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“I wonder why this is category restricted at all.”
Good question. There is no real reason that it couldn’t be added as a shipping method in any category for use when appropriate. High volume sellers in the sports card, postcard, stamp, and coin categories – which are huge – have probably been clamoring for years for eBay to figure out a way for them to obtain TRS status which they’ve been pretty much locked out of since they so often ship their low priced items in an envelope with a stamp. Someone at some point said to eBay: “Hey, there’s this Intelligent Mail Barcode thing I can get from LetterTrackPro, why can’t eBay offer that for us and let the half-assed tracking it offers count for TRS?”
EBay probably doesn’t want to encourage its widespread use. It is not a very good shipping method. Besides only being usable for thin, flat, bendable, first class letter-sized and -weighted non-plastic and non-padded envelopes, the tracking is hit or miss. A letter carrier cannot scan it – it has to get a scan at the outgoing PO in the sorting machine and in my experience about 20% of the time it doesn’t happen, and if that doesn’t happen, there are no additional scans. Also even if it does the initial scan, it does not provide a delivery scan. “Out for delivery” is the last scan you get. There has to be a separate back door route into USPS to see the tracking because it is not readable on USPS.com and other public access sites. EBay says if the buyer complains of non-receipt, the seller is supposed to just suck it up and refund them. It can’t be used for items selling for more than $20, though you can combine shipping to $50.
This is great news. I have been using the Intelligent Mail Barcode from LetterTrackPro for several years for my postcards, small photos, and patches in my Never-To-Be-TRS eBay store which gave me a tracking number that eBay would accept as an upload to the sale but after that would not load updates, so there was never carrier validation. I would have to go to my LetterTrackPro account to see tracking updates. It appears to me that eBay has made a deal with the USPS to use that system, based on eBay’s parameters and FAQ answers for Standard Envelope, with the bonus of a few cents off the usual price for 1, 2, and 3 oz first class envelopes.
One thing concerns me – the USPS charges a bit more for “nonmachinable” first class envelop mail and the Intelligent Mail Barcode doesn’t work, presumably because nonmachinable mail gets spit out of the scanning machines and has to be hand-sorted. I’ve had a few mail pieces actually returned to me because the patch was a little too thick or when I tried to send a larger coin like a half dollar and didn’t put the extra postage on the envelope. Ebay has decided to prominently specify what can go in the envelope – for example ship “no more than 15 raw cards” or “no more than 5 raw coins” – but you really have to dig down a bit to find that eBay Standard Envelope thickness has to be uniform, not too rigid, etc., which are machinable mail standards.
If the USPS enforces the machinable standards for eBay Standard Envelopes I think there are going to be some unhappy sellers when their envelope with 15 raw cards or 5 raw coins, for example, gets returned to them.
This is the envelope I’ve been using: https://www.ebay.com/itm/351575636101 I see that the price per 100 is a few dollars more than the 5×7 mailjacket that you linked from ebayshippingsupplies, though it’s slightly smaller.
7/18/21 – 4/24/21
Total Active Items (2 different IDs): 326
Items Sold: 13
Gross Sales: $383.49
Highest Price Sold: $152.52
Returns: 0
COGS: $94.47 (including commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 0
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0Regarding combined shipping, I have always simply asked the multiple item buyer to buy it all and I would refund, but I found that since Managed Payments I cannot enter the one tracking number I used on to the other items, so I get a no-carrier-validation ding on my metrics. I like to maintain TRS so it matters to me.
Yeah I would miss live auctions. So many small live auctions are such form of entertainment for the locals that I think when this craziness is over that I think those in that category will go back. I hope so.
I recently received a positive feedback from someone who used every available digit. It was all “A”s and “+” as in AAAAAA++++++AAA+++AAA+++…. ad nauseam.
Back in the ’70’s besides selling at flea markets and through the shopper classifieds I would go through the yellow pages and shop more esoteric things directly to businesses I thought would be interested. I lived in Philadelphia PA at the time so there were options within reasonable driving distance. Maybe a present-day version of that since you’ve got internet and could ship it would be fruitful for something like this.
Perhaps you’ve already tried it but the brand does not have a legal basis for VeRO if you sell it as used rather than new and disclaim connection to the trademark owner (though admittedly that doesn’t always stop them), and/or sometimes you can be cagey about not stating the brand name or showing a logo in the listing photos but buyers still know what it is. But it’s probably not a good idea to put it up again at all if it has already been taken down.
Sorry, your link is not taking me to anything with deer in it …. one way to do it is you can right-click “copy link” on one of your imgur images and paste it in your post here if you’d like. Then the photo will appear here.
Hiya Mike! I’ve had both a yard sale at the house and local Craigslist sales recently and did all the latter at the house. I think in my area the few publicized issues re Craigslist/FBM robbery victims (aside from crime arising out of personals ads) that I have noticed have been with cell phones and cars and the robber has been the one advertising the item with the potential buyer being robbed of the cash they brought for the purchase. (Though I know nationwide both sellers and buyers have been victimized.) I found that a couple of my Craigslist buyers wanted a little more information about me before they came to the house – they were more worried about it than I was.
Maybe the yard sale environment feels more public. More people may be willing to go to a yard sale than would go to a stranger’s house alone. For our yard sale we did sort of a combination, adding additional separate listings for some of the major items we had and stated that they would be at the yard sale but several of the items took much longer to sell.
Hope it’s only a matter of a short time before your wife is on the mend.
Some great sales there, Steven. When I saw Midge eyeing the banana box, I knew what was coming next.
Still working my way up to the present, here are some sales from late November:
Somehow I have run across not just one but two of these small Greek reproduction coins over the last year. It depicts a coin from the city-state of Gela, Sicily, in the Macedonian Empire during and after the reign of Alexander the Great. One side depicts the god Gelas, a bull with a man’s head. The other side depicts a charioteer commanding a biga chariot with two horses being crowned by the god Nike flying above. I don’t know where these coins came from or what the attraction is but despite the word COPY in large letters on the reverse (the “Y” is lightly struck so before I figured out what these were, with my first coin I was Googling “Greek coin marked COP”…) they seem to be in demand. This one was $1 at the flea market and sold for $13 plus shipping within a week.
This is the first book of a two-volume set for the 1981-82 cruise of the USS AMERICA, a conventionally powered aircraft carrier commissioned in 1965. She was scuttled off Cape Hatteras in 2005 after being used in tests, the largest warship ever sunk. This item was another testament to the risks of sniping the goods of marginal eBay sellers. I paid $16 for both volumes of the set – condition “used” with a few blurry pictures and no other description – but when it arrived I found that Volume II was too moldy to sell. I spent a few minutes cleaning up Volume I to at least acceptable and it sold fairly quickly for $45 plus shipping with full disclosure. At least I made money but not in the usual 3 digit range for aircraft carrier cruise books I was hoping for.
This old brass automobile bulb horn was found in my dad’s estate; probably a flea market find for not too much money, knowing him. A little research into the minutia of bulb horn values (the Indians have been reproducing these for many years in various configurations) led to the realization that its double loop and screened bell put it a cut above the usual. It sold for $140 plus $60 shipping to Switzerland.
This lot of 20 clad (copper sandwich) 1976 Kennedy Half Dollars sold for $22.89 with free shipping. I got them back in the ’70’s and ’80’s when they could be picked out of my pocket change on occasion.
I have virtually nothing in this Nestler Slide Rule with case, getting it in a large $5 lot a while back. There is a small but rabid (is it because they are engineers?) community of collectors and many varieties and sizes of slide rules. More rabbit holes to go down in researching an appropriate price. It sold for $33 plus shipping.
This vintage, old school Smith & Wesson brand brown leather police revolver holster was $5 at the flea market. I found an old gun leather catalog online that cross referenced the stold me what models it was made for. It sold for $60 plus $23 shipping to Sweden.
7/11/21 – 4/17/21
Total Active Items (2 different IDs): 339
Items Sold: 10
Gross Sales: $217.68
Highest Price Sold: $58.00 – a USN Blue Angels CPO/SNCO consignment challenge coin.
Returns: 0
COGS: $67.06 (including commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 3
$ Spent on New Inventory: $10.50The $10.50 spent was all on an eBay snipe for a vintage carburetor with a 10x profit potential, with free shipping. I felt a little sorry for the seller but I guess they got back at me by sending it in a Priority flat rate envelope to save a couple dollars. The cardboard one, not the padded one, which ended up pretty shredded by the time it got to me and was all taped up by the USPS with “received damaged” stickers all over it. Fortunately old carbs were built tough so no damage.
I don’t have a particular recommendation, but I did start to do some research on it recently by googling “delivery route planner app free.” I didn’t really get very far but that seemed to be a productive rabbit trail to go down in order to find that kind of thing
“Your baseball card stories blow my mind every week! Thank you for sharing.”
I agree with Retro. Being a militaria guy I noticed those Horrors of War cards with the fabric and patch pieces. I’ve had some pretty close to worthless damaged old uniforms and ratty patches I would have been happy to cut up and put pieces of them in fancy cases to sell for $80. That was genius. Congrats to you for those sales! I love a good snipe on a poorly listed auction, too. They’re still out there.
Have you all ever looked at EasyAuctionsTracker? They do have a free trial (and a ridiculous bargain in my opinion at $50 a year if you buy it) though eBay only gives it data going back two months so if you try it now you’ll have to enter January sales manually. It’s computer-based Excel. It retrieves about 34 data points for each sale (but alas not posted date but they do have blank columns you could use to enter that) on one worksheet then has separate worksheets for the P&Ls and other reports it generates. Doing my Schedule C for the last couple years I’ve had it takes 10 minutes. The few times I’ve needed support it was great (and free). The only disadvantage is that anything not on your eBay accounts (it can draw data from up to 5 accounts) you have to enter manually and I don’t believe there is any way to add in sales off the platform, like Craigslist and the like, so you’d need a separate spreadsheet for that.
As a rule, I do not offer international shipping on electrical or electronics items, not wanting to add the international complication to the frequent returns and flaky buyers in electronics, and electrical items won’t work in many other countries anyway. This sounds like another reason to continue to do so.
Ebay now inserts a code line in the address to UK buyers that I assume alerts customs that VAT is paid. A recent buyer’s address had an extra line in the middle that looked like this:
Wideopen GB 365 6085 76 Code:Paid
Unfortunately that makes UK address have too many lines to enter and too many digits in the line if using Shippo etc but I made it work.
7/4/21 – 4/10/21
Total Active Items (2 different IDs): 346
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $628.59
Highest Price Sold: $225 – a 1960’s Russian you-know-what brought back from the Iraq War.
Returns: 0
COGS: $49.50 (including commissions but not including cost of any family castoffs sold)
New Listings: 16
$ Spent on New Inventory: $0You mentioned in the podcast that the tax filing deadline has moved but don’t forget that the quarterly estimated tax payment deadline has not moved so your quarterlies are due the usual dates, for federal and most states (including Virginia).
Regarding the caller with the Russian buyer, there are some countries not worth shipping to. I use ShipSaver insurance for high dollar items and they have a list of destination countries for which they won’t insure packages and of course Russian Federation is one of them. Any place they won’t insure, I don’t ship to, as I figure they have the data that tells them it’s too risky.
@cdils: I don’t engage slow payers. No messages. I send an unpaid item claim as soon as eBay will let me (I think it’s 48 hours) which I think gives them a little more time but allows me to get back my fees and relist the item as soon as possible. That being said, I have accommodated buyers who asked for more time to pay up front, and any time that happened, they have paid when they said they would. I used to send polite reminders to late payers who did not contact me but it never, ever, worked. All I got was crickets so I feel it is a waste of time.I was reading this with interest because I turned on some items for auto offers a while back and wanted to make sure they are shut off for some upcoming travel. But I don’t have an “Offer Settings” on my Active Listings page. So I’ve been on the line with a clueless CSR for a half hour now and they can’t help me. Tried a couple different ways to go at it with no joy. Maybe I’ll try calling tomorrow morning and get someone different.
