Over the past 2 months I've been holding a postcard and ephemera yardsale through ebay using their 30 free listings per month. Bought 100's of items but never sold a thing.
I was surprised to find how much work is really involved - to scan the cards, upload them, create the listings and then deal with mailing the items. It has been fun and interesting and educational. I realize how much effort it would take to pay the rent doing this here in New York City. I gained a lot of respect for the ebay sellers. I see how easily mistakes can occur.
I tried my best in each listing to show clear 300 dpi scans of both sides of the cards, showing full edges and corners. In the listings I called out any problems as best I could. I really didn't want to deal with returns. I mailed the cards inside a rigid plastic sleeve in a kraft envelope; these are mostly antique cards and need to be protected. Jiffy packs would be better but they are expensive individually. Good practice would have a sleeved card inside a rigid holder, inside a jiffy envelope and mailed with delivery confirmation. But who wants to pay $4 postage for a $5 card, right? Other thing I was stunned by is the incredible high price of international postage.
I think I end up with a 33% sales rate after a couple weeks listings for each item. I think I sold a number of cards simply because I wasn't setting up a museum - I really wanted to sell the cards and priced them based on what else I saw in ebay - sometimes the high bid was much more than I would have predicted.
I now understand what a poster said about 99 cent auctions being impossible to live on even en masse: paypal alone takes 30 cents right off the top. I suspect at the end of the day ebay and paypal will get 20% of my sales because of the small dollar items.
cheers
