The River, The Ranch & The Bay

I am a contributor to a group blog – These are the DSR’s of Our Lives – get it?  LOL  If you scroll all the way down that page – you can hear the theme music so if you are an old Soap Opera Fan you will enjoy that!

Last week, one of the contributors had a great idea – a DSR Blog Tour! So you, my lovely reader, are going to get to know all my fellow DSR Blog editors.  This is going to be a lot of fun!

My first ‘interviewee AKA The Victim’ Is someone you all Know well and hear her each week on the Show! Mz Beth Cherkowsky. So now you will know her even better!

1 – Please tell me about yourself and why you are an eCommerce entrepreneur?

I’m a veteran mail order seller in the collectibles area. Did that for 30+ years. Depression Glass, Art Pottery and then in the 90’s Action figures. I’m in eCommerce because no one wanted to hire a short, fat, mouthy 55 year old when I needed a job again. So I went from “hobby seller” to Powerseller in 30 days.

2 – how did you pick your business name and what do you sell?

We’ve gone thru a couple of names. I was Action Figure Alley back in the 90’s (even on eBay and Amazon). I wanted Queen of the Auctions but Lynn Draille beat me to it so since we always collected depression glass and we’d bought a mother lode of depression glass at an auction two weeks in a row, we became Depressionglasswarehouse on ebay.

3 – what online venues are you currently selling on and are there others you plan to expand to in the next year?

I sell on Ebay, Amazon, the Usenet Google groups, Bonanzle, Biblio and soon…my own website again. The expansion plans are to move to my own website. I’ll use eBay for quick turn over but put most stuff on my website for the long haul

4 – What are your goals for your business in the next year?

To increase sales by 20% – We did $49,000+ Gross Sales last year. I want $60K for 2009

5 – Tell me a favorite story about your eCommerce career.

Back in 1993, pre-ebay I used to buy cases of action figures at wholesale from manufacturers like Kenner/Hasbro (when Meg Whitman was their CEO), diecast from a Hotwheels/Nascar distributor, wholesale fromMcFarland Toys, etc. I had a very rudimentary website set up and got calls all month. I was selling about $3,000 a month in TOYS!! stuff like we bought my son at Woolworths or Kaybee. But I was getting them wholesale. In 1996, I met with a toy company employee at Toy Fair in New York and she mentioned they had a trailer load of a “chase figure” that had gone unclaimed. (well 2 different ones actually) Chase figures are the one figure in the box that is made in short supply for a variety of reasons, could be the modeling, generally it’s a villain or a female character. So I asked about buying a case or so. She came back about a month later and said $5.99 each. I think she thought I’d buy a case or 2. So I bought I think 20 cases of each. I sold the individual figures on my website and most went in the $50-60 range – some as high as $100. At the time in 1996, the Japanese economy was roaring and they were fanatical collectors of action figures in this toy line. So one afternoon I got a call from a man in California who wanted whatever I had left in those two figures. I said $500 a case – 12 figures to a case PLUS you pay shipping. He said yes. He paid by credit card for 12 cases, $6,000 and I shipped them that day. HE was taking them as “baggage” on a plane to Japan later that week and he already had a deal to get $100 a piece for the figures. So he doubled his money on each case and I got about an 1000% profit ($600 divided by $60) . In fact, with that money and some savings, we closed down our ebay store and traveled thru Europe for 5 weeks. I hope to make another “wise” investment like that any day now. (from my mouth to God’s ears).