Here’s some Tips for Selling on eBay – Genre Auctions!
I’d like to offer one of my tips for selling on eBay – especially since it’s still fresh in my mind. As mentioned in the last post, summer is really a difficult time for us to do eBay. Today, however, I want to talk about when it’s DEFINITELY worth your time to make the time to run some auctions.
I’m really fond of what I call “genre” auctions. That is, I may have a really nice tennis racquet that I bought at a yard sale – but I’ll probably wait to run it on eBay until I’ve got about 4 or 5 of them. Then I’ll make up a template for the “genre” and copy/paste it into Turbo Lister.
In the case of the softball bats, I play on a couple of leagues here in New Hampshire, and my team captain for the men’s league had a number of bats he asked me to sell. I did a little research on the bats, and it turned out that he had quite a few of them that were worth some bucks.
Now, here’s one of my “eBay tips” that I personally adhere to – and I adhere to it now only after trial and error (and a lot of error). As difficult as it is to say “NO” to someone who asks you to sell something for them on eBay, in a lot of cases it’s really in your best interest to back away from such requests. My personal rule of thumb is that if I can’t make any decent money on the transaction, it’s just not worth my time and effort.
Obviously, everyone is different. You may have a lower or higher profit threshold that you need in order to make it worth your while to list something for others. In my case, if I can make at “x-amount of money” AFTER all eBay and PayPal fees, I’ll consider it. It also has to have a track record of selling in the recent past.
In the case of softball bats, these bats had a pretty good track record.
I give my consigner 50% of the hammer price – right off the top. So, if a bat sold for $100, he gets $50. I get what’s left after my fees.
So, he didn’t have just ONE bat – he had about 12 of them. Several were worth running on their own, and the others I just lotted up. I also happened to have a few bats of my own, so I just waited until I had a couple of rainy days, and then photographed them and listed them. Kath helps me a lot when I’m listing a lot of items at once because she can type really fast.
As you can see from the photos accompanying this post, we did pretty well!
The total take was about $700 in my buddy’s inventory (so, I sent him $350), and then I sold a couple of my own. My take – after fees (which were about $80 all told) was about $450. Not bad for a few hours of listing, and then a few hours afterwards answering questions, and then the tasks that have to be done afterwards (invoicing, follow-up, packaging, shipping).
Here is another screen shot from a few of the other results – and Kath is going to make another video with some more indepth info about this particular genre as soon as we grab a few minutes for her to film the intro. So, definitely consider working in “genres” – it can save some time if you are “grouping” items, because oftentimes you can make a template.
As an aside, we have decided to head south again this winter – this time back to North Myrtle Beach! More on that soon… In the meantime, THINK GENRE! Take care! Best, John
