Saturday, June 30, 2012

The eBay Learning Curve


The whopping 10 auctions I have listed on eBay have finished and I have sold a grand total of… wait for it…dun-da-ta-ta…1!

Yeah, that’s right one.  I sold Gambit for 3.99 which I listed with a cost of shipping and handling for $7.00. According to my Paypal account I will be receiving a total of $10.37. I guess the $0.62 difference is the cut for eBay, which is not bad. 

Now, before the auction of the item actually concluded I tried to figure out how to best package the item for shipping. The guy at the post-office told me if I used a one of the Priority Mail envelopes it would cost around $5. However, I told him I did not want to use an envelope because it did not seem like it would protect the item well enough. Then he pulled out a Priority Mail box and told me shipping that way would cost a little over $6. That seemed to be the better option so I took the box home and waited for the auction to finish. 

Now that the auction had completed, while I was waiting for a conformation of payment I started to stare back and forth at the box I got from the post office and the Gambit figure. I got to thinking it is such a huge box for a small item.  If I was going to ship it in that box I was going to need a lot of packaging material to keep it from moving around. I looked at the other Priority Mail boxes that had ordered from the post office earlier and found one that seemed to be a better a fit. It was still a relatively large box for the Gambit figure but not as large as the other one. I decided to use it and I got the package ready to ship for the next day.

This morning I headed over to the post office to send off my first eBay sell ever. By the way is there never anyone in-line at the post-office? When I finally got to the register and handed the cashier the package I was told that shipping the item would cost me a grand total of $12.10. Now, that price was a bit higher than what I was told earlier. It turns out that the box that I had packaged it in was not a better fit after all. It was a flat rate box.

Well, I guess I could have just decided not to go through with the shipping at that moment. However, there turned out to be bit of a mix up with the Paypal account that had I linked to my eBay account. While the past couple of days I was reading on eBay that the payment was still pending my buyer had already sent his payment through Paypal.  It was also already the weekend and I didn’t want to wait any longer on sending out this item. I decided to go through with it and take the loss in hopes that I will still get a favorable feedback rating so that more buyers would be willing to bid on my auctions.

So as for my first eBay sell ever I ended up in the red at $1.37. I guess I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience.

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About

I've been a huge comic nerd for a long time. It was my dad who first introduced me to comics when I was very young. He gave me his small collection of comics at the time and ever since then I’ve continued to add to it. Over the years I have collected hundreds of comics, toy figures, and other memorabilia. And though I would really love to hang on to them, due to unfortunate circumstances I have to let them go. *sigh* So, the purpose of this blog will be mainly to showcase what I have up for sale on eBay. Most of the items will be comic related memorabilia but I also have a few other “types” of collectables that I hope to be getting rid of as well. And every once in a while in between the post of what I have for sell I may just post some of the crazy ideas that pop-up in my head which of course you can simply choose to ignore. Thanks for stopping by.

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