If you are visiting from the Carnival of Money Stories II hosted at The Suburban Dollar, welcome to Out of Debt Again! Thank you Kyle for including my post in today's carnival!
A few years ago when I was working only three days a week, and Mr. A was the full time stay at home dad-guy, I had a LOT more time to eBay. I used to love it. The thrill of putting up an auction, then checking in to see if the items sold. On the other hand, I hated it.
The love wins out every so often, when I get the urge to list something; to try again and see if I'll get lucky, this time. Well, when I went through and decluttered my bedroom, I came across a candy dispenser that I just had to see if it was worth anything on eBay. That's been one of the biggest reasons I hang onto clutter, because “it might be worth something on eBay“.
Wow! The same exact candy dispenser sold just three days earlier for $16.00! I took a picture and listed the item, starting the bid at $5.00. I guess the category I selected was free for the day, so I didn't incur listing fees.
I decided I wasn't going to look at all. I wasn't going to check in and see if I had any bids. I'd just let it be a surprise.
In fact, I actually forgot about it. The next Monday I was at work, and checked my email just before getting started and WOWZA!! The subject line said I'd received a PayPal payment for $39.55!! Whoot!! I'd listed the shipping as $8.50 so that means I'd made THIRTY-ONE DOLLARS profit!!
I was so thrilled, wow, I almost sent that to Goodwill! Boy oh boy, did I make the right choice to list it on eBay. Must have been a bit of a bidding war. Those people, they just get it in their heads that the item BELONGS to them just because they placed a bid. Works for me!!
Then I logged into eBay to get the shipping details, and… oh… shoot… it turns out a very polite man living in Germany won my auction. And he wanted me to ship the item TO GERMANY. And… shipping to Germany was… THIRTY-THREE DOLLARS. My Germany winner had paid the full amount for shipping, and my auction ended for the paltry sum of $6.55.
Ah well. In the end I made $6.55 minus eBay Final Value fees of $0.57, minus PayPal fees of $1.84, so I'm a whopping $4.14 richer! Maybe this latest experience will help me to resist the siren call of eBay in the future. 😉
Yours Truly,
At least you still came out ahead. I made errors like that before and ended up eating the cost of the shipping so I learned to always double check my listings.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
September 12th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
You’re right, I am definitely grateful that I made a little bit of money for my trouble. 🙂 Thanks for visiting and commenting! 🙂
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Did you say in the auction that you’d ship outside the US?
If you didn’t, and I think the default is that you WON’T ship outside the US, then you don’t own it to the person in Germany to follow through on the auction. Just tell him no, you won’t ship overseas unless he wants to pay full shipping.
You gave up a little too easily on that one.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
September 13th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Hi Mary, as a matter of fact, my German winner did pay the full shipping to send the item to Germany. I do not limit my auctions only within the US, so I was fully aware that my item might need to be shipped out of the country when I listed it. To clarify things, I assumed, when I saw the paypal notice for $39 that the item had sold to someone within the US. I was pretty happy about that, until I logged in to see where to send the item and found that most of the money paid to me had been for the overseas shipping costs. Can you see the irony of the situation now? I thought it was pretty funny that eBay “got me” like that. 🙂 Thanks for visiting and commenting!
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