It’s that time again for me to round up my earnings from last month as well as report my progress towards paying off my student loans.
As I preface in all of my income reports, the figures that I report below are from part-time re-selling (anywhere from 8-15 hours per week). My first and full-time job is my family and my home. Re-selling is something that I do on the side. I have no intentions of turning this into a full-time career — I just want to pay off my loans and enjoy a little treasure hunting while I’m at it. With that in mind, if you can dedicate full-time hours to re-selling, your numbers will most certainly be higher than those that I report on this blog.
eBay Income
I managed to list a few more items during the month of May than I did the previous month — but not by much. I really have not sat down to tackle liquidating my eBay inventory full force, so this month (June) will involve 100% focus on eBay so that I can get rid of the clutter and finally breathe again.
I grossed a total of $1031.48 in eBay sales:
This is an increase of $497.61 over last month’s numbers.
The following were my expenses:
- Shipping fees: $176.50
- eBay fees (final value fees, listing fees, subscription fees, etc): $74.56
- PayPal fees: $38.81
- Cost of goods sold: $228.41
My net profit for the month was: $513.20. Unfortunately, that number just does not sit well with me. Despite having at least two items that I did not make much of a profit on, I still don’t enjoy seeing almost $300 going towards fees alone. If I’m going to get hit with fees like this on eBay, it doesn’t make sense for me not to hand over a majority of my inventory to Amazon FBA and let them handle shipping and storage.
Amazon FBA Income
My sales on Amazon surprised me. I expected to maintain figures close to what I grossed last month, but was pleasantly surprised towards the last two weeks of the month when I experienced a surge of orders.
I grossed a total of $4,142.56 in sales, however, the figure shown below does NOT include any refunds for the month. The actual figure is $3753.47 in gross sales when you account for refunds.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I did not meet my goal of selling 200 units. I thought that I would given the personal challenge that I set for myself last month, however, I still have a lot of unsold units sitting in Amazon’s warehouse from that challenge. Nonetheless, I DID surpass selling over 100 units. I have never done that before. 🙂
Here is a breakdown of my expenses for the month:
I sold more units this month than I have since I started FBA, so I expected my expenses to increase. This figure also does NOT include the cost of inventory which amounted to $780.19.
After all expenses, my net profit was $1662.83.
Total Reselling Income
With eBay and Amazon FBA combined, I grossed $5174.04 and took home a net profit of $2176.03. I believe that is a good figure for an average of 10 hours per week of work, however, I also feel that there is room for improvement. One of the ways I hope to increase that amount is to start charging for shipping on eBay items. That is one thing that has seriously cut into any profit that I make from selling on eBay.
Student Loan Update
I’m happy with the progress so far on my loans. I started this blog with my loans around $14.5k and I’m down to $13k as you can see below:
Hopefully by my next income report that figure will be just under $12.5k as I try to increase the amount I pay down each month.
Goals…
I set quite a few goals last month. Let’s take a look and see what I actually accomplished:
- Sell 200 units on Amazon FBA.
–> Unfortunately I did not meet this goal. I sold 162 units which is 38 units shy of my goal. I will revisit this goal again some time in July or August when I can focus on Amazon FBA again. - Start contributing $500 per month towards my student loans.
–> I finally reached a point where I feel that I make a consistent amount of money per month that allows me to contribute $500 per month and still re-invest in inventory as well as pay other miscellaneous expenses. - Begin working on a new passive income stream. —> I took the first steps in ironing out an idea for a website. This includes drafting content and creating a marketing plan.
- Decrease the amount of time I spend on social media AND my laptop. —> My social media hiatus only lasted a little while and I still spend too much time on my laptop. I’m no longer active on Facebook, but I still need to decrease the time I spend on my laptop.
- Begin liquidating my eBay inventory and list all of my pre-owned VHS tapes in lots. —> Although I listed more items this month than I did last month, it barely scratched the surface. Also, I did not list a single VHS tape which was what I wanted to accomplish more than anything else.
Despite not accomplishing every goal that I set, I still feel good about the progress that I did make.
I have a few goals that I would like to accomplish this month:
- Ship my last batch of Amazon FBA inventory by 6/11 and leave Amazon alone for the rest of the month.
- List ALL of my eBay inventory and re-donate or throw away what I know will not sell or isn’t worth my time or sanity.
- Try to earn $2,000 on eBay this month.
- Stop buying new inventory until all eBay items are listed.
- Begin charging shipping on all of my eBay items. No more free shipping.
- Work on designing my niche website. This website will help generate passive income.
Retail Arbitrage Challenge Update
I talked about the personal challenge that I set for myself in my last post. You can read about it here. I believe this challenge was the catalyst in helping me break past selling 100 units and actually getting me close to reaching my goal of 200 units.
I sat down to review the numbers and here are the results:
I decided to compare those numbers to the thrifted inventory that sold last month. As you can see from the photo above, my thrifted merchandise came out on top, however, if I would have sold out of all of the inventory that I purchased for this challenge, those figures would be tied (in terms of net profit).
The question that I posed in my last post was whether or not this challenge was worth my time. To be honest, I feel that it was even though at times I felt like I wasted my time because I was making so little per item sold. After seeing the final numbers “on paper,” I can see now that those tiny profits per item really paid off.
Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret. All of those retail arbitrage items were purchased across two days. I spent no more than 5 hours buying that merchandise. Most of that 5 hours was spent scanning and driving; shopping was the easy part.
The reason it took two days to source was because I went home after the first day to research where all of the other stores within that chain were located. I then mapped out my route to hit them all the next day and buy what remained. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hit them all because by the time I got to the second store on my list, my funds had run out. …well actually, I went overbudget by $38.
By far, that was the quickest sourcing trip I ever experienced and it was well worth my time. On top of that, 90% of the merchandise I purchased did not require me to remove any stickers so processing was a breeze as well.
Moving Forward…
I won’t be focusing on Amazon FBA this month, but come July (Lord’s willing), I will undertake a retail arbitrage challenge again. This time, however, I will be increasing my spending and avoiding some of the buying/sourcing mistakes I made the last time around.
I hope that your month of reselling was just as profitable.
Until next time,
Yolanda