Advice For Selling On Ebay?

Well, I finally got my butt in gear and posted some things on ebay. They gave me the name doanl.dreis. All my stuff is for auction, since none of it is very valuable. So far, just one bid.

Don

When you get 100 posts you can register your ID with SCF and an ebay icon will appear at the top of each of your posts. Then we can all check out your items.

Just one more advice if you sell internationally from USA and have time to go to USPS office with the USPS kiosk.

I'd recommend to buy the country-specific labels and affix them instead of the generic stamps. The bar code saves you from the manual sorting mistakes by USPS operator (like Slovenia vs. Slovakia, Mauritius vs. Mauritania, etc.).

As soon as the mailing is in the correct country, the local post workers will handle it properly.

I found that it drastically improves the odds to reach the buyer in many exotic countries and the speed of the delivery.

The only issue is not to mix the labels because there is no way (at least I don't know) how to determine on which country the label works correctly.

1. I've not had any difficulty with my international shipments reaching their destinations.

2. Using the mountain of postage I have is infinitely cheaper and more convenient.

3. Some stamp buyers get VERY cranky if you do not put stamps on their ebay letters or parcels, to the point that you risk neutral/negative feedback by not using actual stamps.

Not worth the risk or hassle.

I'm not sure about the second part of the point 3 but as the saying goes: there are many ways to skin the cat.

There are buyers who will block sellers who use meters / printed labels. Many, many buyers request stamps to be used for postage when shipping a lot. It's an added bonus and makes a shipment much more presentable as well as collectable. I don't have issues with shipments because I use stamps for postage either. It doesn't matter where I mail things to - Haiti, Ethiopia, French Polynesia, Bolivia, etc etc. It all gets there the same.

Note - if you have a rigid stiffener card inside those envelopes you should be paying an additional 21 cents per shipment for the nonmachineable surcharge. Also I doubt your buyers like to have there addresses plastered on the net - might want to blur/block them.

Thanks, corrected the image.

I just received the general ebay Seller's Digest email just now - the new Top Rated Seller requirements are in effect. If you want to keep that 20% discount off your final value fees you must offer a 30 day return and same or 1 day handling (verified via tracking on domestic shipments). I wish ebay would only require tracking on items of a certain larger weight (4oz. or more) or greater dollar value of shipment. Silly to have such a requirement if you're shipping lower value / low weight items. No reason to mail a stamp or a cover via parcel rates.

I stopped chasing the FV discount about 10 squares back. Too many hoops to jump through. 1-day handling just simply isn't feasible for someone who works full time (and then some) in addition to ebay activities. Additionally, as you state, if you sell stamps, sports cards, stickers, or other small lightweight items, the tracking requirement just kills it right then and there.

The 30-day returns is a nonissue, because anyone who pays with PayPal has a 180-day return period anyway.

It would be better to wish upon a star. ebay does not want to be a platform for low value transactions. As a public company that must report quarterly results to the market, it does not make economic sense to earn pennies per transaction. As others have observed in other threads, the rational response of a stamp seller who wants to be a Top Rated Seller is to offer only higher-value stamps that can be profitably shipped using a trackable parcel.

As a buyer, I try to support dealers in that position by using a $50 minimum purchase from a TRS.

cjalermo - I could not disagree more. ebay makes money on sales volumes - and is not holding its breath for the $zillion transactions. Their seller's fees and paypal fees on small transactions (which most of mine are) are appalling. They do not suffer one iota for the low level stuff. And let's not forget - there is ZERO human intervention on 90% (give or take) ebay transactions. For them the money just keeps rolling in and they don't care one way or the other about the size of the transaction.

When two competitors compete for the same market they may become a like. A lot of what ebay does is so they be Amazon 2.0. ebay's tracking requirements for TRS status was probably born out of the desire to attract larger retail sellers like you see on Amazon.

I would also agree with CanadaStamp - high volume of low price sales can net a lot more than a few high price items that never move. It's what drives places like Dollar General and Walmart while places like Macy's suffers - as the old saying goes, "You'll never go poor by appealing to the lowest common denominator". Also data storage is not much of an issue these days so high number of cheap items is not an issue. If it was then they would have installed a minimum listing price ages ago.

Like it or not, buyers of most items like to see tracking numbers on their shipments, myself included. Now if I'm buying a $2 stamp, I don't expect tracking and I hope most other buyers don't, either, but a tracking number does add a layer of comfort to the purchase. ebay pushes tracking to make buyers more comfortable and to help reduce disputes between buyers and sellers. I don't see them changing that anytime soon. Another way to solve the problem would be for the USPS to offer tracking at a cheaper rate. If tracking on a letter package were, say, $1 (including postage), there wouldn't be much of a reason not to at least offer it.

Don, ddreisba, donal.dreis, are you satisfied with what you got for the R124?

Your listings could be improved with better scans, and by including backscans.

You could add a 2nd category for the Lots (Collections, Lots).

I agree with Zenzy about the slightly obfuscated scan, but I am not sure that a second category would help much. Also, crud on the back of used stamps should be soaked off to give the back a clean appearance. Absent a description, no one will pay much more than 10% of catalog value because the assumption would be that the stamp is damaged, if not defective. Also, the condition description should be filled out. If ebay fails to display it, it could give you a reason to go after ebay if there is a problem.

It seems that the item condition must be populated to make the condition description visible. Unfortunately, ebay doesn't support "Unused" as an item condition. Using "New" for an unused stamp would be a wrong unless the item is a sheet of stamps still in shrink wrap. In any case, the item condition won't show, at least for now.

Also, it is possible to print bar coded labels without postage on Endicia or order pads of barcodes from the USPS. The price of discount postage continues to drop. I sell surplus postage on ebay and prices realized continue to soften. There is little reason to use computer printed postage or use ebay shipping labels. The ebay Global Shipping program makes no economic sense for stamps selling for less than $400.