The day I became a hikikomori

XIV

I feel like I'm stuck. When I started selling Funkos I could see how my inventory expanded little by little, but for the last month or two I feel my inventory has remained basically the same. If I got 5 new Funkos I'd sell 6 in the next few days, so I had to be constantly looking for new ones and, because of that, I became a little less cautious; I ended up getting deals that weren't as good as I thought, meaning I was basically filling my inventory with Funkos nobody really wanted to buy, or at least nobody wanted to buy at a fair price.

So, I lowered the price of some of those figures and tried to solve that "stuck" problem searching for lots. The first one I found consisted of 69 Funkos—yeah, I know, 69, nice, whatever. They were horror figures and some Disney ones nobody really wanted, but they seemed to be at a good price, so I investigated every single figure and, with the help of my excel sheet, I came to a conclusion it was a good deal indeed.

But it could be better: when I checked the Q&A section of that post, I discovered whoever was selling the lot was willing to lower the price a pretty good amount. I then asked them to modify the post's price so I could buy it, he/she/they told me that offer was only valid if you came to his/her/their store, which was in a near state, so I thought about going there.

Nah, I didn't want to take the highway with that much money or that many Funkos; bad things could happen in a Mexican highway.

With that in mind I made him/her/them an offer that would benefit all of us, to my surprise, he/she/they accepted it. I couldn't miss that opportunity.

The problem was I didn't have that much money at the moment: most of my investing money was in my Amazon seller and my eBay equivalent—MercadoLibre—accounts, waiting to be liberated—when you sell something there, you have to wait like a week to get your money.

But I could ask for a loan in MercadoLibre: they had been sending me spam about a pre-approved loan they had for me, a loan up to the equivalent of $3,000USD. I didn't need that much, but a loan could help me a lot.

I then entered my account, looked for that pre-approved loan and, surprise, surprise, it was not there anymore. It turns out they cancelled the deal because in the last weeks I had cancelled 3 of my sales—I had already sold those Funkos somewhere else, and I've forgotten to remove the post—so I didn't met up their metrics, and my reputation as a seller decreased.

In other words, their algorithm didn't trust me anymore. That also affected my sales overall—and still is—but I'll talk about that later.

I couldn't use my credit card because my credit's limit was not that high. And obviously I didn't want get a loan from some shady guy who would end up breaking my legs or something if I didn't pay him, so I decided to just save until I had that much.

But one day, while I was buying groceries, I had an idea.

"Hey, what if you just use your savings?"

Yeah, I could totally do that, even though I really didn't want to, but if I did I'd only need to get it back eventually—I'm halfway through rn. I'd save any interest rates a loan would have, and I could buy the lot ASAP.

And that's why used part of my savings to buy that lot.

A couple days after, I had all 69 figures. It was a Thursday, and it took me until Friday night to inspect them—a few of them had some details in their boxes, even though all of them included protectors, but luckily none of those figures were any valuable—and post them one by one in Amazon, Mercado Libre and Facebook.

People really, really like horror Funkos: I was constantly selling them online, and a lot of people from Facebook were interested in the ones I had left. Most of them wanted buy, and one guy only wanted to trade. He had a couple nice figures, which I could trade him for some of the ones he wanted and sell them with a higher profit—and I did—but the rest weren't worth a lot, and he also wanted some of the most valuable figures I had. More of him later.