Neophyte Bottom Feeder

Hi Texasmick and welcome to the forum! You'll find just about all the answers to your question somewhere here in the forum, but you asked a very intense question, especially the second part about getting the most from your auctions.

First: fees. ebay's full fee schedule is here:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html . Sellers pay all fees; buyers pay nothing except the item cost and, usually for a coin's shipping/handling. Basic insertion fees are 20 cents and up, depending upon the bid starting price. The first image is free, then 15 cents for each image after that (unless an image package fee is added). There are a LOT of additional fees just for making a listing, depending upon what options the seller wants (e.g., gallery image [highly recommended for coins], Reserve, Buy It Now, bold fonts or border, etc.). Then after sale, a Final Value Fee (FVF) is charged by ebay to the seller, presuming the item was sold. The FVF is a percentage, starts at 5.25%, is scaled downward from there and additive depending upon the final sale price.

For a $5 coin, it might cost 60 to 70 cents for a basic listing. Final Value Fee on 5$ would be an additional 26 cents for a total $1.06 payment to ebay. Three dollars shipping is a little high for a coin, but not unreasonable if the packing materials are of good quality and additional postal services such as Delivery Confirmation, Certificate of Mailing, and/or Signature Confirmation are included with the $3 s/h. These fees can be reduced by online purchase and home printing of postal labels. My basic fees for either coins or Scout patches (in which I also deal) vary from $1.65 to $2.25, insurance not included. Much goes to packing materials (45 to 65 cents for bubble envelope) and about $1 for Safe-T-Mailer cardboard packing (for coins, some patches). I do NOT add in the gas it costs me to drive the 25 miles to the Post Office in my gas guzzler Jeep - $7.50 to $8 round trip. I consider this a cost of doing business and I don't charge the customer for my lifestyle far away from the nearest Post Office.

Whatever you do, do NOT try to make money from shipping and handling charges. Your buyers will pick up on this right away and you will never see them again, not to mention possibly adverse comments in their feedback to you, even if it is not a negative or neutral.

Second: advice about how to get the most from your auctions. Books have been written about this topic, so there's no way we can go into all the nuances and qualifications of successful ebay sellers. Best advice I can give: be open and honest in all your transactions. For sales, if a coin is cleaned or damaged, say so. Show large CLEAR images of BOTH sides of any coin; if there is a particular feature of a coin (say, an error or die crack or mint mark), show this to the best of your camera's ability. Have a detailed and accurate description and don't depend upon the pictures to show it all. Don't try to gloss over a potential problem with a coin (i.e., don't try to BS them); experienced coin buyers will see right through the verbiage and they'll never look at your coins again. Give your auctions and buyers a personal touch: respond to questions before an auction ends and as soon as practical after an auction ends, send a nice congratulatory email to the winner and do follow-up emails letting them know a coin has shipped, its tracking number, etc.

Benefit from others' mistakes, errors, and auction examples. Follow the golden rule. And read the " ebay Discussions" section of this forum; it's filled with others' mistakes, tragedies, and triumphs.

I'll say again the most important factors: openess and honesty.

Hope this is a start to get you off on the right foot. And good luck!

Fred

As Fred pointed out, there are a number of things to consider when trying to get the most out of your auctions.

We don't start any item above $9.95 (this includes coins and notes that have value in the thousands). This makes our basic listing fee 35 cents. We almost always use a gallery picture as this makes a listing stand out. That's another 35 cents. If the item sells for $132.50, the final fees are $4.54. If the buyer pays by Paypal, that's another $4.37 in fees. If you sell from a store, the fees are higher - starting at 8% of the first $25. All in all, on an $80 sale, your amount after fees is $70.39. It is my suggestion that you start your auctions low as you will be more apt to get early bids and "bids beget bids" meaning that the more bids an item has, the more bids they are probably going to get.

I also advise that you state your shipping charges and offer a full return policy. If you have an html editor and a place to host your pictures, include the pictures in your auction description. ebay compresses their images, so you will have better looking images and you won't have to pay the image hosting to ebay.

Here is a link to one of our closed auctions. Take a look at the wording and also, even though there are 40 images in this auction, we did not pay for any image hosting with ebay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...m=8413159613

Hope this helps.