After 5-1/2 years in Romeoville, it’s time for a new chapter in our lives. As of March 31, 2011, Kellie and I will be closing Simply Sold on eBay in Romeoville.
We first opened the doors for business on August 5, 2005 and we have truly enjoyed the past 5-1/2 years at Weber and Taylor and will miss the friendships that have been made possible through this business. Over the years, we’ve helped people raise money to remodel basements, take vacations, buy cars, invest in new business equipment, pay off debt, feed and clothe those less fortunate, serve charitable missions throughout the world, and much more.
In that time, we’ve taken over 5 million photographs, sold nearly 30,000 items, shipped products to more than 80 countries across the world, helped local residents create nearly $2 million in value from unused items, assisted many businesses in becoming more profitable, and aided charitable organizations throughout Chicago raise money to support their mission.
•We will be continuing to accept new items for sale until March 12 to allow enough time to get the items listed, sold, and shipped by our last day on March 31. There’s only two weeks left to get your items in for sale, so act quickly! We look forward to seeing you soon!
•For those of you who have items for sale at our store, we’ll be finishing the selling process for you and, don’t worry; we’ll still be paying your proceeds as expected.
•If you have something at our store that didn’t sell, we kindly ask that you pick it up no later than March 12. Unsold items remaining after that date will be donated to a local charitable organization.
•Throughout the month we’ll be selling desks, chairs, shelving, and other equipment. If you’re interested in something, stop by and we’ll see if we can work something out.
In case you’re wondering what’s next for us, Kellie and I are pursuing other passions that we’ve held for many years. Kellie’s first love is teaching others to create amazing works of art through quilting. She’s working with a few organizations in the local area to keep this passion alive. John has been working with the Bolingbrook Park District as a Certified Personal Trainer for the past few years. As a lifelong athlete, fitness has always been a love and being a trainer has given him the ability to share fitness and health with others. Recently, John has been offered an opportunity to expand his role with the park district and he’s accepted the challenge and the opportunity to continue helping others achieve their goals.
We look forward to seeing you over the next two weeks and helping you sell those remaining items. From our family to yours, we’ll miss each of you and look forward to seeing you around town!
We’re making a change to our store hours effective Wednesday, October 27. Saturday hours will remain the same, 10am – 5pm, to serve to on the weekends. Our weekday hours are changing to 10am-3pm from 10am-6pm. To accomodate special situations, if you need to drop off an item outside these normal hours, please contact us at (815) 293-0300 to make arrangements.
This guy named Darth came to the store the other day and asked if we were hiring. He was pretty convincing, although a little quiet, so we hired him.
Customer service didn't work for Darth
He started at the front counter greeting customers and researching items they brought in to sell. Honestly, customer service is not his strength.
The buttons gave him trouble
So we moved on to taking pictures. He did OK, but he had trouble with the buttons on the camera. I kept asking him to take off the clumsy gloves but he just stod there grinning at me.
Darth and Marion didn't work well togther
From there we moved on to shipping. What a disaster! The dude is like a bull in a china shop. Whacking at stuff with the tape gun. He’s putting shrink wrap on items like he’s trying to strangle them. What’s that all about? We couldn’t trust him with the delicate stuff so he’s no longer on shipping duty. He kinda pissed off Marion too. His breath isn’t the greatest and they started arguing about it, she threatened him with an atomic wedgie and we had to separate them.
Guard duty seems to fit him well
For now, he’s on night guard duty in the front window while we look for new employment for him.
Need a new employee? He might be just the guy for you. He’s only going to be around until October 24.
We’ve had over half a million views on our You Tube videos to date and they’ve made a big difference in the success of many listings. Most of the videos are designed just to show that the product does what it’s supposed to do. That is, designed to show that it works. This one was a little different.
Since I’ve produced over 100 fitness videos for Inspired Journey Fitness, I decided to take a different approach here and show ways to actually use the Bowflex Ultimate Home Gym.
In our most recent video, I show you how easy it is to set up and use the Bowflex Ultimate for five different exercises.
If you’ve got something that you’d like to sell and that item might be right for a video, bring it in to the experts and we’ll take care of it for you.
Take yourself back to 1982. For me, it was the beginning of high school and Pac Man was the hot game. I thought it was pretty cool when we were able to get a version that we could play on the old Atari 2600. It was the height of cool. Pac Man at home, and you didn’t have to feed a quarter into the machine for every play.
The old 2600 died many years ago and the games probably went into the trash with it. Too bad because they could have been worth something.
We recently received a large lot of old Atari, Colecovision, and Commodore 64 games. I’ll admit, even after five years in this business I was a bit skeptical but when I looked them up I found that they were selling pretty well. The Commodore games started receiving bids almost immediately after they were listed on eBay and the others have picked up a following too. By the time the three auctions had ended they generated over $500!
Do you have any old video games? If you’ve got a good sized collection (50+ games) with their original boxes, we might be able to help you turn them into cash.
I’ve talked before about how even things that are broken can sell. I’m not asking you to bring in junk. Let’s get that straight right up front. When someone comes in to the store and says “I’ve got some junk for you”, I’m not impressed. Junk is junk. Throw it away or recycle it.
Moving on.
Some things are not in perfect condition or sometimes not even in working condition, but if they’re the right things that someone can fix, they just might sell. Game systems are a perfect example. That old XBOX 360 might have gone haywire and you replaced it with something else. Someone out there wants that broken one for parts.
Here’s another example of something we’ve recently sold. We sell a lot of wheels. Aluminum wheels are soft and if you hit a pothole they stand a decent chance of bending. However, they can be fixed.
These were replaced with a new set and instead of scrapping them, we sold them. The seller gets a chance to recover some of his money and the buyer will just have to take one wheel to a repair shop, get it fixed, and he’ll be stylin’.
We’re selling 4 Bon Jovi and Kid Rock Tickets at Soldier Field on July 30. Tickets of all sorts sell well on eBay and these will do well also. It’s the hottest concert of the year!
Every time I hear Kid Rock’s name I think of a clip I heard on the radio. Kid Rock was at Wrigley Field and sang “Take me out to the ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch and what happens at the end just cracks me up.
This clip includes a bunch of other unrelated stuff at the beginning, so fast forward to about halfway through to hear the funny part.
If you’ve got tickets to sell, bring them in. If you’d like to bid on these tickets, click here now
We sold something this week that we’ve been working on for several months. That’s much longer than a normal sale for us, but we pursued this one a little more aggressively because it was a great opportunity for everyone involved, the seller, the buyer, and our store.
It was one of those types of items where there isn’t much of a market and you have to find just the right buyer. An interested buyer called and said he was deciding between our listing and one other off-eBay item in Pennsylvania.
He said he chose our item because we had a great video showing the product working.
It was the video! I think I was more pumped about the fact that the video made the difference than I was about the actual sale.
I love when we can do something like that to make the difference between selling and not selling. That’s why we do what we do.
What can we do to make a difference for you? Have we already done something that amazed you? Leave a comment on this blog and tell us about it!
We’re often asked the question, “what’s the wierdest thing you’ve ever sold”. While we try to stay away from downright quirky things that have no value to anyone, we’re not against selling something that a collector would really want but is a bit unusual. Sometimes you need a little fun.
Here’s one that really got us laughing. It’s Barbie’s friend, Growing Up Skipper.
Here’s the goofy thing about Skipper. You twist her arm around in a circle and, well, she grows up, or out, or both.
Do you have something odd that you’d like to sell, tell us about it below? Got something strange you’ve sold? Let’s hear about it!
