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That bird will never know how close it came to meeting its maker.
Glad to hear your sales are better, Sharyn. Mine have been plugging along slowly despite a couple vacations and time away periods, saved by a few high dollar items. Some sales from earlier in the year:
This 1 Balboa coin from Panama featuring the infamous General Omar Torrijos has been rattling around my junk drawers since I was stationed there with the Army in the 1980s. Panama tied its currency to the US so that 1 Balboa always equals $1. But not only that, its coinage duplicated US coinage by size and weight so the coins from both countries circulated freely together in Panama. Panama did not print bills, though, so US dollars in all denominations circulated as its paper money. (You had to call them Balboas with the Panamanians, and not Dollars, unless you wanted to give offense.) When I got back to the US I was able to use up most of the Panamanian coins I had left in various US vending machines but I never ran across a machine that took $1 coins so this one stuck with me. It sold for $13 with free shipping.
Here’s another one of those ubiquitous beat up 1930’s Turkish Mauser rifle bayonets. It sold for $78 plus shipping and was a gun show find at $25.
This was an interesting book I picked up at a used book store for a couple dollars. It is a signed, self-published auto-biography of a Cambodian politician’s time as a guerilla fighter in the wars during and after the Khmer Rouge of the 1970’s – 1980’s. It sold for $18.50 plus $28 shipping to go to Australia.
It appears that China produces a range of large, unmarked glass animal figurines like this one. This example was a house-warming gift from a while back but is not exactly our style so off it went to a new owner for $39 plus shipping.
Las Vegas casino ashtrays seem to be one of those categories where sellers have very high hopes but where the majority of items actually only sell in the lower ranges. A couple dollars at the flea market, this one from the Fortune Club, a long-gone joint on the strip, sold for $50 plus shipping on a best offer after I let it sit for a couple years at $100+ with no bites.
7/11/21 – 7/24/21
Total Active Items (2 different stores): 331
Items Sold: 9
Gross Sales: $1,126.10
Highest Price Sold: $500 w/free shipping ($26) – grain moisture meter kit for farming; runner up $320 plus shipping – British commemorative coin from the 2012 Olympics.
Returns: $0
COGS: $154 (including consignment commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 0
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0I missed last week due to a camping trip (southwest NC mountains) so this report is for 2 weeks. It is funny how putting my stores on Time Away always seems to trigger sales. But when I get back it’s crickets.
I’ll always do eBay. I’ve been treasure hunting since I was a teenager and will continue to do so as long as I am able but I have to have a sales outlet. I don’t want to do to my kids what my parents and in-laws did to their kids, leaving houses full of cool old stuff that had to be disposed of at fire sale prices upon their deaths due to various personal situations among the kids at the time.
He’s a 26 lb bundle of fun but when he crashes, he crashes hard. (He was a ranch cat from Wimberley, TX, BTW.)
Your buyer has given you a gift: feedback extortion for a discount and refusal to return the item. Your polite message asking him to return the lot was the perfect response. At this point, you should be able to go silent and do nothing. You need say nothing more. If he gives you negative feedback, you can contact eBay to have it removed.
Caveat: this is based on previous experience. YMMV. It may take more than one call to eBay to get a CSR who knows what to do.
A bit of advice for the future: when selling unique and collectible items, take greater care with your representations. See Retro’s reply above and take it to heart.
There was a really good video of the box resizing several years ago but I can’t find it now. The guy in this video does a passable job at showing the square-to-rectangular box hack in his third tip:
chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDFf7a9vTFE
The first two re-sizings he does are pretty self evident but the last one is tricky unless you’ve seen it done.
In short, you don’t have to do anything.
With one caveat: If you use a third party shipper off eBay you’ll need to include the code. I have seen it as a third line in UK addresses that looks something like this: “Wideopen GB 3625 60805 75 Code:Paid” and it will be visible within the buyer’s address as shown off to the right on the eBay label printing page.
Which makes it a bit of a pain with UK addresses, especially, since those addresses already have too many lines (what’s with that, AF?). But recently I found that PirateShip for example provided a separate entry block specifically for the code which I assumed worked because the buyer gave me positive feedback.
I’m fine with it. Most of my sales are from promoted listings though I only do 1%, and I often get buyers with guest accounts that I assume came from off site.
I must sound like a broken record but I think it’s a piece of Chinese reproduction pottery, a fantasy antique (in that it is not an attempt to accurately copy a specific antique example); the type of thing that US antique dealers and auctioneers have been buying from wholesalers to fill out their inventories for the last 50 years or so. The mold is probably from a vintage Fitz and Floyd design but the decoration is different. Still, an appealing piece. I think you did great getting $50 for it.
Until eBay came up with their special postcard label recently I used the Intelligent Mail Barcode from LetterTrackPro for several years for postcards. It gave a tracking number that eBay would accept as a manual entry upload but after that would not load updates, so there was never even carrier validation. AFAIK the only way to see tracking updates is in your LetterTrackPro account and they drop off after like a month. I used a cheap 4.5′ x 6.5′ cardboard envelope that’s stiff but not too stiff that it triggers non-machinable surcharge so a first class mail stamp was sufficient. It only works on domestic letters.
How it works is that you have to go into Letter Track Pro, manually enter the address and purchase a barcode, which includes a tracking number. Pricing varies and is pay as you go, starting at $0.01 per address and up, depending on your volume. There’s no subscription. You preload money for your transactions. Then you have to manually print out the address (that includes the barcode) from the Letter Track Pro website and there are printing options for different types of labels. I used 4×2 Avery labels. Each time I printed a single label I could select a different position on the sheet in order to use up the entire sheet.
Tracking usually began at my local processing center and always ended at “out for delivery”. There is never a “delivered” scan. For probably about 10% or more of the letters there were never any tracking updates at all. The scans are machine automated – the carriers have no ability to scan the letters.
You can also receive email updates of the status changes if you wish, but I have turned those off. I don’t use FB Marketplace so I don’t know how it would work with that.
I have TRS with 1 day handling and a small store, the latter meaning that I have lost TRS with only a couple late shipments, which late shipments have mostly occurred because I was trying to do a buyer a favor. (My carrier sometimes fails to scan on pickup so I’m often right on the edge of the 95% metric already.)
So in this scenario I would keep my normal shipping method on the listing and tell the buyer that I will refund their shipping paid when I receive their label (which I insist upon, not wanting to spend the extra time dealing with an account number). I also tell them a deadline for me receiving the label, so that I can ship on time with my label if they go silent and delay in sending me the label after payment.
