Help With My Auctions On Ebay

OP, how big a town do you live in? If it's good-sized, your best bet is to attend estate auctions, stamp auctions, study CraigsList, and even auctions listed in the Sunday paper.

You find material (or at least I do) by buying a big messy lot of everything under the sun and selling off the good items piece by piece, building your capital every time, and buying larger and larger lots. At some point, you keep some items for your own stamp collection, and if you are skillful, they will be "free," more or less. Talk to all the auctioneers in town, and tell them if they email you that an upcoming auction has stamps, you will be there.

All this presupposes that you are able to recognize and separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Stay away from U.S. after 1935, unless you are paying 50% of face for mint stamps. You need reasonably up-to-date Scott catalogs, and it wouldn't hurt to have Gibbons, Michel, and Facit. If you don't want to do foreign stamps and especially covers, then your job is much tougher. Selling U.S. only is a hard slog, because there's so much competition, and, it's hard to BUY right.

So tell us your most comfortable strategy and the way you want to proceed, and the prospects for buying unpicked material locally where you live.

Lately I have been selling more postcards and paper memorabilia than stamps. About 2/3 of the stamps are going to previous buyers, now good clients because I've treated them right.

I like "local" sales, but then I'm in a metro area of 1.5 million. No postage, no returns, no fraud, and especially, no PayPal.

ebay name = screenwriter77 (nothing listed at present)

I am enjoying selling here, now that I begin to know what folks want, how to structure payments and postage and other details. I have also had good success on StampBoards in Australia, although postage is a killer, the absolute cheapest mailing costs $1.10 now.

My big goal for 2013 is to sell off $2000 worth of discount postage and put the money into coins. I have enough stamps unless I see a screamin' deal.

By the way, there are GREAT bargains on ebay, especially in foreign collections put up by amateurs, and large cover lots.

SILVER--------People who are making money selling on ebay ,don't disclose their method of continue success to others .

They put "Please review the rules." in red. in my initial inquiry. What rules did I violate.

You might want to review the "Posting External Links" in the Forum Rules (the button all the way to the right near the top of the page).

As Marx pointed out in volume 1 of his seminal work Das ebay, to make a profit you need to add surplus value to your product. What gives the product its surplus value is Work. And since I imagine you don't have a large gang of wage-slaves that you can exploit, the work is going to have to be yours.

What work did you put into the deal on your $2.50 stamp to ensure that it sold for $3 rather than 60c? Did you, assuming for a minute that the stamp was Togolaise, spend months of your philatelic life studying the stamps of Togo so that you could recognise a bargain when you saw it? Did you then spend several more weeks looking round the markets (both electronic and physical) searching for that elusive stamp which you knew was underpriced?

If you did this, and you still made a loss, then you were very unlucky, but these things happen. Keep up the hard work and eventually it will pay off.

But if you didn't ....

Rarely will anyone tell you exactly how they make money, so you need to do your own research and be prepared to put in some long hours. Try to find your own personal philatelic 'niche' and then milk it. Someone will/may figure it out eventually and copy you, but by then you should have discovered new 'niches' to exploit. I have found some very profitable niches over the years in stamps and coins, although one of my best ones whilst still profitable is now is only returning about 50% of what it did when I first started. However all the time I am researching new avenues to exploit.

As one poster mentioned, new members cannot post outside links...but in your case I think it might be the mention of your ebay selling handle.

I don't know..i have been on ebay since 98 and I don't know the answers..geez if it was easy everyone would be doing it...i have something that someone out there might want..what is the least amount I would be willing to take for it ?

In order to be successful, I suspect you need:

(i) a strong knowledge of stamps;
(ii) an understanding of what sells on ebay;
(iii) a source for same; and
(iv) a sound strategy for using ebay successfully.


(ii), (iii) and (iv) are applicable across all types of items one might sell on ebay, including merchandise that is basically fungible, but (i) is pretty important for being successful in the stamp arena, and probably the hardest one to come by.

I doubt that there is a substitute for putting in the time.

I looked at your current listings and find that our advice is falling on deaf ears; you once again have a sizeable number of "Wave" stamps that you will lose money on [new listings in the past 12 hours, or perhaps relists], and mini sheets of 20 current U.S. 2c, 4c, 5c, and 10c definitives that you will probably lose money on, after postage costs.

You have a 2c Battleship revenue starting at $3 that's worth 10 cents at most. You have a damaged 2c Vermont of 1927 started at 76 cents that's worth 10 cents. You have a Kansas revenue starting at $3 that's worth a quarter. You have a 4c Canada train starting at double Unitrade. You have a Quebec revenue that's considerably underpriced, in my opinion, although I haven't seen the back of the stamp.

This combination of overpriced items and currently available mint U.S. (at less than cost) virtually guarantees that you will lose money in the long run.

=====
I see you are in a major metro area (Dallas-Fort Worth), much larger than mine, so there should be TONS of stamps around, in estate auctions, CraigsList, private sales, etc., etc. Needless to say, the important thing is to learn what to buy and how much to pay. But you should have no trouble finding more philatelic offerings than you could ever look at.