Ebay sellers thread (other platforms too)

[QuarterMillionMan]

$5000 a month pays more than I make at my full time job.

[QuarterMillionMan]

90 day, I stand corrected.

[disneysteve]

90 day, I stand corrected.

It would be nice if that was my 30-day total.

[disneysteve]

Ugh. I had some type of computer glitch yesterday and lost some of my ebay records. Fortunately, I only lost 3 days of my sales info and I have hard copies to recreate it. The bigger problem is that I lost my inventory log back to April 13. That's going to take more work to recreate. I'll have to go through my listings to refresh my memory of things I've bought since then. And no, I didn't have any back up of these files. Lesson learned.

[james.hendrickson]

As long as all the orders go out, you should be fine.

[disneysteve]

As long as all the orders go out, you should be fine.

Has nothing to do with orders. It’s just my own spreadsheet. The inventory is the problem as I need that for taxes as well as calculating profit on items sold.

[QuarterMillionMan]

When selling on eBay you want all positive ratings (I'm still at 100%). A negative rating will drop your ratings like a brick. I ship fast and within 1 business day. Often I ship the same day. I also use good quality packaging. Selling on eBay and other platforms have been liberating in getting rid of household items that I no longer use or want. Before I started selling on eBay, I used to mainly sell on Craigslist which is good but cumbersome having to meet the buyer. With eBay, it is so convenient & easy to use.

[disneysteve]

When selling on eBay you want all positive ratings (I'm still at 100%). A negative rating will drop your ratings like a brick. I ship fast and within 1 business day. Often I ship the same day. I also use good quality packaging. Selling on eBay and other platforms have been liberating in getting rid of household items that I no longer use or want. Before I started selling on eBay, I used to mainly sell on Craigslist which is good but cumbersome having to meet the buyer. With eBay, it is so convenient & easy to use.

Feedback is definitely important. It's hard because most buyers don't leave any so it takes a while to build up your score. I'd say maybe 20% leave feedback.

I obviously agree about the ease of using ebay. Not that it's easy - it's actually a fair amount of work - but it's a great system.

I sell some stuff locally on Facebook Marketplace. That's great when it works but so many flaky people are out there. I can't tell you how many times someone has scheduled a pickup time and not shown up and I never hear from them again. And of course I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every "Is this available?" message I've gotten only to get no response when I say, "yes it is". I did very well with FBMP a couple of years ago when I was in Florida cleaning out my cousin's house. There were lots of no shows and scammers but plenty of completed transactions that made it all worth it. That's how I sold off a lot of the bigger items. I made a couple thousand dollars doing that.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Ds good points. Another thing w/Craigslist is I've heard stories of sellers getting robbed at gun point. Once I sold a 2007 Dodge Dakota and wore a body cam in case the guy robbed me for evidence. Luckily it went down fine and the guy paid $3000 cash but if held at gunpoint I would not fight back and let him take it.

[disneysteve]

Ds good points. Another thing w/Craigslist is I've heard stories of sellers getting robbed at gun point. Once I sold a 2007 Dodge Dakota and wore a body cam in case the guy robbed me for evidence. Luckily it went down fine and the guy paid $3000 cash but if held at gunpoint I would not fight back and let him take it.

If I was doing a large transaction like that, I would absolutely do it in a safe public monitored location. Around here, the police station has a designated area for internet sales like that.

I'm only selling small stuff and $50 and under. I generally have them pick it up from my front step and leave the money in the mailbox. I don't even leave the house. If they rip me off, it's no big deal, though that's never happened. I have had a few sales where we met in a public place like a Wawa (convenience store) or Dunkin Donuts.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Yup that was a risky sale that I did with that truck. Next time I would use a dealer such as Carvana or Car Max and it sounds so easy now where I can enter all the information online get a quote and even have them come to pick it up which might eat into a little of the sale as opposed to driving down and selling it on the spot. But I shouldn't be taking risk like that Craigslist sale.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Not quite ready to sell and I still have a few more good years but this is Carvana's offer for my current vehicle.

[disneysteve]

We've sold 3 cars to Carmax in the past couple of years and bought 2 from Carmax and one from Carvana, but this thread is about ebay and other reselling platforms so I won't go into detail unless you want to start a new thread on that topic.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Noted.

[disneysteve]

I hit a milestone today. I now have over 300 items listed - 307 to be exact. Honestly, I wasn't aiming for it so I can't say it was a goal. I'm not sure how many items I'd feel comfortable having. It's more about how many sales I'm comfortable processing. I'll just keep adding to it until I start feeling like it's too much.