Selling Coins On Ebay

One only has to pick a category and look at auctions with no bids and ending soonest to see why. It ain't ebay's fault. You got sellers with lousy feedback, lousy photos, and asking way too much money for an opening bid skewing that number very dramatically.

When you have entered your ebay search, all the listings appear that meet your search criteria. You can then view the small pictures (and brief descriptions) in that list without clicking on/viewing a particular item. The counter which shows the number of views on a particular item, is just the number of times that particular item was clicked on to view all the auction particulars. In other words, the item may have been viewed in the search criteria list many more times than the item was actually clicked on for all details (and the counter only tracks the number of hits/clicks on that particular auction).

So, the counter is somewhat deceiving. An overpriced item may have been viewed many times in a search list, but never clicked on... hence showing *no views... until you click on it to see how many people looked at it.

*Btw, the counters start at "1", not "0".

This is actually a topic I have thought long and hard about even before I read these posts. I keep asking myself if it is really worth it to sell on ebay in the long run.

Lets say I purchase an item for $1.00 and sell it for $6.00 with free shipping.
Here is how I see the breakdown:
1.00 - bought price
0.25 - list price
0.54 - sell cost
0.30 - paypal fee
0.17 - paypal percent
0.61 - shipping (first class no frills)
0.25 - materials
0.40 - gas to purchase supplies and to ship item from PO
0.53 - BOE (if sold in state)
1.50 - personal tax (seriously)
6.00 - sale amount
0.45 - profit

nickelman--

If more people did a full accounting, they'd find better things to do. I looked at a silver parfulseller/shooting star once. If you figured he was tripling his money, ebay was making $1200 a month for shuffling a few electrons, and he was making $900 for doing all the work.

He listed 100 items a day, so between that and filling orders, answering emails, trips to the po, etc, it would be reasonable to figure he was working a 40 hour week. Let's see, $10,800 a year = $5.40 an hour. How much is minimum wage, and when the day is over, your time is yours?

Another thing people don't factor in is the listing fee. With 40% sell thru, it means the average item is listed 2.5 times, so its listing fee isn't a quarter, but $.625.

Nickelman raises a good point on very low value items. There is no point in using ebay when selling widgets that are worth just a few bucks.

This is my first month selling on ebay and my sales so far are roughly $3300 with almost exactly 10% ($340) going to eBay/PayPal fees. I couldn't have gotten the $3300 out of my coins elsewhere, so 10% fees are fine with me. The Final Value Fee cap at $50 is something that I didn't know about until this year and it helps to hold the fees down on high value items.

I get all of that for sure. The sellers I do NOT get are the ones that take a loss consistently. I bought a coin last year from a seller that offered free shipping. I won the coin for under a dollar and when it arrived the postage was around .40 cents. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't get the coin for a great price, it was a coin that just didn't have any value in fact I probably paid too much for it.

I checked the sellers other auctions for similar coins (there were a lot of them) and they were going for .40 to .75 cents. Free shipping? on a coin that will make less than the postage? Even if the person got the coins for free they still took a loss once the dust settled. I just don't get that.

Nickelman: Some of those guys are trying to get or keep a high status for discounts on the high price stuff. Every lose is a write off.

I'm still trying to figure if the new fee schedule is going to help $1 to $5 coin(s) sale. The way it is now it's scary putting a coin up for $.99 to avoid insertion fees.