I sold something again. I bundled two of the puzzles together, the Autumn Puzzle and the Bridge Puzzle. I thought this would make me a profit and let me increase the number of items I had overall. However, I made a mistake in the amount of shipping I would need when I put both of these together. Overall, by selling both of these items together I ended up losing $.79 when all the costs were accounted for. This is slightly disappointing, but I learned I needed to increase the amount of shipping on the puzzles by a $1 more to make sure I would profit when items are sold. I will lose money very rarely when I sell something. The reason for this is because I will price it at a level where I believe I will make a profit and not accept less than this. The good side is I learned I needed to increase the shipping on my other puzzles so this won’t happen again.

Bought another item

I have purchased a book, “One, Two, Three … Infinity” by George Gamov, for $1.07 to replace part of the $1.57 left from the sale of the puzzles. I have sold many, many books over the years and if I can get them at this cost level I should be able to ramp up to the number of items needed to around 30 to get consistent sales moving forward. Books were the main item I sold for years and years when I was flipping online. I felt minimal risk was involved, low level of capital invested, and a small amount of space needed to make consistent money with books. I will lean into books for a while to get built up to the 30 items a month. As well, there is a lot more sales data on books available in the various marketplaces out there, specifically Amazon. If I look at Amazon I can tell the book I bought has a sales rank of around 50,000. There are at least 10,000,000 sales rankings for books based on what I can see. This means this book ranks in the top .5%. Based on my previous knowledge of this ranking then approximately 100+ of this title can sell a month. I believe this will give me a good chance of selling this book online this month. I’ve got to price it accordingly and have patience. However, I will not sell it on Amazon. I will sell it on Ebay, because the cost structure on Ebay is more beneficial at this point with the amount of items I have online to do. The margins will not be as great in the book space but I know the consistency of it can ramp up very quickly. With the sales data available it is much less of a risk at this point to build up in this way. This puts me at $48.60 invested at this time.

Current Inventory

Not much new to report here just waiting for another sale to happen. I did pick up a stapler and staple remover for $.50 at an estate sale which was close to where I was driving one day to add to the 3 hole punch to list them all together. This takes the overall invested amount up very slightly at this point to $49.89.

I will continue to have patience in this endeavor because I’m not going to worry about selling something every day or every week at this point. As the inventory continues to build I will get there with sales happening more and more over time. If I don’t have another sale by the end of November I will likely go through my house and list some items I have lying around which I would donate anyway to get some more flow going, or I may start putting a few dollars a month investment into this to get the flow going a little faster. Hopefully, patience will pay off and there will be a sell before then. Either way if there a few more items added it is not going to get the flow happening much more frequently than now but every few items gets me closer to have a higher probability of selling something every month.

Current Inventory

I received an offer for the Biscuit mold and accepted it today. It sold for $13.00 and the person who bought it paid for the exact amount of shipping on the item. After all the fees were paid to sell it I profited $2.63 over the purchase price of $7.03. This item was bought on 6/29/22 and with it selling in 76 days its annual return on the amount invested would be 360%. The return percentage of this item was $2.63/7.03= 37.41%. With the ability to reinvest the amount you made in an annual interest rate and selling an item 4.8 times in one year you would arrive at an annual rate of return of 360%. This is another good win for the change jar flip. This increases the amount up to $46.09 from the initial start of $36.38. I am up $9.71 in profit, or 26.6% off the initial investment.

New purchases- Two Puzzles and a Coffee Cup

Once I dropped the sale off at the shipping store to go out I made another trip to a Goodwill. I found two Coca Cola puzzles I’m going to package together as one item and a Christmas coffee cup. I paid $6.91 for the puzzles and $1.18 for the coffee cup. I feel confident based on the amount of interest in Coca Cola nostalgia I will be able to sell both of these together and potentially make my first $10 plus in profit off of them. I don’t know much about reselling coffee cups, but think this may be a good area to try outside of puzzles, which I have a bunch of right now in terms of the overall inventory. This puts me at a total inventory value of $49.35 and makes me overinvested by $3.26. As I’ve said before I’m ok with this amount because I could likely find this amount of change around if I looked for it. I have 20 items and still expect to sell around one item every 30 to 60 days based on my inventory level. I’ll update again when something sells or I decide to find some free items to list.

Current Inventory

I have been thinking about how many items I need to get a consistent one item a month to sell. In this regard I found a little bit more change in my car, and went to look for more items in the under $2 range to build up to 30 items which should get me to around 1 item a month on average. I haven’t sold an item in one month at this point and will think about ways to get to the 30 items. If I keep the reinvestment amounts low and look for some free items or sell some items I have around the house I can get to the 30 items fairly easily. Looking back on my purchases I should have decided to invest to get the total of 30 items with the least amount of investment possible to ensure a sales moving forward. These three additional puzzles put me at 20 items. I will update again once another item sales or I acquire more items to sale. Consistency of a sale every month is going to be the best driving factor to grow the inventory to a level where the reinvestment into more and more inventory will allow the inventory to start throwing off as much as I started off with.

What the future amounts could look like

This is purely a thought experiment and I don’t expect the inventory to look like this in a year from now, but this is why I want to grow to 30 items to get one on average selling a month. With 30 items at an average of $3 per item of profit on each item sold. I am setting a conservative expecation to double on each item I buy right now at the minimum. The results wwill be different than the doubling amount as I go, as evidenced on the first sale I had on July 31st. In month ten this estimate takes into account the expectation of selling more than one item a month based on the number of items at a percentage of them. If this estimate is close the value will almost doubled by the end of 12 months. This might not seem like much, but this doubling could happen the next year easily too which would have turned $35 into $140. At $140 inventory there would be over 100 items at $1.18 per item and would average selling 3-4 items a month. At $3 an item this would be around $10 a month in profit from $35 to start with. With another year the inventory would be close to $300 and have around 250 items and likely sell around 7-8 items a month. This amount should be throwing off around $20-25 a month. This amount of money would start to be able to really grow the inventory in a different way than the build up for this time of consistency of sales a month. I’ll talk about that more later as the inventory continues to grow and what I will do. There are other thoughts which can go into this to allow the inventory to get to a level which is more significant. You could take a few dollars every month and invest it into inventory to help it grow too. If this was done by the end of one year you would have an inventory of around $100.

Current Inventory and Cash