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03/24/2017 at 8:45 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 302: How to Deal with Dreaded eBay Scammers Lurking Everywhere!! #15226
Keep this in mind at all times: You are NOT your target buyer!
What may seem expensive to you for shipping may not matter to your ideal buyer. I have sold $25 shoes that cost $20 to ship priority to someone in California. I’ve sold $10 items that cost $40 to ship GSP!
Turn those areas back on and just let it ride. The market will determine if they want to pay the high shipping.
03/23/2017 at 12:31 pm in reply to: What boxes do you use to ship electronics like VCRs and Stereos? #15155If you have a pile of similar items then you can go to uship and buy a stack of the exact size boxes to fit your needs. You can also go to walmart around 10-11 pm and ask a night stocker or manager to save you the really large boxes. They will fill you a cart. Cereal boxes and storage tub boxes are great and can be sized down easily with a box resizer.
In the electronics section they get a lot of boxes in the 24x24x6 variety as well if you need skinny but really wide boxes.
I have always been somewhat annoyed by coworkers who view their tax refund as a badge of honor. You know the folks – the ones who ask how much you got back and then smugly proclaim “That’s it? I got $8k back!” like they hit the free money lottery.
It is such an American thing to be proud to give the government an interest free loan and also to look down upon those that actually work their taxes out so they keep their money year round.
That is a really good idea!
03/22/2017 at 1:13 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 302: How to Deal with Dreaded eBay Scammers Lurking Everywhere!! #15069Keep an eye on your account. I had an incredibly weird paypal issue similar to this where paypal refunded the buyer and let me keep the payment even though I never shipped the item. Eventually the buyers CC filed a chargeback. The customer told me paypal had already made them whole, so I didn’t do anything. Paypal took out the money and hit me with a $20 chargeback fee. Paypal told me the customer was lying and they never refunded them.
….Why in the world would a buyer lie about paypal refunding them after finding fraudulent activity??
I did get the fee back after arguing with paypal, but it was a very strange issue that left me quite frustrated.
03/22/2017 at 1:07 pm in reply to: Save the planet. Save money. Save your items. Save space. Steel File Cabinets! #15065I wish some of you file cabinet folks would post some pics! It is just hard to imagine a setup like this.
03/21/2017 at 4:56 pm in reply to: Personal budgeting and financial planning. Planning for full time ebay. #15008Thanks for some great advice everyone. We’ve always been frugal and cost cutting oriented, but we’ve always used it to allow us to get more “bang for our buck” rather than for budgeting and saving. You have to be some form of frugal when you have 4 kids.
We can save a ton of money by tackling our out of control grocery and eating out budgets. Our eating out budget is embarrassingly high recently much like the person you mentioned in the podcast. We eat out many dinners due to our busy schedule. We’ve switched to higher quality (and much more expensive) places this year so we can eat quality healthy food rather than fast food junk. It has worked out well in the fact that I’ve lost 50 lbs, but it is not sustainable at all.
Figuring out how to meal plan and also minimize the prep and cleanup is not an easy task for a large family! We also may need some help in finding the energy to sticking to any form of meal plan…
So the way this is written up, why would anyone in their right mind “guarantee” door to door? All that would do is absolve ebay of liability and insure you would foot the refund bill if for some reason it doesn’t make it. Ebay should not be asking sellers to offer door to door guarantee – that is on them.
I has a GSP issue with a Canadian item. I also talked with the rep and I was told that I had to provide a label. It didn’t matter that I literally cannot do this and ebay does not care. In this case I just apologized and refunded the buyer since the item was definitely not as described (pallet merchandise I did not thoroughly inspect).
If ebay is going to have the GSP program, then they need to also provide some form of returns recourse. Now I just hope for the best when I ship something international. International customers through GSP are usually the best customers that never complain. Until ebay fixes the returns issue I’ll just keep playing the odds.
03/20/2017 at 4:55 pm in reply to: Engaging customers who leave bad feedback with no communication #14920It’s like with product reviews on Amazon. Nothing has 5 stars. A 4.5 star product with 1000 reviews is a GREAT product. The people leaving 1 star reviews are just morons. Same with the 1% negative feedback folks on ebay.
03/20/2017 at 4:52 pm in reply to: Does vacation and extended handling time affect top selling seller status? #14919There is a difference between Top Rated Seller and TRS+. Adjusting your handling times only affects TRS+ – you won’t get the fee discount until you set your items back to the fast handling time requirements. As long as you ship within whatever handling time you set then you can maintain normal TRS.
Shoes have to be cleaned and prepped before photography to have speed. If they are already cleaned I can do 20-30 pair in an hour as well. I am very anal about how I do it and it is the same method every time which helps speed things up.
Dan @ NewvintageNY uses the method I would also prefer to use – pay by the item if you are just asking for photos. This gives incentive for the photographer to speed things up to make more in less time.
If you are hiring someone to do actual listing then you really have to pay by the hour because different items can take different amounts of time. Kinda like Jay & Ryanne are doing with their helper.You would also want inspection and measurements performed at this stage IMO.
If I am doing straight photos then I inspect the item, take my standard shots take damage details shots, then measurement shots. I use a stiff tape measure to take basic measurements. I photograph the tape measure reading and get enough of the item in the photo so I can tell which dimension I am taking.
With this much data, you can list the item without ever getting it back out of storage.
And to give you some data, I personally can do 20-30 clothing items in an hour with this method. I’ve perfected my own method though and usually do it in 15 minute bursts for 5-10 items.
T-shirts and hats are usually faster because tshirts are less photos/easier to setup and hats don’t need measurements. Electronics and odd items I usually do the whole listing in one sitting because it is easier to keep everything fresh in my mind.
One last bit of data – as a newbie my wife can only do 8-10 items an hour. She is meticulous and hasn’t had enough experience to develop her own style and flow to speed things up.
03/20/2017 at 4:08 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 302: How to Deal with Dreaded eBay Scammers Lurking Everywhere!! #14903Total Items in Store: 585
Items Sold: 6
Cost of Items Sold: $24
Total Sales: $141
Profit: $117
Highest Price Sold: $30 Born Sandals
Average Price Sold: $23.50
Average Profit: $19.50Still no listing activity on the home front. Closing in on 3 months without active listing. Having said that, it was a productive ebay week because I was working on TAXES!! YAY!!
Last year I used H&R Block software and it let me just input my COGS to the schedule C. This year I switched to TurboTax Home & Business, and it forced me into the true cash system. So…that means I had to take inventory. I’ve been dreading this for a looong time and have put it off long enough. A couple spreadsheets and several hours later, I have a true inventory spreadsheet and actual COGS.
Also this year I did detailed itemized home office deductions rather than taking the standard 300sq ft option. The tax savings was quite impressive. I even set up my storage shed as a business asset so I can start depreciating it. I am happy with my federal taxes but as usual I owe the state money. Every year I increase my state withholding and yet I owe more each year. Very frustrating. No wonder folks leave WV in droves.
I had trouble with blues on my iphone 5s. The combination of artificial light, the camera sensor, and the color blue just generally can cause issues for almost any camera.
I had very good luck with the walmart brand daylight temp 60W LED light bulbs which are pretty cheap now. I have a ceiling fixture with 5 of those bulbs in it and I did not have a problem with blue. At work I had major issues with blue due to the fluorescent light fixtures.
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