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Chapter 1.9: Being an eBay Power Seller

Ebay is an amazing tool for buyers and sellers of the world. We’ve literally found people across the world that were interested in our items which is amazing to think about. We found something cool in a local barn, took a chance that someone would buy it, and at the same time someone in Germany was constantly checking to see if this certain item was found and for sale on the internet. We connected with someone we would have never met otherwise, and it’s all because of eBay. But its not all rainbows and butterflies selling on this site. We have been dubbed an eBay power seller, this is our experience on the road to that title.

For starters, the first 3-4 months we created a personal account. Not knowing much about the site, and selling thru other online sites was our bread and butter, so we said lets give it a test run. Initially, we were bringing in loads of money and soon realized that this was probably going to be a key part in expanding our business. Our items were now offered worldwide, and not just in the East Coast. Literally everything we listed was sold within a month period. What we didnt know about an ebay personal account is they charge higher percentage fees when you sell an item. 

We saw our paypal account rising daily. We were all smiles, but heres where reality set in for us. For example- Say we sold a $100 item. We probably paid $50 for that item because we did the research and knew we could sell it for $100. Ebay takes 10% of the final value of the items you sell on their site. Paypal also has a fee of 2.5%. So they are taking about $12.50 from your $100 sale which leaves you with $87.50. Subtract the initial $50 you paid and your making $37.50 for that $100 sale. It’s still a very good profit margin but heres where we would get jammed up. Sometimes you find these items, they are dirty, broken, need repainting or polishing, rewired or just need to be given some love. Restoration. People aren’t accounting for the $5 in paint here or the $7 brass polisher there, it adds up. This is on top of all the man hours you put in to just post the item. Everything needs to be cleaned, taken pictures of, research what they’ve sold for, write a description of the item, and than finally post it. None of this is including the cardboard, tape, and bubble wrap you need to use on every single item to ship. Another additional cost. Lastly, eBay “recommends” roundabout shipping for certain items, so we were just going with their recommendations at first. Until we go to print a shipping label and it’s an extra $10 to ship. We soon learned after getting burnt on a bunch of items eBays shipping system and to this day we rarely ever have to pay out of pocket anymore. I figure on every $100 we make we profit about $20-25 take home if everything goes as planned. Oh, and this doesnt include all the taxes we have to pay for selling items.

It’s what we enjoy doing. Learning the history, making something mechanically or physically working again, but there’s just a lot more that goes into it than you would think. It’s not just buy low and sell high. 

Once we got the hang of eBay we decided to open an eBay store. It’s a monthly cost to keep it open but it cuts down costs on final value fees by about 3%. Its completely customizable and you can interact with your buyers and remain more organized among other things. Every little bit helps. 

I can say what we love about eBay:

1. The following- You have eyes from across the globe on your product and your brand. This is the biggest and best site to sell on.

2. The customers- Sure everyone is looking for a bargain but we have met some great people along the way, and have had return buyers. Plus we get satisfaction out of seeing our items go all around the world.

3. Easy Use- Whether listing an item, or tracking it, or printing a shipping label it’s not complicated at all once you learn the ropes. Some other sites we’ve tried are like torture trying to post a single item. Also as an ebay shop owner it helps being able to see the analytics and financial reports to help grow your business.

And now what we hate about eBay:

1. The lowballers- Like I said everyone is looking for a bargain, and we are ALWAYS negotiable, but some people are just so unrealistic its frustrating. No I will not sell you a $200 item for your offer of $5.50. This is a daily occurrence for us. You have to laugh.

2. The fees- Ebay can do what they want because they are the best. Some months we paid so many fees we would have been better off paying rent at a storefront. (We’ve since been able to cut down a little on fees with our own little system we created)

3. The eBay buyer protection program- Ebay has a great program if you’re a buyer, but as sellers it doesn’t work out in your favor. We’ve had multiple items (We literally wrapped with a full roll of bubble wrap) arrive broken. Some people are just scam artists which we’ve learned and others just the delivering company must have played soccer with our box. Whatever the reason though, eBay protects that buyer and your items and money is down the drain. 

Unfortunately as of late eBay has become inundated with tons of reproduction and cheap bulk alibaba items. I think they can care less because money is money, and if it sells than good for them. I can remember being a child when eBay first launched. My dad was and still is a collector of many items from Sports to Disney to Movie Memorabilia. I’d sit with him when an auction would be ending and he’d bid with others bidding all in the final seconds and somehow he always won whatever auction he wanted. He had some system with an old clock and calculating the seconds, and he’d bid with literally a second left and win the auction. This was before they had any of the computer equipment they have today. Now you can actually buy programs to win an ebay auction by a cent, which lets you win the auction but not overpay. Back then everything was genuine. The sellers, the bidders, the items. You could find deals and trust the items. On top of all that the selling fees were nothing like they are today. Now I see people making millions (yes millions) of dollars selling fake signs made in India. Or you could just buy 1000 tweety bird license plates thru the alibaba website for a thousand bucks and sell them for $5 a piece on eBay. More on that on a second.

The petroliana community (gas and oil sign collectors) have a deep hatred for these sellers. There’s even a black list of sellers eBay names floating around that is updated monthly. So basically this is how it works- these people mass reproduce gas, oil, auto, and soda porcelain signs. If you’ve ever seen American Pickers you know these signs can be very expensive. The more rare-the more money. They literally have a factory pumping out reproduction porcelain signs that are so good to the naked eye its almost impossible to tell if it’s authentic or fake, especially thru internet pictures. They even go as far as to make rust and rub dirt on them to make them look authentic. They use words like “RARE” “OLD” “ANTIQUE” or “AMAZING” but never ever say it’s authentic, or real, or original. These signs sell for thousands and thousands of dollars everyday, with tons of bidders on them. It just shows that even the experts aren’t sure what is real or not. I know we (only once) have bought a reproduction sign, and also many people we know have bought tons of them. They are starting to flood the market and by them being made so well to look authentic it’s a tough hobby to be in. I can talk about this for days, so maybe I’ll do a full blog on it upcoming if anyone is interested? Well see…

The alibaba items are another part of eBay that I really don’t like. Just my opinion. Some of the stuff is cool and cheap but it’s kinda like shopping in a dollar store. Yes, you can buy a car cell phone charger for a dollar but it probably won’t work after a month, and then you say to yourself “Well, whatever it was just a dollar”. Same thing with these bulk items that are flooding the eBay market. Searching on alibaba you can buy 1000 tweety bird license plates for $1000. Now you look at what they sell for on ebay and they go for like $5 per piece. You could definitely make some good money there but it just seems so cheap to me, and if they dont sell you have nearly a lifetime supply of tweety bird license plates that who knows what you can do with. You also have to be careful with flooding the market because after a while the buyers fade away. We learned that with 2 specific items we had bought it bulk. 

1. A Honda Magna Motorcycle Key Chain- Crazy right? It was a cheap little plastic key chain shaped as a motorcycle and it said Honda on it. We found a sealed bag with like 50 of these things, got em cheap, and listed one. The original key chain sold for around $25 and as time went on the price went lower and lower. We still have about 20 of these and we cant even give them away for our $7.99 asking price now. We still made out on them either way.

2. Pepsi Pinwheel Snapback Hats- these hats were never put out to the public to buy and they were only for Pepsi Cola Delivery drivers to wear in the 80’s. We found 4 sealed brand new hats. The first one we got close to $130! For a hat! We just recently sold our final one for a measely $50. Still pretty expensive but no where near what we originally got.

Those examples are just to show what flooding the eBay market will do. The collectors get their item, and then the next collector gets it, and then the next, but after all those collectors have that piece you get stuck with the bulk and can’t give them away. So its a very risky business buying in bulk and selling on eBay and you definitely have to walk a fine line and time it the right way. You have to mix it up and keep the inventory different which is what we always try to do. 

I guess to sum it all up, we’ve had a major love/hate relationship with eBay. I remember the day we made our first big sale. We were actually both working in our office and a guy made a solid offer on a street sign we recently picked, we countered and met him in the middle point of his offer and our asking price. He accepted, and we were so pumped that day. I mean we were straight high fiving and chest bumping pumped. The guy we originally bought the sign from literally was going to use the sign for scrap metal and we convinced him to sell it to us. He looked at us like we were nuts when we shelled out money for that sign, but it did pay off in the end. That first big eBay sale gave us that feeling that we could do this. Than we got our first positive feedback review, than our first return customer, and so on. Whether we are at a point that we love or hate eBay, it has played an important role as to where we are as a company today, but its definitely something we may not want to do forever, and being dubbed a Top Rated Seller shows the hard work and dedication we’ve put into online selling. With nearly 100 positive reviews and 0 negatives, I’d say people either like us or the product, and whichever it is, we’ll continue to chug along.

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Fintech vs techfin — generation incarnations vs finance incumbents

A hen’s eye view of the developing function that generation performs in financial transactions brings out an overt dichotomy: that among era companies jumping into the monetary area with complete power — finch — and financial companies having to adapt to the generation wave — tech fan. Chris Skinner, an independent financial technology analyst, identified the difference among finch and tech in agencies approximately a year ago.

The dividing line is clear from the very beginning.

Fintech organizations have a sturdy technological historical past and to them, finance is simply every other use case to be explored and exploited. It’s also an exceptionally untapped territory, which requires disruption and agile execution. Traditionally, this has been the distinctiveness of latest private upstarts in place of the installed gamers from the personal or public- quarter global. It wasn’t VISA that created the progressive PayPal despite their present reach.

Disruption in finance vis-a-vis other sectors Finance is, globally, a fantastically regulated industry regarding licenses, registration, club, and adherence to strict norms from various banking, insurance, and securities regulators. Access to those markets is constrained and calls for adherence to current norms which, in turn, guard incumbents and restriction innovation. However, the increase in the digital era and telecommunication has compelled the economic region to awaken to the disruption that new technologies can wreak upon their antique, secure fashions and strategies.

Massive agencies have disrupted whole industries — Amazon (retail, facts centers), Netflix (films, television), Google (media, telecom), Apple (music), Tesla (vehicles), Lodge.Com (Lodge reservations), to name a few. But, there are very few examples of startups in the Banking, economic Services, and coverage (BFSI) sectors which could craft out a dominant function (for instance PayPal).

Finance — a relatively regulated quarter This slack tempo is because of the regulation-pushed nature of the commercial enterprise. Startups have popped up all over the BFSI landscape. However, maximum of them have a tendency to be subsumed by using large incumbents. If no longer, they migrate to being an authorized/regulated entity themselves, therefore becoming a member of the industry they desire to disrupt. Technologically nimble incumbent players have confirmed more receptive to the guarantees of this disruption and feature spread out a yawning competitive gap vis-a-vis their less agile opposite numbers.

Again domestic too, this international fashion for tech in to be triumphant over finch is likely to be authentic, particularly given the conservative regulatory surroundings inside us of a. Anecdotal proof from the BFSI quarter over the last few years strengthens this view. a few Big gamers have emerged led with the aid of traditional bankers who embraced the brand new digital generation paradigm, eg. Kotak Financial institution, Sure Bank, CapitalFirst, Ratnakar Bank, Edelweiss, IIFL, and so on. It stays to be seen how a number of the more recent finish businesses together with BankBazaar, Capital Float, Lending art, Hair cent perform within the years ahead. A huge finch player Payton has already received a payments Bank license and could need to act extra like a regulated tech in participant.

other tech in bankers seem to be grappling with the easiest way to bring a generation into their present day setup. Public zone behemoths including SBI have lagged inside the technology-adoption curve in comparison to their non-public opposite numbers — working example, the automation of procedures thru paperless operations. There is a certain resistance to unlearn and relearn, nearly as though finch is forcing the ‘tech’ in tech in. This duality turns into apparent when broken down similarly.

Control profile At the same time as age isn’t always always an illustration of ways adaptive a CEO’s outlook can be, it isn’t always the largest marvel that the common age of the top Indian finch CEOs is around forty years (Paytm, BankBazaar, Capital Drift), whereas that of similar tech in organizations’ chairmen is north of 50s (Edelweiss, Kotak Bank, Capital First). Also unsurprisingly, finch CEOs have a technical schooling. some of them have enjoy with consulting corporations and others have that in mixture with technical paintings enjoy. Best 50 percent of founders have greater than years of enjoy in financial Services earlier than their modern mission within the finch area. Approximately one-1/3 of the founders have 2–10 years of revel in and 17 percent have over 10 years of revel in within the domain.

Alternatively, almost all tech in managing directors are alumni of a number of the pinnacle Control academic institutes inside the world and feature a protracted enjoy within the banking area. Interestingly, There may be a shift in the manner tech in is drawing close the challenges in technological version. Even the Indian government, in a first, has appointed non-public region professionals to move Bank of Baroda (Ravi Venkatesan, ex-Chairman, Microsoft India) and Canara Financial institution (TN Manoharan, Director, Tech Mahindra).

Traditional buyers maximum Indian in tech startups are normally backed with the aid of the who’s who of the Silicon Valley assignment capital ecosystem. Tech in investments, Alternatively, are in large part made with the aid of sovereign price range like GIC Singapore or personal fairness funds like KKR and Blackstone. generally, funding to tech in businesses are an order of value more than the investment for in tech startups (excluding Paytm this is already creating a transition to a ‘licensed’ payments Financial institution). Aspirational differences A study in their contemporary and capacity target market famous that fintech startups are focused on the more youthful clients, a set that can be stereotyped as being comfy with transacting online. In well known, finch organizations attempt to create new markets. Tech in companies commonly goal SMEs, the older technology, and a wealthier elegance, for whom transacting on-line is instead alien. This may feed into the cycle — tech in customers don’t want change and therefore, There’s a extra sluggish approach to adopt new generation. Tech in organizations goal to retain their marketplace share or take some from different incumbent gamers. Threat project Tech fan, by means of its very nature, has huge credit risks and is operations heavy. In addition to credit score Threat (if it is inside the lending area), finch groups have to protect themselves in opposition to safety and privacy dangers from hackers. Even as tech in gamers tend to pursue conventional metrics like profits cowl, protection cowl, and CIBIL ratings Whilst taking credit risks, finch gamers have a tendency to rely on more modern and extra interesting metrics derived from the virtual world or social media and cellular usage patterns in their customers Even as making credit selections.

External affects The dynamic nature of rules for the financial industry is each a boon and a curse. At the same time as it may imply an evolving, conducive environment, it Also approach having to be for your feet. For now, tech in bankers must perform within heavily regulated obstacles and finch enjoys working from the periphery, handling to avoid policies to a Big volume. Even though a number of the disruptive technology implementations like blockchain and peer-to-peer lending don’t have strict regulations guarding them, in tech firms want to develop the logo and accept as true with of their tech in counterparts to grow. Further, the penetration of startups in all areas of finance and the growth of the role of technology in conventional economic companies function growing opposition for every other. Similarly, each finch and tech in organisations have opposition from more modern and more green government schemes that have the potential to cast off huge chunks of marketplace proportion. That is in particular genuine of the bills area this is seeing widespread technological innovations via UPI, India Stack, and so on.