November was truly amazing.

I spent most of this month with the final prep of the impending arrival of our new baby who was originally due on December 11.

Not surprisingly however our little bundle of joy had her own plans and entered this world at the end of November about 2 weeks early.

Life changed forever in an instant. That moment (the birth)…after some reflection might be the most beautiful moment I will ever witness whilst truly conscious for my entire life.

I am finding new levels of gratitude every day since.

This months summary will be extremely concise and also absent on numbers as obviously my current priorities lie outside reselling and sit with the family. I will however say they are markedly up on the previous month combined with minimal sourcing leading to some decent profit. I might add them to December’s summary.

Planning Theory

As I alluded in some previous posts I did carefully consider how to manage eBay around the birth itself and extended into the following days and weeks after.

Indeed I had been working towards this very moment for the last 9 months, not just with reselling but on making sure everything was organised, as much as one can prepare for these things.

There have been multiple posts / articles about how changing a store to Vacation or Holiday mode will decimate future sales.

Obviously I didn’t want to do this but I did want to dial back some listings to sell less of these while off work on leave (you read that right). This is because I currently have a couple of locations where items are stored that are around 20 mins drive from home. I planned to keep these trips to an absolute maximum of one or perhaps two a week depending on sales. A 40 minute round trip to pick up a $10 item would not be good. When I’m normally at work this isn’t a factor but when I have no need to go that direction it is.

The items further away were all changed to have a 5 day handling time. I chose this number to allow me to better plan a suitable day time whilst also allowing sales to potentially be grouped and collected / shipped all at once.

This affected approximately 150 listings. The remaining listings are a combination of 1-2 days to keep the visibility and top rated plus seals.

The method to manage this was to simply alter the handling time for all listings using the bulk editing tool.

A relatively simple task with the exception of being forced to update the stragglers with item specifics.

Overall I still got to 980 listings for the month before things dropped off.

Lastly I also outsourced a couple of more tubs to my subcontractor who does some of my photos and listings while I had the time to do this. I’m at a point where I won’t have to do this again for a couple of months (Out of clothes backlog) at least so happy to sink this cost now. See how things go but I may well use the subcontractor in some other areas as well after I clear the easy backlog.

On my return to listing again I will have 75 listings straight up ready to go and a heeeeap of other items that are easy to photo and list.

The New Logo Is Complete

Stoked to have a custom logo finally finished. Created by @francisg.art (insta). Professional service and big thanks for putting up with my several tweaking requests. Send him a DM if you are chasing any graphic design work.

Why a logo now after this time? Well often people start with this type of thing when setting up businesses, logos, business cards, etc… all things that are nice to have but can chew up huge amounts of time and take away from the actual business setup process itself. I have even done this myself on other projects previously. Now that things are established I can see future value from getting this (and then the business cards) created at this time.

Plans For December

• Brainstorm, Plan and prepare for 2020.
• Finish The Business Cards. I have the new logo, the rest will be easy with a spare hour.
• Cruise control for eBay. There’s still 958 active listings at the time of writing and for December and I will not be adding any new listings. It will be interesting to see what sales occur with no listing activity and how the profit looks considering there will also be no sourcing costs.