Reselling mistake – how a week cost me $200

Introduction

My 7 SNES classics had arrived near launch day.  Well most of them anyway.  Target took their sweet time getting them to me.  So there I was on Thursday October 5 trying to decide the best way to sell these.  I had posted them on FB earlier that week for $175, but I got way too many flakes.  Not even one sale.  That’s when I decided to just move them online.  At the time, Amazon FBA was currently at $200 and Ebay was $130.  With that kind of spread, I decided to dust off my Dymo label printer and went to work shipping these off to FBA.  Except I was lazy and didn’t actually do this until the week after (October 12.)  Then it took a week for the ship to get to the IL warehouse (I got the checked in emails on Thursday the 19th.  Then to make matters worse, it then took another 3 days for Amazon to reallocate the inventory (people could order it backordered, but who’s gonna do that?  Most people want to see an item is available to ship out ASAP.)  That meant my first unit didn’t sell until Monday October  23, a good 10 days since I mailed them out.  Gross sale price – $150.  UGH.  Net sale was $130.  Cost was $88 after tax.  Profit was then $42 per unit * 7 = $280.  If I had shipped them out a week before, I probably would have gotten at least $25 more per unit.

 

Lessons Learned

Early bird gets the worm.  I should have sold some preorders on Ebay when I had the chance (those could have been $200 gross at the time.)  The only good thing out of all this is I was able to dust off my FBA skills.  I still have lots of items that I’ve been wanting to ship to FBA but have been too lazy.

9 comments on “Reselling mistake – how a week cost me $200

  1. So, I originally only got one preorder… but ended up getting a couple more … I sold a couple pre-orders on ebay for $275 gross each — those were the best. I got a dozen or so on launch day, and those grossed $165-$170 each. I’ve gotten a handful getting them in passing since then, and mostly those have been grossing ~$150. It helps that i sold ~300 nintendo switches on ebay earlier in the year, I think it leads to better placement and with no negative feedbacks on those orders buyers feel comfortable. These are not the NES classic, but as long as you don’t have to wait in line — I’m happy to buy as many as I can easily get my hands on.

      1. Not really. I refuse to lose sleep or wait on long lines — unless I really need one for an actual gift. I only resell a few items a year — but I try to get a hold of as many as possible. Too bad I cant buy more harry potter tickets! Thanks for posting about that… I would have never known.

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