People on Ebay are stoopid!!

[d000hg]

What a waste of bloody time. Anyone who says they're making a mint doing that is talking crappola.

Firstly, the fees for advertising, selling and paypal take a significant chunk out of the process. Secondly the postage is a pain, and thirdly do you know how long it takes to pack up/do the envelopes/postages etc for 200 games a week?? I do and your example sounds highly implausible. Not enough margin in it.

Depends what you count as "a mint". If you can make a profit of £1 per item (after P&P) then you could be on £200/day which IS a mint for a regular person who's alternative is some boring job at the council for £20k.
If you can do higher-price items then you could do more - I thought about this a few years back, with the idea of writing some software to find when a shop suddenly slashed the price on a Lost boxset; buy and sell before eBay noticed and then move onto the next thing. I did it manually once but was too busy to every try it out. Easy money though if you don't mind it too mind-numbingly boring!

[Gentile]

What a waste of bloody time. Anyone who says they're making a mint doing that is talking crappola.

Firstly, the fees for advertising, selling and paypal take a significant chunk out of the process. Secondly the postage is a pain, and thirdly do you know how long it takes to pack up/do the envelopes/postages etc for 200 games a week?? I do and your example sounds highly implausible. Not enough margin in it.

From the sound of that, I don't think you've quite grasped how e-bay works. What advertising do you think he was doing? And he didn't have a direct relationship with PayPal, or any other payment provider, he had one with e-bay and that was it.

As for stuffing 30 jiffy envelopes a day and sticking labels on them - he reckoned the time taken was about 45 minutes each night, plus a stop at a post box each morning. And he'd spend 20 minutes of his lunchtime each day checking out the local second-hand games shop.

If you're selling 200 games a week at about £20 each, a third of which you're making 100% markup on, that's about £1,300 a week. Not too shabby for something he was doing in his spare time.

[fullyautomatix]

I mainly use Ebay to sell. Its surprising how much some people are willing to pay for some tat.

I have used ebay in the past few months to buy also , for example, a laptop adapter, printer cartridges etc.

[Gentile]

I mainly use Ebay to sell. Its surprising how much some people are willing to pay for some tat.

I have used ebay in the past few months to buy also , for example, a laptop adapter, printer cartridges etc.

It's impulse buying, isn't it? I've never used it myself, since the very idea of being in an online auction for second-hand items of low inherent worth seems like madness to me, but I can quite believe k2p2's anecdote earlier about someone paying £38 for some McDonald's Coke glasses. It may be tat to most people, but as soon as it has a rarity value by virtue of not being available any more any commodity becomes valuable to somebody somewhere. There are even some people out there that still buy VB5/VB6 skills!

[MarillionFan]

From the sound of that, I don't think you've quite grasped how e-bay works. What advertising do you think he was doing? And he didn't have a direct relationship with PayPal, he had one with e-bay, and that was it.

As for stuffing 30 jiffy envelopes a day and sticking labels on them - he reckoned the time taken was about 45 minutes each night, plus a stop at a post box each morning. And he'd spend 20 minutes of his lunchtime each day checking out the local second-hand games shop.

If you're selling 200 games a week at about £20 each, a third of which you're making 100% markup on, that's about £1,300 a week. Not too shabby for something he was doing in his spare time.

"From the sound of that, I don't think you've quite grasped how e-bay works. What advertising do you think he was doing? And he didn't have a direct relationship with PayPal, he had one with e-bay, and that was it. "

Do you know how E-Bay actually works and what the costs involved in it our. Initial advertising costs (listing prices) - Paid to Ebay, then in addition to that for every sales (Paid to Ebay), then if someone pays using Paypal (which most do, there is a Paypal charge, this comes from a different account). Oh and relisting costs. At that turnover there should be VAT paid as well.

So for 30 jiffy envelopes per night, he reckoned 45 minutes. That's 90 seconds per envelope. I can tell you from experience that aint happening. Get the address from Ebay, check the payment, check the account, print out the address, respond to the customer. Then you're forgetting the amount of time it takes to list on Ebay. You can use Turbo Lister, that can reduce your advertising rate of 12 mind numbing adverts per hour, down to say 20 or so an hour.

20 minutes a day checking out his local second hand games shop.

So he was buying and selling 10000 games a year was he? So that means he should have a feedback rating of 10000 for each year. Let's say, he's been doing it for 3 year, thats 30000 feedback.

Lets have a look at his Ebay account then?

It's impulse buying, isn't it? I've never used it myself!

Well thats obvious from your last comment. What was that about knowing something and shouting it loudly?

[fullyautomatix]

It's impulse buying, isn't it? I've never used it myself, since the very idea of being in an online auction for second-hand items of low inherent worth seems like madness to me, but I can quite believe k2p2's anecdote about someone paying £38 for some Coke glasses. It may be tat to most people, but as soon as it has a rarity value by virtue of not being available any commodity becomes valuable to someone somewhere. There are even some people out there that still buy VB5/VB6 skills!

More than impulse buying its the determination to win an auction. Instead of bidding at the last minute a lot of punters bid on items which start at 99 p and then somehow want the item at any cost. During this bout of bidding and counter bidding they lose the ability to google the price for the item on Amazon etc.

[MarillionFan]

More than impulse buying its the determination to win an auction. Instead of bidding at the last minute a lot of punters bid on items which start at 99 p and then somehow want the item at any cost. During this bout of bidding and counter bidding they lose the ability to google the price for the item on Amazon etc.

Actually it's not even the impulse. That has gone by the wayside. Most people Ebayers use a sniping tool these days. I use Goofbay (which is quite good). In fact you can use that to type in a Users Profile and it will do an analysis of what they've sold, the listing costs etc. Very good way to analyse a business and see when someone is telling porkies about how much they make.

[Gentile]

More than impulse buying its the determination to win an auction. Instead of bidding at the last minute a lot of punters bid on items which start at 99 p and then somehow want the item at any cost. During this bout of bidding and counter bidding they lose the ability to google the price for the item on Amazon etc.

Interesting. I think you're right that's a big part of it.

[stek]

I was bidding on Fender guitar, bad condition needing a total restore, thought I might snap up a bargain, went for just a bit below a fully restored A1 one....

[fullyautomatix]

"From the sound of that, I don't think you've quite grasped how e-bay works. What advertising do you think he was doing? And he didn't have a direct relationship with PayPal, he had one with e-bay, and that was it. "

Do you know how E-Bay actually works and what the costs involved in it our. Initial advertising costs (listing prices) - Paid to Ebay, then in addition to that for every sales (Paid to Ebay), then if someone pays using Paypal (which most do, there is a Paypal charge, this comes from a different account). Oh and relisting costs. At that turnover there should be VAT paid as well.

So for 30 jiffy envelopes per night, he reckoned 45 minutes. That's 90 seconds per envelope. I can tell you from experience that aint happening. Get the address from Ebay, check the payment, check the account, print out the address, respond to the customer. Then you're forgetting the amount of time it takes to list on Ebay. You can use Turbo Lister, that can reduce your advertising rate of 12 mind numbing adverts per hour, down to say 20 or so an hour.

20 minutes a day checking out his local second hand games shop.

So he was buying and selling 10000 games a year was he? So that means he should have a feedback rating of 10000 for each year. Let's say, he's been doing it for 3 year, thats 30000 feedback.

Lets have a look at his Ebay account then?



Well thats obvious from your last comment. What was that about knowing something and shouting it loudly?

Maybe she exaggerated a bit about the numbers involved just to make us believe it. But the concept is true. You could buy the games etc for that special offer and sell them for profit on Ebay. It is another question if its worth the hassle. What about returns policy and punters claiming they didnt recieve the item, hassle over delay in delivery etc etc.