A Blog in the Life of Dustin Wallace

Here’s a quick update on what’s been going on:

• We had a nice loooong holiday break, but we only spent one day at our own house.  My holiday break (aside from traditional Christmas fun) involved moving my in-laws camera store to their house (they closed it on Dec. 31st) and tearing out my parents’ kitchen.  Hadassah and Karys had a blast shopping at the outlets while I worked on my parents’ kitchen in Gilroy.  We spent a lot of time in Bakersfield and had a great time playing Pit, Taboo and Catchphrase.  We ate at Famous Dave’s for the first time in Gilroy and we are hooked on Devil’s Spit sauce.
• Karys has started crawling!  Being around all of her cousins while they were running around really helped her mobility.
• The youth choir closed out our watch-night service to bring in the new year.  They did a great job.  They’ve been singing out quite a bit.  They’re next excursion is this Friday at Bro. Delgado’s church in Stockton.
• I’ll have a new announcement shortly regarding a new and exciting music department responsibility that my wife and I will be undertaking in 2009.
• Sun’s upcoming layoffs are very close at hand.  We’ve been told they’re coming late this month.  If I stay, great; if not, then I’ll have a four month severance package.
• Amazon sales are doing well.  They’ve made up for the recent lack of piano students.  I dropped my piano lesson rates in January.  Hopefully I’ll have more students soon.

That’s all I can think of for now!

I completed my first month as an Amazon seller!  It has been a blast so far.  I can’t say that I’ve made much money yet, but my inventory is payed for as well as my shipping supplies.  I’m in the black and my intuition leads me to believe that this will be a profitable enough endeavor to continue.  I sold 74 books in October.  Here are the in’s and out’s that I’ve learned thus far:

• Keep an eye on the forums, but don’t believe everything you read.  There are a lot of spiteful people on the seller forums and I have yet to even attempt to post.
• Don’t be dismayed by penny book sellers.  Yes, these nuts make money selling books for one penny!  They make about thirty-five cents on the shipping credit.  They sell huge volumes of books and have very refined systems.  These are the guys that buy used books by the truckload.  In the end, many buyers see penny books and don’t trust the sellers, so they look further down.  I’ve sold enough books against the odds to know it’s not worth worrying about.
• Some sellers use scanners attached to their PDA’s to look up book values quickly while searching for new inventory at yard sales, flea markets, thrift stores, etc.  I just use my BlackJack II to type the ISBN’s in at Amazon.com.  It may take a little longer, but I use my intuition to determine what books to look up.  These sellers who scan, scan everything, which probably takes just as much time.  I was at the flea market and saw a girl going through book after book with a scanner.  Needless to say, I was annoyed.  I looked through a few boxes of the books, took mental notes of a few titles and stepped aside to look them up on my phone.  I was able to return and buy a few long before she even got close to them.  Not only are the scanners expensive ($100’s), but there’s a monthly fee ($10’s) and you had better be making a hefty monthly profit for it to be worth it.  A lot of sellers say it’s not necessary and that you can build up your intuition so you don’t need a scanner.
• If you want to make money, cut costs.  I went from buying a couple envelopes at the post office for $1.50, to buying a couple boxes at OfficeMax for about $0.80 a piece, to buying a couple hundred on eBay for about $0.20 a piece.  Now that really helps you see more profit just off of the shipping credit you receive.  I saw some cool boxes that would be nice to use though.
• Rather than waiting in line at the post office, I conceded to using PayPal to print USPS postage labels.  You are forced to pay eighteen cents for delivery confirmation (which probably isn’t a bad idea and it’s about a dollar cheaper than at the post office).  It’s a lot easier to hand the packages to my postman than wait in line, so it’s worth that eighteen cents a package (and I’m getting something for that money anyways).
• Getting a Pro Merchant account is worth it ($39.99).  It pays for itself after 40 books sold per month because you don’t have to pay the $0.99 listing fee.  Not only that, but your listings won’t expire.
• It took me the first month to get my sales spreadsheet the way I liked it.  I keep track of daily sales, weekly sales, monthly sales, purchases and overall cost/revenue.
• I need to work on re-organizing my inventory.  Right now it’s just in categories.  I should just alphabetize everything instead.  It will make order pulling easier as the inventory grows.  I currently have about 350 items in inventory.  My goal was 300, my next goal is 1,000.
• I’ve determined not to obsess about my prices every day.  At least once a week I go through the entire list and check prices to see if I need to tweak them.  The price is not the only thing that attracts a buyer’s attention (although being near the top does help).
• The least fun part is customer service.  I had one customer who failed to read the condition description and blamed the book quality on me.  He threatened to come to my house for a $13 refund!  After this buyer’s negative feedback, I campaigned previous buyers to return to provide me feedback.  Shortly after, my feedback didn’t look so ugly.  I also made the mistake of switching two orders and immediately bought them replacement copies on Amazon with expedited shipping.  Fortunately, one of them was a fellow seller and was understanding.  The other buyer was also very gracious.
• This won’t ever replace my day job!  It’s a nice escape though.

There are probably more things I could say, but I’m drawing a blank now.  I’m off to list more items!

About a month and a half ago, Mark handed over the youth choir to me.  I have always been very content to just play, knowing how much effort it takes to lead.  I barely have enough time to keep up with the material Mark dishes out, let alone come up with my own and teach vocals.  Somehow it has worked out.

The youth choir sings on the fourth Sunday night of every month.  I continued the previous rehearsal schedule of one hour on the third and fourth Sunday evening before service.  However, I’m realizing that I’m going to need more time and will probably extend the third Sunday rehearsal by half an hour and add another hour and a half rehearsal at the beginning of the month, maybe on a Saturday.  I’m also realizing how great sheet music is.  Even great is that many Gospel songs are available in digital sheet music format for instantaneous printing.  This is extremely helpful considering the hours I spent transcribing chords and vocals for “Praise Is My Weapon”.
Since I began teaching them, they have already sung out at two events.  In September, they sang at Experience in Tulare.  This past month, they sang at our youth pastor, Lawrence Warfield’s, father’s church in Stockton for their eighth anniversary service.  I don’t think these young people have ever sat through such a long service (about four hours!).  I don’t think I’ve sat through a service this length since the Mark Morgan revival days at Shoemake’s.  I knew it was going to be a long one when I saw the soundman switch tapes in the recorder long before Vincent Manyweather got up to preach.  I sat on the organ for about four hours (without a cushion!).  I felt that for days!  There were a few choirs, a couple praise dance teams and nearly every minister that got up to speak sang a solo.  I tasted my first greens that night in their fellowship hall.  Nothin’ like fried chicken, yams and greens!  We had a great time.

In all, I am very proud of this group of young people.  When we restarted the youth choir, much tighter restrictions were placed on members.  This caused the group to shrink to much less than half its original size.  The word I repeat to them throughout every rehearsal is “discipline”.  Formerly, there were many adults at their side enforcing good behavior and attention.  They are all on their own now, aside from myself and our youth pastor.  They have done a remarkable job at learning and remembering their parts.  At times, I have been impressed that their volume met or exceeded the original group over twice their current size.

I am reminded of how volatile young people’s lives can be.  It is surprising to see what they can go through in just two months.  It is my desire to be an example that they can look up to and pattern their life after.  Please pray for this ministry!  I see it as a source of strength for the core members of our youth group.  Something tangible to reveal and validate their impact even as youth.

I went online to pay our second supplemental property tax bill today and saw that the upcoming year’s property tax bill had been posted.  Cool!  A proposition was passed that cut our assessed home value down by about 30%.  I’ve been waiting to see the impact on our property taxes for over a month now.  I really liked what I saw until I saw the last tax code - 51150 R&T 480 Noncompliance.  That didn’t look like a tax to me, so I called the tax collector who referred me to someone else who recently retired who left a phone number on their voicemail for someone else who connected me with the assistant to the assessor.  Wow!  I found out that it was a change of ownership form that the title company had failed to fill out the purchase price on.  Usually, if this happens, the assessor mails the form to the new owner to fill out and return.  Of course, we didn’t move in for nine months.  After digging around, they found that I had called in January to provide the proper mailing address.  They then resent the form and I promptly filled it out and returned it.  Because of my quick turnaround, they agreed to remove the “tax”.

Thirty minutes on the phone saved me over $200 on my property taxes.  If all these taxation discussions during the election hadn’t been going on, I might not have been curious about what taxes were included in my property taxes.  In my research online, I found that about 250 such R&T 480 Noncompliances had been issued over the last tax year bringing the county nearly $100,000 in revenue.  All from one little form that you sign when you buy your home!  However, this form is very important as it is how the assessor finds out the purchase price of your home.

So keep an eye on those property taxes and make sure they’re actually taxes and not penalties!

My first day of business on Amazon.com is over and I’m pretty happy so far.  I made a net profit of about $25.  Yep, that’s after shipping and packaging.  In my zealous state, I went to Goodwill and picked up some more books to list.  There’s a lot to learn when it comes to selling books online.  Only one of my books will probably be a decent sale.  I’ll be hitting up thrift stores, garage sales and our local flea market to build my test inventory.  Looks like I’ll be moving my inventory to my shelving in the garage.

One thing that befuddles me is all the books listed for one cent.  Shipping is a flat $3.99 which is given to the seller.  Usually this is more than is needed to ship the item, so there is some left over.  But Amazon takes a cut off the top, so I couldn’t imagine these sellers of one cent books making more than nickles, dimes or maybe quarters on each sale.  The only way I could see it being profitable is if the seller is selling a ton of books.

One thing I’ve learned is that the market changes overnight.  So I have to review my inventory and modify prices.  Believe it or not, sometimes this can mean raising your price.  This is addicting! 

Visit my Amazon.com store…