Liquid Rhymes

Last week I decided that some of the stuff I had sitting at home were taking up a bit too much room and so decided to get rid of it. Among the clutter at the house I decided I wanted to get rid of my last cell phone, a Verizon LG Dare, my old PS2 + games, and a unopened DVD box set of Lost Season 2 (which I had received as a gift but already had).

Among my options to rid myself of this old stuff I considered:

• Selling on ebay – I’d done this before with fairly good results, as far as I remembered
• Selling on craigslist – sell locally, which I’ve done before for things like tickets
• Giving to the goodwill – a solid option without monetary upside (except a tax deduction)

Knowing that ebay has a large marketplace I decided I to go with that route. I listed my three items on ebay, and I noted a couple of things have changed:

• ebay now has a nice system of matching an item to a stock description and category. This is great, and I assume a response to Amazon’s zshops catalog – it’s a great way to bring the structured catalog to the crazy bazaar that is ebay
• ebay limits your shipping prices for certain items based on it’s category and place in the catalog. This is probably great for buyers, as they know what they’ll pay, and possibly good for sellers as they will gouge less on shipping and possibly get higher prices for the items. On the other hand what this might do is just shift a higher price to the bid amount, leading to higher fees for ebay. I assume that’s what’s going on here. I got stung by this, read on to find out more
• ebay charges 15 cents per image listing that you host on their page. If you want to host your images elsewhere you can do that but you’ve got to edit HTML to do it. I did that, but I can see why others might not want to
• It took me a while to list my items: the steps which give the better user experience (finding categories to put the items in, selecting shipping details) take more time to list. I think I spent a little over an hour taking pictures and listing the items

I picked a 5 day auction, so on the day of the auction I madly refreshed my listings to see what would happen. True to my memory of before, the bids accelerated rapidly in the waning minutes of the auctions. The PS2 increased nearly $20 (about 40% of the ending price) in the last 5 minutes. After it was over I found:

• The PS2: sold for $58.50 (plus $15 shipping)
• Lost sold for $10.50 (plus $3 shipping)
• The LG Dare sold for $58.50

After the auction two of the buyers paid quickly: the PS2 buyer and Lost buyer. The LG Dare buyer emailed me to explain her 17 year-old brother was actually the one bidding, and he would pay me next week after he gets paid. She advised that if I could I might be better off re-listing the item – I’m not sure if that’s possible, so I emailed ebay to see what they advise, and I’ll update this when I hear back.

Because the PS2 came with so many things (18 games, the console, a headset, etc.) I wanted to charge around $20 for shipping. However, ebay caps the shipping amount to $15 so this was all I was able to list. When I went to the shipping place (a Postal Annex) I had originally packed it in a large box that I had laying around. Imagine my shock when the initial quote given was $46! I quickly inquired as to why, and having being told that the problem was the box size, downgraded to a smaller box, the smallest which would accomodate the PS2 and accessories. The end damage, however, totalled $32 after $24 for shipping, $4.09 for the box, and $3 for packing peanuts and “handling”. That’s $17 more than ebay would let me charge for shipping, and a significant percentage of my $58.50 selling price (29%). The PS2 sold for $73.55 with shipping, and after subtracting $31.87 for shipping and $2.43 for paypal’s fee I’m looking at $39.25 before paypal’s fees.

The Lost DVD was a similar issue – I purchased a USPS mailer envelope (with padding) and priority mail shipping to get a tracking number. This totalled over $7 when the maximum I was allowed to charge by ebay was $3. With the Lost DVD after paypal’s 69 cent fee for handing I’m only netting $5.80 for the unopened set, and that’s before ebay’s fees.

The shipping, of course, took nearly an hour out of my day. So I’m looking at nearly 2 hours of my time, a PS2, and a Lost DVD set for around $45. ebay’s policy of maxing the shipping costs below the sellers actual costs is going to help buyers, and possibly sellers who do lots of volume and have low shipping costs, but screws the small time seller.

Next time I’ll turn to craigslist or the goodwill.