eBay Seller Question

lahmejoon

Hi All,

So, I went through my saved seller list and wanted to see if there were any that were no longer active. I noticed that one of the sellers currently lists some rather common cards and noticed that most of the closed auctions only sell for $0.25 to $0.40. Here are the parameters:

Auction format
$0.25 minimum bid and assume auction ends for $0.25
$0.50 shipping
Paypal payment

Ignoring the time factor it takes to list, package, etc, and ignoring the cost of supplies, would this even yield anything after paypal and final listing fees? I'm just wondering what I'm missing or why someone would do this because it doesn't appear that this would net anything.

charrigan

Min .30 PayPal fee + cost of stamp eats it all up. Hard to see the viability here.

mlbfan2

The seller could be trying to build feedback, or perhaps he thought his cards would sell for much more than they did.

lahmejoon

Yeah, it's strange. The guy has 5,000 feedback, so it can't be for building feedback. Looking at the recent auctions, all of them are in this price range. We're talking auctions for 88 Donruss singles.

About three or four years ago, when I purchased from him, he was selling rookies of Sandberg, Boggs, Gwynn, Ripken, Clemens, etc.

MooseDog

Seems like a tough way to make a go of it but most people don't know PayPal has a "micropay" account. Terms are .05 + 5% which makes total fees cheaper than a regular PayPal account up to about $12.

So on your .75 sale, his PayPal fees are .0375 or probably rounded to .04, plus .05; and I'm going to assume he's taking advantage of free auction listings from eBay, otherwise he'd be losing money.

.75 sale
.07 eBay fees (9% eBay store rate)
.09 PayPal fees
.48 PWE postage (assume Stamps.com discount price)
____

.12 net profit

miwlvrn

<< <i>Seems like a tough way to make a go of it but most people don't know PayPal has a "micropay" account. Terms are .05 + 5% which makes total fees cheaper than a regular PayPal account up to about $12.

So on your .75 sale, his PayPal fees are .0375 or probably rounded to .04, plus .05; and I'm going to assume he's taking advantage of free auction listings from eBay, otherwise he'd be losing money.

.75 sale
.07 eBay fees (9% eBay store rate)
.09 PayPal fees
.48 PWE postage (assume Stamps.com discount price)
____

.12 net profit >>



That $0.12 assumes he doesn't have any cost at all into acquisition, either. Plus cost of PWE and some sort of packing inside the envelope, whether it is a piece of paper, a penny sleeve, a top loader, etc. I don't think there is a net profit to this example no matter how you try to add it up.