Ebay vs. Etsy - Ebay Wins

Ok: I did a little experiment that actually did not involve enticing people with free shipping or any other incentive - in fact what I discovered worked so well that I was surprised.


Last month (technically starting on 8/27) I was given a block of free listings by Ebay. I have sold on Ebay for many, many years. I painstakingly redid nearly all my Etsy listings so they could be listed on Ebay at the same time. I figured this was a "no harm no foul" thing since if one sold on one site or the other, I could simply deactivate the listing on the site where it was not sold. 


On the first day of listings, I sold items immediately on Ebay that had been sitting in my Etsy shop for at least two months. I even inflated prices on Ebay given that the commission is higher than Etsy to cover my costs comparably. Some items I marked up anywhere between $10-$40 over what I was asking on Etsy. I sold 26 MORE items in that specific time frame on Ebay than what I would have sold on Etsy. In comparison I only sold 18 items on Etsy and they were mostly some of the least expensive items I have in my shop with the exception of two winter coats. Furthermore, the 26 items I sold on Ebay does NOT count all the sports jerseys, costumes, modern clothes, etc. that I also sold on Ebay that I CANNOT sell on Etsy.
 
On Ebay, buyers have the option of offering less than what the Buy It Now price is - people love this feature. Even if they are getting $5 or $10 knocked off they are more likely to buy because they feel they are getting a great deal (I mean who does not want to pay less?) You also have the opportunity to "haggle" a price back and forth. 


However, I do not believe this is the sole driving force behind the large sale discrepancy between Ebay and Etsy. On Ebay, I have triple the views...TRIPLE in comparison to the views I have received on Etsy in the same amount of time. Therefore, I have concluded that since Ebay gets more exposure, the likelihood of sales are double that of Etsy at (likely) any given time regardless of price. Given that selling items via the internet is my job for the time being, it is my prerogative to push as many items out the door as possible in the least amount of time. With the results of this experiment, I believe from now on I will list on Ebay first for 30 days, and then if it does not sell it will go onto Etsy.

Adding a Etsy Store to your Facebook Page

Check out this awesome thing! After following a link someone posted on Linkedin, I found that you can link your Etsy or Ebay shop to your Facebook business page for FREE! Yes, this was FREE! I had looked into this before, but all the sites I found you had to pay for the service. This link is provided by EasySocialShop.com and it literally took me 3 minutes to set it up ready to go. I was impressed! Time will tell if it brings in more buyers...

Glorious Clematis

Glorious Clematis! Here in Indiana this year, we had a verrrrry late spring. It was very cold and we had quite a bit of snow late in the season. Because of this, my spring flowers were pretty wimpy. My tulips came up late and many did not get a chance to bloom :( However, I went out yesterday to find my salvaged clematis was GORGEOUS!!! I picked this baby up as a wimpy little twig at Menards for $0.50 last summer. These typically go for $14-$18 each. When I found the pot among some of the other way far gone point of no return plants, it was waterlogged, the roots were exposed, and there was only one little sprig of green in the center of basically brown mush. For $0.50 I could not go wrong so I brought it home and hoped it would survive to grow onto my awesome salvaged door I picked up last year as well. And just look at it! This even bloomed before my huge purple one I have had for years. Just goes to show you, with a little love, the wimpiest things can become something special!

Washing, Cleaning, & Caring For Vintage Clothing

I have had people ask me before how I care for and clean my vintage clothing. When I tell them I use dish soap they just are like, "huh? what? why?" Well, I have found that this is the best way to actually get a garment really clean.

Clothes washing soap (both powder and liquid) do not form suds like dish soap does. They do not bubble up as much because obviously you would have a disaster like this:

Ok this is NOT my washer, but if you WERE to put dish soap into your washing machine, this would happen. Because of this, clothes washing soap and liquid is heavily scented to mask any odors that do not come out of clothing in the wash. Newer deodorants, I have found, are very difficult to wash out of clothing on a cold cycle. Same holds true for liquid cosmetics, lip gloss, body glitter, indoor tanning lotion, etc. In recent years I have found a lot of vintage dresses that have been used by young females for "themed" parties and proms and they tend to have the above mentioned items on the clothing. Most people today have "energy star" rated washers too. What this means is that they use a lot less water than washers made 20-30 years ago and the result is that you cannot actually fill a washer to full capacity and clothes do not get as clean as they do in a vintage washer (depending on how full the washer is with the clothes to water ratio).

Now, what does this have to do with vintage clothing? The vast majority of my vintage clothes are made from polyester. Polyester is entirely synthetic so it is a plastic in a sense. Polyester is also like a sponge that will soak up anything you have on your skin as well as anything else you come into contact with - even other smells like mothballs or cigarettes. When I first started selling vintage clothes, there were some really nice pieces that were either badly stained or had atrocious smells. I would wash them in the washer with liquid soap on cold or medium heated water (never hot, it can damage the seam stitching). Sometimes even after 2 washes they would STILL smell or have stains. Why? I had no idea. I would even SOAK items for hours and then wash and they would not be clean.

This lead me to using dish detergent. Dish detergent has a degreasing agent in it. This is what will remove the cooked off food mess from your dishes. This came to me when I had a vintage reversible coat that would not come clean. The coat was polyester, and it was quilted so it had filler inside. It not only was in the most mothball saturated closet in history for years before I bought it, but one one side of the coat (which was cream colored) it had a brownish splatter stain that to me looked like motor oil. After two washes in the machine you could STILL smell mothball AND the stains were basically untouched. I even pretreated the stains with Shout in the second wash with no change. So, about to give up and pitch the coat, I filled up the kitchen sink with cool water and dish soap and plopped the coat in. I also pretreated the stains with some more dish soap.

That water was the grossest brown color in a matter of 10 minutes! Even after 2 washes in the machine. The problem was just the greasy stain on the coat would not come out with the washing soap. The dish soap not only got the stains totally out, but it eliminated all the mothball smell. From this point on, almost everything is washed or prewashed in dish soap if it is super smelly or has questionable stains. The glory about this is that dish soap will work just fine in cold water. I have found that clothes washing liquid does not do as well UNLESS you get specific cold water wash liquid that is like $3 more than the regular and the bottle is smaller. I use generic dish soap from Target and it works great (I like the apple scent).

Now, if the clothes are machine washable and they are just smelly (almost all vintage clothes will have some kind of smell and will need to be cleaned) just put them in the washing machine and wash them with whatever wash soap you prefer. They will turn out great! If the clothes are "problematic" I suggest you try dish soap. :)

Here are a few tips I use every day! 

For stubborn stains I use the dish soap and sometimes use a MEDIUM bristle tooth brush in a circular motion. I first try this on the UNDERSIDE of the fabric (even if you cannot see the stain on the inside of the garment) because this can prevent fading or little "pills or balls" appearing on the fabric.

Heavy Duty Goof Off (in the metal can) will get permanent marker out of polyester jerseys - especially "puck scuffs" from hockey jerseys. I have found that for the most part, Goof Off will not take the color out of the fabric, just the stain. This product will also get sticker residue off of jeans. It will remove chewing gum too, but not as easily as with sticker residue.

Arm Pit Stains: I have yet to find out how to completely remove these but this seems to help:
1 tsp Dawn or other dish detergent
4 tbsp peroxide
2 tbsp Baking soda
This makes a pasty mix that you can scrub on with a tooth brush then leave it on for a while then rinse out.

You CAN hand wash Merino wool and cashmere sweaters as long as you DO NOT pull, twist, or wring it out. I wash my sweaters in cold water with dish soap then lay it flat on the bottom of the bathtub and let the shower rinse it out. I then take a bath towel, lay it on the floor, and put the sweater on it. I then roll this up and squish it to get the water out of the sweater. You will saturate 2-3 bath towels this way, but just hang them up and then they dry and can go back in the cabinet AND since almost all the water is out of the sweater it will not stretch or deform. I wait until it is completely dry before I put it back on a hanger to avoid "hanger shoulders".

If you have a garment (usually a sweater) that has a color that runs (probably red) you can hand wash it and then after you rinse it out, let it sit in a sink with ice water (you really need to use ice) so that the color will re-set. Then use the above mentioned towel method and it will prevent color bleeding (I discovered this when washing Christmas sweaters).

You can use a shoeshine brush (unused obviously) to brush and fluff fur coats and this does not pull or tug on the fur.

You can use vinegar mixed in water instead of fabric softener. I am personally allergic to fabric softener and it has SUCH a strong smell that a lot of people find to be "perfumy".

You can also do a "vinegar steam" to get cigarette smoke stench out of clothing! Fill the tub with about 1 inch of the hottest water you can run. Dump in 3-4 cups of vinegar. The vinegar vapors will be STRONG so keep the bathroom door shut or your whole house will smell like it was pickled. Hang the clothing on a rack or cord above the water in the tub (I use a shower tension rod I can remove to hang in the center of the bath tub) and hang the clothes on hangers from this. The steam from the water will permeate the clothing and neutralize the cigarette smell. You need to let the steam process work for about 2 hours for best results. This works well for coats and things that cannot really be washed (like wool pea coats and embellished sweaters). If the clothes smell like vinegar, just hang it outside for a bit and it will go away.

You can use a blow dryer set on hot to remove "dents" or impressions in leather and patent leather.

Etsy and The Non Existent Shipping Calculator

Ohhh Etsy...why do you have a non existent shipping calculator? It makes everything so EXTREMELY difficult to determine shipping costs ESPECIALLY since the post office is constantly changing their rates and shipping restrictions.

I can remember when I first started on Ebay and it cost no more than $5.45 to send anything anywhere. International was cheap, Canada and Mexico were considered to be part of the US, there were fewer zones, you could send MASSIVE boxes with little extra cost, anything under 16 ounces you could send with stamps, yadda, yadda, yadda. Fast forward to today and every, single, thing is taken into account with shipping and it is costing an arm and a leg. Furthermore, prices vary WIDELY depending on the zone, which used to only fluctuate $0.20 or so now can command a $20 difference.

Take the picture at the top for example. That thin dress only weighs 12 ounces inside an envelope. Because of this I can mail it First Class Mail for under $5.00 within the Continental US. If it weighed 13.1 ounces or more, it must then go Priority Mail or Parcel Select which can be between $7-$8. This is if it fits into a pre-made and distributed Priority Box...BUT if it is going to Alaska or Hawaii it would cost $12-$13 because they no longer send "Parcel" packages there.

If that same item (the dress above), weighing 12 ounces, had to go into a box 1 inch larger than 12X12X12 it would cost $33.00 to send it to California! WHAAAAAAAAAAT! Yes, I am serious.

I got into a pickle on Etsy selling hats. The hats weigh virtually nothing, but I had to make my own boxes so that they would not be bent or curled. Not knowing that the Post Office changed their box rule to 12X12X12 - it used to be a 106 inch total of all sides and it would ship for the normal price, I only charged someone $10 to ship a hat. If the hat had gone within my own zone, it would have cost the normal rate (less than $10). The one going to California cost almost $37.00! I was livid! I had to send the hat Parcel Select to avoid losing money on the sale, and now I have to charge triple the cost to send the hats. How is this fair? 

Because of stuff like this, it is beyond my comprehension as to why Etsy does not have a shipping calculator like Ebay has. Below are some examples of recent costs to send to certain zip codes: PLEASE LOOK at Chicago - Chicago is in the SAME shipping zone as me and as you can see, the differences are DRAMATIC.

California 90210
12 ounces - $6.45 Priority. 1 pound 8 ounces - $10.25 Priority. 12X12X13 Box 12 Ounces - $41.95.

New York 10019
12 ounces - $6.00 Priority. 1 pound 8 ounces - $8.75 Priority. 12X12X13 Box 12 Ounces - $34.65.


Alaska/Hawaii 99546/96727
12 ounces - $6.95 Priority. 1 pound 8 ounces - $11.25 Priority. 12X12X13 Box 12 Ounces - $48.15.


Florida/Texas 33040/79821
12 ounces - $6.20 Priority. 1 pound 8 ounces - $9.50 Priority. 12X12X13 Box 12 Ounces - $38.80.


CHICAGO 60018
12 ounces - $5.60 Priority. 1 pound 8 ounces - $5.80 Priority. 12X12X13 Box 12 Ounces - $6.60.

Isn't this ridiculous!?

Mary Alice Hadley Pottery

A few weeks ago I was out "junking" and I found a bag of these adorable drawer pulls. They were heavy and hand done so I knew they had to be expensive. I scooped them up not knowing anything about the maker M.A. Hadley. Well, it turns out that M.A. Hadley is referring to Mary Alice Hadley of Louisville, Kentucky. I did know that Louisville had and still is a major pottery hub since there are amazing deposits of clay in Southern Indiana. 

Mary Alice, born in 1911, became a nationally recognized artist at a VERY young age for her whimsical designs. In 1939 she began putting her designs onto pottery. Having come from a well established potting family, she whipped up plates and bowls for herself and for friends who loved her designs. In 1940, she and her husband opened the Hadley Pottery Company in Louisville and has been extremely successful ever since. The Hadley factory is STILL in the original building in Louisville and it features some of Mary Alice's original art, murals, and pottery. Despite the fact that Mary Alice died in 1965, her designs live on given that Louisville natives bought the company in 1970 and it has since sill remained known as Hadley Pottery.

The blue gaze you see is Hadley Signature Blue, and they are the only company to use this color. 

These are also designed to be extremely durable - and you can tell because these are very thick and solid pieces. According to their site, all their pieces are microwave and dishwasher safe - and they have been made the same way for over 70 years.

Aren't these adorable?! They have the cutest country theme, and although I do not have the same style going on in my house AT ALL (Everything in my house is Mid Century Modern) I can appreciate solid, American craftsmanship and design any day! M.A. Hadley pieces are only made for limited amounts of time apparently, so once a style is gone, you really have no way of finding it again. New knobs retail on their site for $14.50 a piece, but I can say these are well worth it because they will last a lifetime I am sure. In case anyone is interested, you can visit the website here.

Parrot Tulips

EARTH DAY! Check out these amazing Parrot Tulips I have growing in my garden! 

Here is a close up!

 

I also have these funny daffodils! 

Still Working on Website

I have acquired my domain through GoDaddy but I am trying to build a site at Wix. So far, I am very pleased with the Wix system and their tools (very easy to understand), but I want to make it "perfect" of course before launching it.

Etsy and Twitter

My sales have picked up recently on Etsy so I decided to try and put more effort into my social media marketing. I have had a Facebook page for Gray Cat Vintage since 2010, but I never really used it and no one ever visited it aside from family. I guess I really did not know what I was supposed to do to generate interest in the page. Fast forward to now. Last year or the year before I got on Pinterest. I have several boards with many followers, but my most successful board is for Gardening and Outdoor Ideas. Since people were looking at my pins, I also made a board for my Ebay and Etsy sales - to which I immediately had people "following" that board. 

Why was this successful and the Facebook page was not? Since I do not post EVERYTHING I sell on Pinterest, it is not flooded with stuff. I pick the "highlights" of my listings and include those. I think that the "less is more" idea was more favorable than just linking a zillion listings to Facebook - which was what I did in the beginning and no one ever visited the page. Now, I update the Facebook page with "news" including recent listings, updates on sales, popular items, etc. and I have found a few more people following the page. 

The biggest difference however has been that my Facebook page is linked to Etsy. See, Ebay does not really allow you to do this. Yes, you can link Ebay with Facebook but it will upload things automatically and self promote Ebay on your page which is not something I really cared to do. Etsy simply provides a link from my shop page directly to Facebook. Super easy - no hassle. Because of this, I also obtained a Twitter account in case in the future I want to promote sales or special deals.

In case anyone wants to visit my:
Pinterest page is here.
Etsy is here.
Facebook is here.
Twitter is here.
Ebay is here.

Asbestos Tile and Cutback Adhesive Part 2

Ok well I was apparently too ambitious on this one. The cutback residue on the wood floors is impossible to remove without hiring someone with an industrial sander to grind it off. Since the thicknesses vary, this can and will create a totally uneven floor surface and could have sanded the floor so thin it would have caused damage. Sometimes people can steam the floor to remove the cutback, but it is laid on so thick, this option will not work for my floors. 

Furthermore, there is no transition between the kitchen and the dining room. It looks almost like they did the kitchen last and laid the wood floor separate from the rest of the house. It is the same wood and it is level, but it is totally choppy where the kitchen meets the dining room. My only option now is to have new sub floor put down and install my funky, vintage salvage yard tile over that. I am sure it will turn out just fine :)

Added note: Well, poo. LOL! When the old floor was removed and the new sub floor was laid, it actually covered more surface area than the old floor. Let me explain: The old floor ended about 2 inches from the cabinetry closest to the dining room. (None of the rooms in my house are even or even perfectly square, but I will get to that in a minute). The carpet in the dining room had to be pulled back to make enough room to lay the sub floor. My friend who did this work laid the sub floor so that it met up with the actual CORNER of the kitchen - where in reality the original floor should have ended in the first place. 

Now, back to the rooms not being even - when the house was built the only thing I can think is that the layout was either totally different from its present state, or the person who built it did not really know what they were doing. In my dining room, there is a double window - a double window that is not centered in the dining room. It actually encroaches into the kitchen making it very visually awkward. Not only is the window not center, but the wall that separates the house (in the kitchen) is not lined up with either the edge of the window OR the cabinets.

Back to the floor "oops" I made - since the sub floor now looks more proper it did make the surface area I need to cover larger. Sooooo, I do not have enough of my vintage tile. I was about 6 tiles short (you have got to be kidding me). I knew there would be no more of this tile because I bought all the pieces they had at the salvage yard. So, I went back this weekend to try and find something to salvage this whole project. I found tile that was the same thickness, but not even close to the same color - or even the same size. The tile I bought originally is 16X16 and the new tile I found is 12X12. So, now I had to come up with how I could make this work. The only thing I could think is that I could make a border around the whole kitchen in the new tile and use the old tile to fill in the middle.

This will either look totally cool and unique or completely stupid. I am SO UPSET that the pictures I took of the original floor and the demo were accidentally deleted from my camera. I will try and update this with pictures of the new sub floor and tile soon.   

Vintage Asbestos Tile & Cutback Adhesive

Ohhhh man what a nightmare! One day I decided that I hated the heinous 1980's faux brick beige sheet linoleum that was on the floor in my kitchen. I went to a salvage store and I found some large 16X16 squares of vintage school floor tile that I thought would look groovy and much better than the nasty old stuff that was currently on the floor. I (for whatever reason) assumed that the sheet linoleum that was vinyl was the only thing adhered to the floor and that there was probably sub floor beneath it. Welll....yea, that was not the case at all.

My house was once my grandmothers house and she was a heavy smoker which was why I really wanted the linoleum gone. The vinyl layer was actually very easy to pry up because it had become quite brittle with age and nicotine permeation - it had after all been on the floor for probably 30 years. However, the vinyl was laid over the COOLEST 1950's vinyl that sadly was too damaged by the other vinyl adhesive to keep. This vinyl was gray speckled with gold which is very similar to the tile I found at the salvage yard but without the gold. This tile was also a vinyl, but it had a paper backing on it that was adhered to yet ANOTHER layer of flooring. Once I saw the paper backing I knew it had asbestos in it. What a lot of people do not know is that asbestos was put in just about everything because it was a great binding agent and it was fire retardant. Now we know its a cancer causing agent and you should wet it down and/or have it professionally removed because you can inhale the particles.

Well, I was about half way through  the removal of the first two layers of flooring before I thought to myself "hum, I should probably wear a mask". Anyway, with the mask now on I removed the rest of the two top layers of flooring. This is where the problems began. 

The first layer of flooring was really thick green marbled asbestos tile. This was adhered to the floor with this black, goopy, sticky tar that I found out is called Cutback and it was used in the 1930's to lay down asbestos tile. This stuff is almost impossible to remove. Luckily, the area in front of the sink and around where the appliances were the tile and cutback came up together relatively easy. The center of the floor was another story. The cutback was laid down about 1/4 of an inch thick. I read on another blog that a lady rented and used a wallpaper steamer to remove her asbestos tile and cutback, but knowing it would take a few weeks of intermittent work it did not seem practical to rent a steamer. So, my mother remembered that she had a heat gun at the house and we started melting the tile and the cutback to get it off the floor. 

If the floor had been sub floor I would have just said forget it and put another layer of sub floor over the mess and tiled over it with my new groovy tile...but...Under all that tile mess are hardwood floors that are the same as the rest of the house and they are in perfect condition. So, now I feel compelled to save the old hardwoods and refinish them, which means I need to get ALL the old tile up and get as much cutback off the floor as possible. I took some pictures that I will post later, but as of now we are just about done removing the old cutback....To be continued...

Studio Lighting

Last year for my birthday my boyfriend got me the BEST gift EVER - and by that I mean he really thought about this and how I would use it and it really changed how I do business. He got me a EZCube light kit. The kit had two different sizes of soft boxes, 3 studio lights, and accessories for photographing jewelry. With the soft boxes I am able to make small items look like gallery art and the lights can be used with or without the boxes to create professional looking photographs. 

Now, I have an extensive photography history dating back to high school, so I have/had an idea of what to do with lighting already. But the kit makes everything so easy anyone can do it. To illustrate the difference this is a picture taken in my office with sunlight passing through the curtains. Now, the curtain I have up casts a peach sheen into the room and no matter what setting I changed on my camera, it still picked it up. If there is no sun and I must use an overhead light, it will generally look "off" when photographing clothing.

This is a picture taken with all 3 studio lights set up. There is a halo light, a small light with diffuser, and a large light with a diffuser. If my office was wider, I would be able to put the lights in ideal areas - but with low ceilings and not a lot of room I was somewhat pleased with how these turned out. As you can see, the weird sheen from the curtain is avoided and you can see where the lights are positioned by the shadows on the wall. The studio lighting also picks up true colors MUCH better - especially noticeable in the pic of the kimono where it has a black background and multicolored neon flowers. BUT - I was not liking the shadows AT ALL. I did not like that is looked like "museum" lighting since such lighting would be more appropriate for a vase or lamp. So....onto the third lighting set up.

I removed the halo light since it was causing the gray cast in the upper left hand corner. I also lowered the two cube lights with the diffuser covers to the floor and pointed them upwards. I put "daylight" swirl bulbs in the ceiling light and turned that on - as well as removed the curtains completely from the windows on a sunny day.  As you can see now, all that light has allowed for a white background, solid colors, good contrast, saturation, and realistic in terms of actual colors.

I haven't used the jewelry props yet, but maybe in the next couple of weeks I will be able to show how that turns out :)

Garden Door

Last summer I picked up the coolest vintage door at a salvage yard for $10! It is aluminum with leaded glass at the top and a screen in the middle. It even has a letter door! Hopefully by this summer, my roses and clematis will have grown up the screen! It looks great flanked by my 1950's concrete pink flamingos and bright blue flower pots.

First Etsy Sale!

I am so excited that I made my first Etsy sale! I was really surprised at how many people looked at the item I sold because when I had it listed on Ebay, hardly anyone paid attention to it. Today I am going to list more similar items that were also "unsolds" on Ebay to see how they go!

More Web Adventures

Ok...so GoDaddy's web builder sucks. It is beyond too difficult to edit, and it also bogs down the net speed really badly. You must open at least 3 windows at a time then, half of the stuff you do then try to save will not actually save. Then, there is the unfortunate thing where you go into "preview" and accidentally X out the window losing all your work....yea I am working with Wix now since I wasted about 3 days with GoDaddy...