Thursday, February 17, 2011

Adventures in eBay Selling 2011 - February Edition

So as I probably blogged, last Wednesday I put up 50 items on eBay, hoping to score some cash before I go out of town this weekend to visit the in-laws and stay up at a cabin at Sundance. Yes, the Sundance, the actual hill, not Park City. Nice eh?

21 of the 50 items I listed were single trading cards, mostly Chrome stuff that I've been keeping for just this purpose. I put all of them on for a 99 cent start price, with only three exceptions (and they only started at $1.99), with free shipping. Just for giggles I figured out that if I sell an item for 99 cents, I end up making a whopping 8 cents. So that paradigm isn't really going to work for me, except that hopefully I'll get some nice feedbacks and every item I sell counts towards getting a discount on my fees. It also gets rid of a bunch of cards, and those who want them get a pretty good deal.

So I'll keep doing it, even though I'm not going to make a whole lot, I really need to get rid of most of the stuff that I don't need, and honestly I can't keep track of trades anymore.

What WAS nice is that a couple of lots of Comics sold for decent cash. Not that I didn't lose money on them, since you know I bought them at cover price or near cover price when they were new, read them and stashed them away. "Y The Last Man" #2 though #38 sold for $50, which isn't bad, except that I paid 37x$2.95 apiece for them. I also sold about 20 issues of "The Amazing Spider-Man" from a couple years ago for $25. Again, a little more than $1.00 per issue, which cost me somewhere between $2 and $3 per issue.

Still I'm not complaining, at least that stuff is selling. I have tons of stuff I can't off-load because I will only use Priority Mail Flat Rate (because frankly I'm not going to bother buying boxes or envelopes, and I like the fact that I KNOW how much shipping is going to cost). The thing is, when you're buying 5 or 6 comics at buck apiece, adding 6 bucks to ship doesn't work out very well.

In any case, I now have about $60 to play with this weekend. And that's the important part.