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I’ve just found that I can list with GSP as an option, as well as international p&p.
As far as I know, printed paper is generally duty-free. I did post a book to Australia via GSP where the purchaser was charged duty, but I was unable to navigate the AU GOV site to find out whether this was correct. Given the price of second-hand books in Australia I wouldn’t be surprised!
I send the GSP stuff to a site about 20 miles away. What happens after that I don’t know- but unless they’re employing out-of-work Santa’s elves or subsidised Chinese postpeople they must be paying some labour charges and all the rest, and make a profit. I don’t put a C22 customs form on the package, so they presumably add that plus the address label.
I had a BIN buyer complain about the cost of GSP on a book. The only way to rectify the situation was to cancel the sale- I asked the buyer to do this but he couldn’t, so I had to cancel it myself. I was able to post the book to him for just over half what eBay’s GSP were charging (which suggests that if GSP is estimated by eBay as someone has suggested, it’s a bit of a crapshoot).
So the question is; if I cancel a sale because the item is “unavailable” I get a defect. And the defect hangs around for ages, and (it appears) you’re only allowed three defects before consequences arrive. However if I make out that the buyer wants to cancel, then it’s not a defect. The case above, I relisted the book with corrected P&P and he bought it. The only evidence that he wanted to cancel the original sale was a message saying that he tried and he couldn’t cancel.
Hypothetically speaking, if I get an intransigent non-payer I could cancel the sale saying that the buyer rang me on my mobile and asked to cancel. No defect.
The examples I’ve seen of this kind of dirt-cheap stuff sourced from eBay have been posted in the UK. Maybe they’re shipped over in containers already wrapped and all the seller has to do is to print the label out and throw it in a mail sack. It’s still got to get to the buyer, and the delivery companies pay their workforce about 45 pence per parcel. Maybe the Chinese government subsidises the whole kit and kaboodle, and puts a spy chip in each item!
Yeah, but… here’s a torch for 99 pence (1.30 USD). Free postage, and includes a rechargeable battery (so not allowed via airmail). Out of that 99 pence, seller has to pay for padded envelope, postage, eBay fees, PayPal fees, printing out address labels and labour. Labour cost for the final leg of the delivery, from sorting office to home, is (in UK) about 45 pence (e.g. Hermes). So what’s going on? This isn’t cheap postage from China.
I listed three items yesterday without specifying weight and dimensions. Postal options were UK free 2nd class and international GSP. Now for domestic postage since I’m offering free P&P it doesn’t matter if I don’t list W&D. And I don’t charge international buyers P&P- it’s the GSP system that charges them. So I’m curious as to what happens if an international buyer makes a purchase.
Computer was a Mac running Firefox.
Think it’s a vest extender. Like this. “Attaches to your vest snaps to make for a better fit.”
It’s male- indicated by the eyebrow ridge bulge. Sorry, couldn’t resist that! The prominent cheekbones make it look like the sort of skull favoured by Goths and metalheads, so it’s probably just designed to hang off clothing.
Idahoarder: check out barnfinds, which hopefully should give you some ideas re selling the cars. Also (judging from recurring comments on that site) make sure your tetanus shots are up to date!
Shot glasses- no. Firing glasses- yes. Look like shot glasses but have thick bases (for multiple toasts- holds less booze and you can bang the table with it).
Advice from the antique shop where I have a cabinet is that sets of 6 drinking glasses are Xmas sellers (not 4!) I tried sourcing some from thrift shops, but found a) the shops mark them up b) spotted other customers looking for them.
As for china, the shelves in the thrifts attract middle-aged men for some reason. Glass and ceramics are the cockroaches of the antiques world- unless you tread on them they’re going to survive for centuries.
Royal Mail First Day covers. My neighbour trades in Indian stamps but… he spent over 300 GBP (400 USD) on a couple of thousand of these British covers in folders. Which he then gave to me to sell. They’re basically commemorative stamps on covers, cancelled on the first day of issue with a fancy mark.
These were collectable about a thousand years ago. Now they’ve virtually unsaleable. I calculated the original purchasers* must have spent in the region of 6,000 GBP on the stamps alone. I think I got back around 250 GBP, and most of that was by finding someone who thought they could sell it on to a dealer.
*Their names and addresses were on the envelopes. I could see that one of them had moved from some beautiful part of the Lake District to some housing estate on the edge of an industrial city. Sad!
I also sold books on Amazon- past tense! The shipping rates were set slightly below the actual rates, so I lost a few pence in shipping costs. This shipping-rate ripoff has been going on for years; I use “ripoff” because it helps Amazon promote itself as the “cheapest” source of books. “Have you seen one cheaper? Let us know.” as they say.
What really ticked me off was the vendors using automated pricing software to undercut prices on virtually a real-time basis. So I’d list a book at say 5.49, and within a day World of Books or some other outfit would have repriced their copy at 5.38. And so on… I did think, but I never tried it, to use this to drive down the price of a book I wanted to buy!
Here in the UK the system works like this. A friend has a volunteer job in a thrift shop, sorting through the books. Those deemed unsaleable are put in bags and sold by the ton to WoB or similar. He “chucks out” half a ton of books a week, and that is one shop in one middle-sized city.
The charity receives (I think) 75 GBP per ton. The books are taken to warehouses, where they’re sorted into saleable and waste, and either listed or pulped. I suspect the “big boys” have large postal concessions, a bit like the Chinese!
There’s a lot more flexibility in selling books on eBay- like doing bundles of books on a particular subject, listing the book not in the book section but in another section (e.g. golf books in the golf section), setting a decent p&p.
As regards lenses, I thought about it, and I concluded that perhaps the most useful advice is a) to spend as little as possible! b) don’t buy lenses that have the following faults
Fungus: looks like translucent tree branches, most likely inside the lens. Bad, because it etches the glass and (apparently) is contagious- to other lenses!
Balsam separation: where the optical surfaces of the lens have been glued together and are now separating. Kind of a misty area with a bit of a rainbow effect sometimes.
Oil from the mechanism: not fatal because the lens could be dismantled and the surfaces cleaned.
Bad grease: difficult to move the focus on the lens barrel. Again not fatal.
Scratches on the glass.
Digital cameras also suffer from fungus, on the sensor, or more commonly dust which shows up as out-of-focus areas in the photo.
British royal coat of arms (lion and unicorn). Can’t be used as a logo in the UK.
Jay:”In the US, its popular to decorate your house with older items. Do Germans decorate this way?”
Reminded me of a builder who lives maybe about 25 miles away from me. He was interviewed for a national newspaper, where it was revealed that he has the world’s largest collection of portrait busts of a certain corporal. Also 4 Panther tanks, 3 Tiger tanks, an E-boat and some 300 armoured fighting vehicles.
Hi Ostap!
Re parts for Mercedes/BMW cars. There’s a lot of those in my neighborhood. However, I doubt whether any of the owners do their own servicing, so If you’re going to sell parts here (i.e. the UK) you’d be offering them to the trade, and competing against trade suppliers. There may be a market in small independent garages.
Motorbikes might be different, since owners are probably more inclined to do their own servicing.
There’s a market for cut-throat razors- I’ve sold carpenter’s sharpening stones to razor enthusiasts. Knives are a different thing. The trend in chef’s knives seems to be towards the more utilitarian. Also there may be problems in shipping to the US.
Camera lenses may be good for you. Digital cameras can use c-mount lenses from movie cameras. Other lenses can be used with adaptors. Lenses with brass barrels (Voigtlander for instance) are worth checking, as are early Zeiss and Leitz. It’s one of those markets where vendors (e.g. flea markets, thrift shops) price both the rubbish and the good stuff high-ish because they don’t have the knowledge to distinguish between the two.
Most 20th century film cameras should be avoided now, unless they have a good lens. The collectors are dying off.
