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I ship around 1000 packages a year and usually blow through a truck of packing peanuts in around 3 months. I store them in a small warehouse space.
Worst one for me this year was a Tiffany lamp I bought for $1,500 and sold for $800. The shades weren’t original and that’s where all the money is with Tiffany.
I have never to date dropped the price when I receive those messages. I personally don’t like the “race to the bottom” mentality that eBay tends to push. They seem to think that price is the only driver of something selling, which of course is not always true. If I were to drop the price in the future, it would be by the minimum percentage allowed and I would raise it back up if the item didn’t sell in a few days.
Tons of time and effort, at least in my opinion. I write very detailed descriptions that take 5 to 10 minutes on average to finish. There were over 500 listings involved. All of that work wasn’t worth the profit margins.
I’ve shifted to dealing in merchanside under $100 for the most part. Much easier to sell, much less competition to buy and much less of my money tied up for long periods of time.
Personally, I would sell them as full years. If you split them up, the selling price per magazine probably wouldn’t be high enough to justify the extra effort.
It really sucks when this happens. One of the big reasons I don’t accept returns is that the buyer damages the item 90% of the time because they don’t pack it properly. I’ve never had success fighting it with eBay the roughly 5 times it’s happened over the years.
As a follow up to the message you left on the podcast, there’s a way in PayPal to export all of your order history into Excel. This brings in all your customer’s addresses as well. I use the report to calculate my monthly sales tax remittances (if a customer has a Massachusetts address, I collected sales tax on the transaction and I have to remit to the state). Inside PayPal, click on “Reports” in the top tab, select “Activity Download” and then select the appropriate date range and click “Create Report”. This creates a CSV file that can be opened with Excel. Once the report is open, search for the title of the listing you are interested in and scroll to the right to find their address.
I’ve shipped literally thousands of 45s through Media Mail and never had a problem. This includes individual records as well as large lots of 500 plus.
This is the message I received:
RESTRICTED ITEM
Dear Christopher,We are writing to inform you that your recent GSP transaction to jacz1 cannot be completed.
The item was stopped at the Global Shipping Center, and has been restricted from international shipment. The item will not be shipped forward to its final destination.
No further action is needed at this time. We’ve let your buyer know why the item couldn’t be delivered.Under the terms of the Global Shipping Program your buyer will be refunded automatically, and you are entitled to keep the proceeds from the transaction.
I called and fought this through with a few reps but was not able to get anywhere. I did get them to cover the $30 cost for return shipping. The item has a residual value of around $50 and I think it was insured by USPS for $50, so I should be able to mitigate my losses to a degree.
I really wish I knew about this risk ahead of time. I went for years thinking seller protection would cover me in cases like this.
I thought I’d add my 2 cents to this discussion. I’ve been on eBay for over 10 years and I have never and will never accept returns in any form for any reason. The whole idea of losing money because someone decided they no longer wanted something just doesn’t work for me. Despite not accepting returns, I still sell just about everything I list and only get around 1 or 2 INAD cases a year, most of which were my fault and can usually be worked out with partial refunds. I think I’ve only ever had 2 things mailed back to me in 10 years.
I think returns are a lot like free shipping. For most people, if they really want the item, it doesn’t matter if returns are free or the shipping is free, they’ll still buy it and be happy with it when they get it.
An important caveat is that I sell antiques and collectibles. I would probably not have had the same experiences if I was selling clothing.
On the question about 45 RPM records:
In my experience, the key is to buy only ones that are in good condition with the sleeves. No cracks, warping, missing labels or deeper scratching. If the sleeves are missing, the records get scratched very easily and then they are worthless. Sleeves can also get expensive if you have to replace them.
I used to buy out warehouses of 45’s from old jukebox distributors and sell them in unsearched lots of 250, 500 and 1,000. Shipping through media mail really helps with the cost for the large packages. I generally asked 10 to 12 cents a piece, sometimes a bit more. In my opinion, it is not worth the effort to search through them. You may find one or two good ones after a few hours of work if you know what you are looking for, but removing them will make it far more difficult to sell the others because you can no longer claim they are unsearched.
Keeping in mind that condition is the most important factor, some other things to look for include promo records (not for resale), older records (pre-1960), good songs/titles, good artists, good labels (Blue Note, Sun, etc.) and good genres (Doo Wop and Jazz). For promo records, the best ones are songs that were not commercially released.
