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I have a feeling it could go either way at this point. Given the relative obscurity of betamax, my last resort will be dumping these all in a pile and selling them as blanks instead of trying to work the “Maybe there’s something on these!” angle by making individual lots.
My experience with pre-recorded media is limited to a lot of MiniDV tapes I found from someone who was hired out to video weddings. A “lo-fi noise” band bought them.
It’s likely I’ll be sitting on these a while now that I’ve gone through a chunk of them and still have no idea if they’re straight copies from VHS or recorded TV broadcasts, but my hunch in the former, as one of the tapes is an unrated copy of a movie from the 80s that never came out on betamax and probably wouldn’t have aired on TV. There were also some adult movies sprinkled about that are obvious transfers from another format.
I’m going to give them a week and see what the views/watchers look like. If there’s no sign of life, I’m going to slash prices and try to move them ASAP.
If you want paranoid-level searching that cuts out a lot of BS, it may be worth trying to find someone running a searx.me instance. For a while I used https://searx.neocities.org/ which looks for running instances and picks one at random. “Searx is a metasearch engine that aggregates results from over seventy sources while protecting the privacy of its users. This utility forwards your search query to one of 65 random volunteer-run public servers to thwart mass surveillance.”
Duck Duck Go is OK. It’s my main search engine. It’s worth noting you can append “!g” to any search query to just have it return a Google search.
Any of the Samsung Galaxy phones are good. My eBay phone is an S5 or S6. I would pay up and get a slightly newer one. The sim card slot in mine finally broke, but otherwise it still works after nearly 3.5 years. A good thing to do is find the phone that fits your price range and Google “<phone name> in 2019?” (yes, a year behind) and see if anyone can vouch for its usefulness still.
My current phone is an Honor 6X that I bought refurbished for $100. Not the best camera IMO, but it’s really fast and the battery life is absolutely amazing – probably 3 days max if I turned on battery saver and barely used it. With a full day’s workload the battery only ends up at around 60%. Storage is 32GB on-board memory and I think it can be expanded.
Phone shopping is surprisingly complicated. YouTube is a good resource, as is Reddit.
Okay, so I have a CPA do my taxes each year. What does this mean? I thought eBay was taking care of this for us and the sales tax was only passed through our PayPal accounts and back to eBay?
It’s kinda funny that eBay was talking about building more tools for sellers to handle returns, but none of them have surfaced. Seemingly each time a return is opened I’ve had to deal with a different process – sometimes it’s automatic, and sometimes I get choices to intercept the return and offer a refund. All I ask for is consistency.
But more in line with the thread: eBay customer service reps are seemingly less powerful than they used to be. It’s unfortunate that even Anchor seems less useful from what I’ve heard. Case in point, I got a return opened that said I charged too much for an item and should have sent the buyer more of said item as a courtesy. My only options were to accept the return, refund in full, or send a partial refund. I called eBay and they said there was nothing they could do since the return was opened under “missing parts”, and that I just had to eat the return (international) shipping cost. CS said “Yeah, the buyer is wrong, but there’s nothing we can do.” Not that I was going to let that stop me – I kept calling until I got the problem elevated to a supervisor who just said, “What? This is wack. I’m closing this.”
But eBay seemingly only works in half-measures, as they paid the buyer out of pocket to close the return. No impact on me, but now the buyer walks away thinking they were 100% in the right and I’m left here thinking the next seller who comes along and deals with this person will just assume it’s legit and issue a partial refund or something.
I’m beginning to understand that eBay only cares about the buyer’s impression of the item – not the description itself. If a straight-up “This item is 100% busted, doesn’t work, never will work, and is useless” doesn’t prevent an INAD, we’re SOL.
I’m a Linux user. My main PC runs Arch and my eBay laptop runs Ubuntu.
I would have went with Ubuntu personally since it’s got a nice installer and (generally speaking) most of the help/tech support resources you’ll find online are newb-friendly. The packages (programs) are also updated more frequently. Not sure how much it’s changed over the years, but Debian is extremely slow with adopting new versions of programs. This may be a problem if you’re looking up tutorials and find whatever video/article you’re following is using a newer version of a program. See https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
Darktable is the Linux Lightroom equivalent for editing RAW photos. MSPaint alternatives are here: https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-paint/?platform=linux
For a good Notepad-like editor, use Geany. There are dozens of text editors that range in complexity.
For PDFs, Evince or Okular. I use Evince on my eBay laptop to print shipping labels.
For tips: If you don’t like Debian, remember that there’s plenty of other options out there. I mentioned Ubuntu and think that would be a good distro to try out if you’re thinking of bailing on Debian. Each distro does things differently and each has a learning curve of some kind. For example, I prefer Arch Linux, but it has no installer – you do everything “by hand”, so to speak. Ubuntu is by-far the slickest out of the box, and is the most user-friendly.
With that said, doing stuff in the terminal will eventually be a reality at some point if you haven’t had to deal with it already. It’s a crazy rabbit hole, but once you understand it you’ll find it’s very powerful for file management and other day-to-day tasks.
Remember: If you have a problem, Google it. In some cases you might land on a help page for Ubuntu/Arch/or another distro, but the advice is universal.
What did you end up doing on this? I have a buyer with the same problem. They’re international and want a bunch of stuff, but eBay won’t combine shipping.
As previously mentioned I’ve been shopping on GW’s online store. Today I finally got around to listing an item from there and realized they’d completely misrepresented it. They swapped around model numbers to a more desirable model that demanded roughly 4x more than the one I got. I effectively dumped $20~ into an item I expected to sell for $100, but will actually lose money on it now.
Since this is on their own platform, they make the rules. There aren’t any repercussions for falsely representing items, and everything is sold “as-is”.
Me? I don’t care – will just sell it at a loss and move on with my life. But what happens when someone orders one of these nutty $12.99 shirts from them and finds hole in the sleeve? Stains? Wrong measurements? “Sorry, no returns.”
This isn’t even remotely comparable to a genuine reselling operation – this is just thievery.
Congrats! You’re off to a better start than most since you clearly have a good eye for pricey stuff and aren’t afraid to pay up. Since you’re out delivering papers, keep an eye out for curbside trash finds – good money there.
Yes, I read the article, and referenced it in my post. My point still stands.
I fundamentally, 100%, without a doubt, disagree with you that it would be trivial for them to do this properly. Take an expert in any category that requires some level of higher education or niche knowledge – these people must be willing to sift through junk all day, pull out the valuable stuff, then do what’s needed to get it into resale-ready condition, for some hourly rate that is probably 25% of what they’d make reselling the stuff on their own or using the same skillset at a place them would pay them properly.
We’ll just need to agree to disagree at this point.
I never implied they were backing off of selling online and it’s clear that isn’t in their future either. See my post later in the thread.
My local GWs openly advertises their auction site/online shopping platform in all their stores at the checkout, side of the building, at the drop-off, etc. It’s not a secret. I’ve never heard of their eBay/Amazon stores disappearing either, but would appreciate more info/a source on that. If you mean disappearing in the sense that they moved it to their online website, then yeah.
The way you describe the outlet is exactly why I love it. I embrace the physicality. Most of reselling comes down to simply being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of money, but the outlet is a pure, unfiltered reselling deathmatch.
I sold a fake security cameras years ago. Titled it FAKE, NON-WORKING, DUMMY etc. Buyer bought it, freaked out, said they’d spent hours trying to get it working and wanted their money back ASAP. I told them to revisit the description and re-read it. They went ballistic, “You lied”, “description changed”. Total idiot.
Guy opens a return. I call eBay. eBay rep says I sold a non-working item and the customer was in the right. I asked them to read the title of the item back to me. “Sir, I understand, it say ‘NON-WORKING DUMMY SECURITY CAMERA’, you still sold broken item.” I just kept saying “Read it again”, and they finally seem to understand, but then passed me off to a manager.
Manager comes on the phone and says “This is very complex” or something to that effect. Won’t close the return, tells me they need to figure out with someone even higher up the food chain what’s happening. “It says NON-WORKING in the TITLE!” They act confused.
They finally have to elevate the case. Someone then tells me they can’t figure it out and are just refunding me and the buyer both “as a courtesy.” I hang up.
This was like 2 years ago at this point. Dumbest thing I’ve witnessed in my entire life.
I have never heard of ThredUp. It seems to only be clothing, no? Regardless, I don’t sell clothing for this very reason – it’s a problem you can seemingly solve by just adding more people to the equation.
I shop Goodwill’s online stores all the time and see the equivalent of a below-average ebay store. If this is someone’s dream, then that’s fine, I just don’t see the appeal or rampant success a traditional reseller would be able to pull off if they had the same inventory. GW doesn’t seem to be interested in doing any of the work needed to leverage what they have. E.g., all electronics are untested and 90% of them use copy-paste descriptions that will have stuff like: “Item is in excellent condition. Screen is broken. Several scratches and writing in marker on outside,” which is just a series of contradictions. If this is the best they can do, then I’m not worried. Photos are also blurry, too far away, or don’t show key bits of information, like model or serial number. Why would I bid on a lot of PS2s if they don’t show the model? What if they’re all the model that scratches the disks? No returns, BTW.
They leave money on the table constantly, which is why I frequently buy stuff off there and flip it for 3x/4x. Even auctions for good items end with me being the only bid. It makes my job a lot easier – now I don’t have to drive around to a bunch of GWs thanks to it all being online. By the time you factor in driving, the $2 handling fee is cheaper than IRL sourcing. Also: When they price stuff equal to eBay prices, it often sits for a week and gets relisted at $9.99, $7.99, or lower.
It seems their bread and butter is clothing, so not my area of concern. I keep watch on their auctions under consumer electronics and just saw tons of 0 bids on the store mentioned in the article. If I lived there I’d be sniping that stuff so fast their site would melt.
Here’s what a reseller will give you: Free returns, quality/condition guarantee, great photos, and detailed description.
ShopGoodwill asks the same prices, $2 handling fee, no returns, no guarantee, weird shipping, bad photos, and limited/no description.
If they can somehow manage to take away my job while managing to do about 10% of the work, good for them.
