Attention Ebay shoppers
A couple of months ago I came to the decision that I was going to start selling cards on Ebay. Well, that hasn't quite happened yet. First, I wanted to build up some feedback so I wasn't asking buyers to blindly trust me. Second, I wanted to see how the process worked from the buyer's end. And third, I haven't quite got around to doing anything yet.
I've spent the last couple of weeks perusing the Magic listings for good deals. A couple of times I saw something that I wanted to pounce on, but I hadn't set up my Paypal account, so I let them go by. Finally last week I got off the sidelines and set up my accounts. By the end of the week I had won (go me!) three listings. And I had learned some lessons about Ebay.
The first thing that I learned is that items that seem like bargains are only so until you calculate how much you'll spend in shipping. For example, I was looking at a Reaper miniature that usually retails for between $3-5 at the store. The list price on the figure was $.99. OMG! What a deal! What do I have to put in shipping? $4.00. Not such a deal. However shipping costs don't directly scale with the number of items so when I bought 3 miniatures at $1.04 with a shipping cost of $5, I was still keeping even, if not coming out ahead. But people seem to in some cases disregard the shipping cost and wind up spending more than they had planned on spending.
The second thing that I learned is that the listings that I was most interested in were not the ones that looked like "L@@K! L337 GEAR HERE! H@T!!!!!!!!" but rather the ones that told me what they contained ("3 Reaper miniatures"). The items that I was most interested in were the ones where I was told exactly what I would get. In the Magic listings there are a lot of "repacks," or a grab bag of cards that *might* but most likely *won't* contain a high dollar card. There are a lot of these, so they must be successful some of the time proving that there is a sucker born every minute.
The third thing that I learned is that setting a low price isn't always bad. Frequently I came across a listing that I might have been interested in at a lower price, but when their first price started near my max price I wasn't interested any more. A lower dollar amount can stimulate interest. You can implement a reserve price to make sure that you get your amount, but if you set it too high then you can get screwed. Besides many dealers appear to build some of their profit margin into the shipping costs.
The last and most obvious thing is that Ebay can be addictive. It is so easy. You can find just about anything you are interested in and have it shipped to your house. And on the flip side, it seems like it would be so easy to make money using it. All you have to have is something to sell. The promise of a sucker out there willing to take your junk and give you cash is almost irresistable. It's like a garage sale where you only have to haul all of your junk out of your house when someone tells you that they will in fact buy it.
Not that whatever I'll eventually be selling will be junk. Far from it. It'll be invaluable.
I've spent the last couple of weeks perusing the Magic listings for good deals. A couple of times I saw something that I wanted to pounce on, but I hadn't set up my Paypal account, so I let them go by. Finally last week I got off the sidelines and set up my accounts. By the end of the week I had won (go me!) three listings. And I had learned some lessons about Ebay.
The first thing that I learned is that items that seem like bargains are only so until you calculate how much you'll spend in shipping. For example, I was looking at a Reaper miniature that usually retails for between $3-5 at the store. The list price on the figure was $.99. OMG! What a deal! What do I have to put in shipping? $4.00. Not such a deal. However shipping costs don't directly scale with the number of items so when I bought 3 miniatures at $1.04 with a shipping cost of $5, I was still keeping even, if not coming out ahead. But people seem to in some cases disregard the shipping cost and wind up spending more than they had planned on spending.
The second thing that I learned is that the listings that I was most interested in were not the ones that looked like "L@@K! L337 GEAR HERE! H@T!!!!!!!!" but rather the ones that told me what they contained ("3 Reaper miniatures"). The items that I was most interested in were the ones where I was told exactly what I would get. In the Magic listings there are a lot of "repacks," or a grab bag of cards that *might* but most likely *won't* contain a high dollar card. There are a lot of these, so they must be successful some of the time proving that there is a sucker born every minute.
The third thing that I learned is that setting a low price isn't always bad. Frequently I came across a listing that I might have been interested in at a lower price, but when their first price started near my max price I wasn't interested any more. A lower dollar amount can stimulate interest. You can implement a reserve price to make sure that you get your amount, but if you set it too high then you can get screwed. Besides many dealers appear to build some of their profit margin into the shipping costs.
The last and most obvious thing is that Ebay can be addictive. It is so easy. You can find just about anything you are interested in and have it shipped to your house. And on the flip side, it seems like it would be so easy to make money using it. All you have to have is something to sell. The promise of a sucker out there willing to take your junk and give you cash is almost irresistable. It's like a garage sale where you only have to haul all of your junk out of your house when someone tells you that they will in fact buy it.
Not that whatever I'll eventually be selling will be junk. Far from it. It'll be invaluable.
posted by mypetrock at 11:48 AM
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