September was extremely interesting for me, offering a brief glimpse at what life might be like running an eBay store combined with short-term contractual work on decent money (effectively a situation I would be looking to work towards over the next couple of years).

This month I spent 8 days away up north and during this time I decided to put the store on vacation mode with the listings hidden from view and no sales.

Thus I had some time for reflection on the past 2 months. I decided I needed some new lighting to increase the professional look and feel of the store particularly before bulk listing the horde of clothing items I was amassing. I have the lighting now and have started to use but also need Photoshop to create that brilliant white background. Thankfully now at least Photoshop is subscription based and costs a lot less than it once did. I also ran some rough numbers and realised I could live quite comfortably working approximately 3 months on a contractual basis with spending the remaining 9 months working on eBay, the only caveat to this being that I needed to 10x my active listings still. Its a 2-year game plan for now but man it would be nice #1 taking some high paying $ jobs again and #2 working for myself with a flexible schedule.

After I returned home I fired back up the store and had my first sale within 5 hours which I was pretty happy with. I had listened to several eBay related podcasts while away and learned that instead of totally closing the store entirely another option could have been to change the handling time on all listings to 10 days easily done through the bulk editing tool apparently. This way all listings still would have been visible and people could still have brought items and would just have to wait for me to ship after I returned. With this in mind I will be trialing this idea next time I have to work away for a week and hopefully have a stack of $ on my return (along with many items to ship lol).

The new eBay phone app which was my primary listing device I am finding super annoying for listing now after the latest update (as advanced options are not there anymore) so I have switched back to batch processing. That is, taking photos of several items at a time (still with the phone) before uploading them to a computer and then using the computer to list again. It seems a bit like double handling but in many ways I actually prefer this now and I am finding that getting the photos taken is most of the battle as I can also finish of listings at work (during lunch breaks of course) and combined with my use of AutoHotKey I can smash out new listings fairly quickly.

Anyway, to the numbers for the month:

You may be wondering why the active listings above do not match the number in my own figures in the first picture. This is because there is a second account being used owned by another family member. This is a form of contingency planning for future years. More on this another time.

Total combined active listings have only increased slightly for the month mainly due to 8 days of not being home and a wasted day over a long weekend where I had every intention of listing 40 things but just didn’t get there thanks to a Casino hangover (I did win $200 at the Casino though!). I guess its good the numbers are up but its still a bit disappointing it is not higher already.

What I did find interesting was while the number of items active increased only slightly the total $ value of the listings was up by $2000 to $9500 worth of items listed. This means my $ value amount increased by 23.5% for the month which is great.

Sales were good considering the store was open only 73% of the month. This month I did spend $344.47 on inventory again but made sure to keep a closer eye on cash flow to ensure I would at least be positive cash flow this month! In the end, the last two days of the month had slow sales and I also found $27 worth of epic items that will turn into well over $200 which I could not pass up.

Thus the total profit left for the month was only $43.67 falling short of the profit goal of the $200 goal.

A $156.33 extra payment was applied to the investment property mortgage.