How Can You Auction An Item For $0.01 With Free Shipping?

I bought a WW collection of about 3000 stamps being offered on Craigslist with the intention of pulling out what I want to keep and then selling the remainder. As part of my preparation I want to get an idea of how well lots of 10 - 50 stamps sell on ebay. So I search collections, lots for Sold listings and get 140,000 hits. As I'm looking at the list I'm seeing MANY sold at $0.01 with free shipping! Am I missing something or how is it possible for a seller to do this?

Terry

Many "stamp dealers" find out selling stamps on ebay is not an easy business.

Maybe the vendors sell addresses?

(I guess I should say I'm kidding.)

So what is ebay's and paypal's cut of 1 cent?

Not much on one transaction. But on the aggregate...

Terry

Reminds me of the skit on Saturday Night Live satirizing a company who's slogan is "We Make Change." They go into great detail in their mock TV commercial on how many different ways they can give you change for a dollar. One of the "employees" then says, "People often ask me, so how do we make money? And I tell them - VOLUME."

All yucks aside, don't offer something on ebay for a price below which you are willing to sell it.

Good question timcca! Of course, the seller is counting on multiple bids to make the sale worthwhile. Personally, I wouldn't waste my time using this selling strategy.

I think an equally good question would be, "How many items that sell for 1 cent with free shipping actually get shipped to the buyer?" My guess would be that it is a very small percentage.

some of these sellers are buying feedback, and even have shills do the "buying? and thus never have to actually ship the item

I think it is part of the auction selling process that doesn't always work. The penny idea has been around for a time. I once offered when I managed the camera store a $19.95 tripod for a penny. It got people to come into the store and turned out to be a fantastic day as lots of other material was sold. I limited my sales to stock on hand but had 500 of them. Still there was complaining when I sold out and I eventually had to prove that I had and sold 500, a pain in the ass but I did it.

The 1¢ sale price on ebay is actually very clever and very effective as long as the item is worth much more than the penny. We all want something for nothing (or close to it) and this approach gets lots of buyers excited and following the item. Remember the purpose is to find a price that "clears" the market which is why ebay actual sale prices are more accurate at predicting value than Scott. I follow several sellers that use this approach.

I get the enticement of a 1 cent opening bid but it is the offer of free shipping that shocked me. Free shipping guarantees you lose money unless the item is bid up past your cost for the item plus the cost of shipping. The hundreds of closed sales I saw on the first pew pages I looked at certainly did not cross that threshold.

Terry

If it's for a simple stamp or set, I'd just charge somewhere between 50 cents and a dollar for shipping. That wouldn't scare many buyers off and then even if it sells for a penny at least I'm not losing money on the deal. But yeah, I'm sure most of these are sellers who expected the item to sell for enough to cover shipping and then some. Really, if you could design a software 'bot that just combed ebay for listings at $.01 and free shipping and then placed a $.01 bid for you at the end, you could end up with a lot of stuff for basically nothing. That is, assuming you weren't picky about what the "stuff" was, of course.

It takes time to get a following of buyers to get use to the way an ebay stamp seller presents their starting price of their lots.

There is a couple of sellers in the community that have 1c or 99c starting prices and do very well as there following of buyers is strong and the buyers are looking for their listings.

With my listings I start at a price that just covers my costs. So my buyers are use to this.

As a long term seller needs to be consistent with their listing strategy.IMO

Some of you are missing the OP's point.




and




This is very different from putting up decent stamps at 1c and letting them rise up from there.

Do that 1000 times with shill bidding and it costs $10 to get 1000 feedback.

some good points were made. Perhaps the person got free envelopes and stamps to eliminate the shipping cost