New Year Inventory Reduction

I started selling items from thrift stores on eBay just over a year ago, when I started I made a million mistakes, my images were worse then the ones I take now, my titles sucked, and I didnt have the experience I have now buying the correct inventory. NOTE: I am far from perfect now on buying invetory just to give you an example I bought a Ralph Lauren shirt the other day when I was in a rush and there was a tear down the entire back of the shirt...

So here we are the end of 2013 and it is time to purge and clean out stale inventory how am I going to do it... After much discussion on the facebook groups I have decided to go a few different ways and some may surprise you...

My inventory is numbered in order posted so #0001 was listed first #10056 was last, it is not when the item was purchased... so even though I may have old inventory not listed to me I will look at it as new inventory...

Organize Reduce Then Sale

Personally I am lucky I have a tractor trailer plus a 4 car old garage and a basement for workspace, so storage is not a problem for me currently so I can hold out to use eBay promotions to reduce my inventory which I am planning to do and this is how...

First I moved inventory around in my store and made categories so I know what inventory needs to be reduced... My categories are simple, New Additions (things I just listed) Main Designers I look for Tommy Bahama Ralph Lauren Harley Davidson & Hard Rock Cafe. Then I have color sales tags... Red Tag Sale Blue Tag Sale Green Tag Sale, these are where I have the inventory that needs to be purged...

I have lowered the price on all of it regardless of what I think it should sell for item is just not selling for me, After reducing the prices drastically, I have added a Mark Down Manager sale to them as well for 23% off the lowered price til the end of the year... Hopefully this will reduce my inventory some...

eBay offers all kinds of promotions through out the year, for me I plan to work in each folder and get them ready for the next eBay promotional auctions, you know where you get 50,000 free auctions over the next 12 days... Well I want to have my items ready so that I can end them and list them as auctions quickly, with a low starting price maybe .99 cents, it is better to get a few dollars back into the bank then give it all away by re-donating the items to the thrift store...

Although I am sure there will be items that do not sell even when we try to give them away, I still wont be ready to give them away, what is left after the auctions I plan to make into packages you know 5 like items one low price... 5 Hawaiian shirts 9.95 or something like that and relist them as buy it nows... When the next auction promotion comes along I may run these packages through the auctions...

Learn From Your Mistakes

Well i could just bag up my cash, didnt you pay for all this stuff? and give it away and try and write it off as a learning experience, or you can use your mistakes to learn from. I will be going through one category at a time and looking to see why I think an item is not selling. It may be a title, it may be pictures, it may be a bad purchase ( i dont think all of them are bad purchases) the bad purchases still have value, can you package them with good purchases and sell off, 5 polo shirts 4 good 1 bad is still 5 shirts...


Now many items I have I know others did the listings for me, it may be the whole ad is bad, so I will take the item down off ebay and recirculate it through my listing system, it will be resorted, re pictured and re listed, many of my items dont have measurements, I didnt measure for the first 4 months because I didnt think it was important... I know better now, so those ads need to be reworked and I plan to do that...

Finally I will be reworking and mixing sales in until I feel I got every dollar wrung out of the items and then I will donate them not back to the thrift store, But to needy in NJ, there are light blue boxes all over and the clothes are given to homeless school students throughout the state so they can go to school in clean clothes...

With the help of God i will stay on track and get through the start of the new year and be a little more profit conscience in 2014...

God Bless
Happy New Years