 months ago.  People are going to buy a ton of stuff in the next month to two months.  There might be a ton of sellers now, but everything can change after Black Friday.


The Blog and Deals Going Forward?



More important is the question of what to do going forward.  I've been holding back on a lot of deals which I hate but I think is necessary.  I've been thinking about it a lot and I don't have a good solution of how to approach it. I will continue to post iPad deals, at least for now, since the value is still there even after a post.  This decision will continue to be revisited.

I will definitely focus on more education and past deals and less on current deals.  This decision isn't easy for me since this has been a very enjoyable blog for me.

I recommend working hard to find deals on your own.  Even better, find a small group of like minded people to share with.  If everyone in the group looks out for everyone else, a group of 5-15 people is far, far more lucrative than following a public blog.

As always if you want to share anything directly to me, you can email me at orensmoneysaver@gmail.com  I'm happy to evaluate any deals you may have come up with and I don't post without explicit permission.


Have any ideas of where the blog should go?  Please comment.
Posted by Oren at 9:16 PM
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