[missdpuck]

Originally Posted by mikephoen

I sold between $30K to $40K a year on ebay almost entirely in collectible cards for the last decade or so that I had my store. We basically only used it to sell items that had value, but were hard to sell locally. Here's a few tips I picked up along the way.

If you've just started out and have no rating, you're going to have to sacrifice on your asking prices to get sales. Using the filters on ebay, you can look at what previous items similar to yours sold for and then you'll have to price yours at or below the cheapest recent sale. Sellers with excellent ratings can get slightly more for their items, but even then, unless you're selling extremely rare things, price is the most important factor in what sells and what doesn't. Good pictures are also a must. The title of the item is important (make sure you have the info that people will search in the title. You can look at the info people used on items that actually sold to get a good idea of what is needed). The body of the listing isn't important at all, so don't waste a ton of time on it. Card buyers are going to only care about good pictures.

As a Canadian seller, expect to lose money on shipping. If you charge what it will actually cost to ship express, then that will also scare off buyers.

When it comes to collectibles, ebay can be really good if you're selling rare/valuable items. It's pretty bad if you're selling common or cheap items. I forget now what our lower limit was for cards, as it's been a few years, but I think it was $40 per card. Anything less than that and the economics really started to break down. That was selling as a business though, with paying employees to list things. You can probably go down as low as about $20 per item if you don't value the time you're putting into this, but I definitely wouldn't go lower than that.

One other thing to consider is that these days, the only people who get ripped off on ebay are the sellers. The buyer protection is insane. If you don't ship with tracking, then if someone wants to rip you off, and tell ebay they didn't get the item, you will lose. Don't even waste time trying to fight it, it's just a cost of selling on ebay. If you ship with tracking, ebay might cover you if they say they didn't get the item.

Good luck with it, just don't think it's going to be easy money. It's a lot of work to run an ebay store successfully.

Yeah, the post-sale extortion attempts I’ve gotten in the past few years are nuts. It’s definitely not like it used to be.