eBay

As most of you know, for the last couple months we have been using eBay to dispose of some of our belongings. A number of you have asked if we make any money doing this, and the answer is people will buy anything. So far we have sold 145 items, the lowest at $1.99 (a plastic shoe horn from the Vista International Hotel in New York City) to $750.00 for 6 used bottles of Nine Flags Cologne from the late 60s. Some other noteworthy items were a Creepy Crawlers set from the mid-60s ($86.00), an All-Star Baseball board game from the early 60s ($125.00), and a Dom Perignon silver cork keeper from the millennium celebrations ($46.99). About 15 years ago we bought a box of coral and seashells at a garage sale for $2 or $3, and those 20 items sold individually for a total of $225.88! An empty wood silverware storage box sold for $125.00. A few years back while at Walt DisneyWorld we bought a monorail playset for $55 that ended up selling for $119.95. A phone that we were trying to get $15 for in our garage sale sold for $42.00 on eBay. For those of you who are familiar with the game of corkball, we sold two bats from the early 70s for over $19.00 each.

The list goes on and on and obviously not everything we sold brought in large dollars. But what we have found out is that just about any piece of junk you have lying around the house will sell if marketed correctly. We have found the most important thing in listing an item is to have a good picture and an accurate description, warts and all. We've also found that items that are chipped or cracked have little value. We have brought some things on the road with us and will continue to list some items weekly. An old Fort Apache set is in high demand as is a train set that we have brought along. We also have some small plastic soldiers and Smurf toys that seem to be a hot ticket right now.

Over the course of these past few weeks, we had a number of questions from interested buyers, most of which were good and legitimate, wanting more info on a particular item. But the classic had to be the person who was interested in the glass sanctuary candle holder we had listed. We had noted in the description that it was 8" tall and had about an inch of wax in it, which could probably still be lit with a long match. Someone wrote asking if it could be refilled, to which Russ replied that the bottom of it read that it was not to be refilled but suggesting that perhaps a votive candle could be placed in it. And to this the person replied asking how she was going to get a lit votive candle in the holder. Russ almost didn't want to reply feeling she was too stupid to buy. It eventually sold for $11.01 but not to her.

The bottom line: we sold 145 items for a total of $2,722.65, and we have made an additional $172.05 on shipping charges. Our intent was not to make money on shipping, but we did set it up to cover our costs if needing to ship to California. Shipping items closer to home were less expensive, and therefore the profit. From these amounts $419.44 was paid to eBay and PayPal in fees. We also spent $66.00 on supplies for packing material and tape. Since we were picking up mail on a regular basis from our P.O. Box, we did not allocate any expense to dropping the packages off at the post office. Our weekly trip to Wal-Mart included gathering empty boxes from the stockers so there was no cost for boxes. So after expenses we netted $2,409.26 over the course of 7 weeks, or $344.18 per week. Since we do have some free time on our hands, and sooner or later the storage unit needs to be emptied out, we feel that the time spent was worth the money made. eBay makes it really easy to print postage at home using your computer, and the post office supplies free boxes when using Priority mail. We enjoyed looking items up and determining a starting price, and each Sunday evening as up to 50 of our auction items were closing, we laughed with each new bid to buy our junk. We are not sure how many states we shipped to, but we doubt that few were left out as an empty cigar box went to Alaska, and a seashell to Hawaii. By the way shipping Parcel Post to Hawaii takes almost a month! It must have gone by way of that slow boat to China!

Now if Russ could only find his baseball cards from the 50s and 60s, we would really be able to supplement our retirement income!

We are still in DeFuniak Springs and leave on Monday with our next stop in Woodbine, GA.