Christmas Challenge! £300.00 by Christmas.

[BenedictsCumberbitch]

I'm getting back into my eBaying, massive clear outs will keep me busy over this free listings weekend, wondered if anyone wanted to join me in making Christmas as cheap as possible and having the good people of eBay pay for most of it!

[LineRunner]

I've got some larger items that I just don't want to post so I'm trying Collection Only at first. At least then people can see what they're getting before they part with the cash.

[lljkk]

That drop & collect service intrigues (strokes chin hairs, I presume you mean this service).
Funny that the only drop off point in our town is only 400m from the actual PO!

Twinkle Ebay takes a cut of sales in 3 ways:

1. Listing fees, this is why we get so excited over free listing weekends!
   
   
2. Final Valuation fee: 10% of sale price. You sell something for £10 + £4 postage, Ebay takes £1. You sell something for £14 with "free postage", Ebay will charge you £1.40.
   
   I think most everybody pays their Ebay fees out of Paypal balance.
   
   
3. Paypal charges, which are hard to avoid. Ebay owns Paypal, too.
   Paypal is a swine, but then I suppose any credit-debit card type system is for the recipient. Paypal charges to seller 20p+3.4% of the transaction value. So suppose you sell something for £10 + £4 postage. Paypal recieves £14, but then gives you only £13.32. Or you sell for £14 but with free postage, your net after Paypal is still £13.32.
   
   Here's a calculator to play with.
   
   My general rule of thumb is to assume that Ebay will get 20% of the sale price. UNLESS I can arrange for cash on collection.
   
   If you get powerseller status or some label like that, the Ebay % cut goes down (a teeny tiny bit).

[dizzyday07]

I've used Collect+ and it is great for small but heavy items as they have a max size of 50x30x30cm. I've also used Hermes through Parcel2Go which is also reasonably cheap but gives you the flexibility of something being up to 1m long

[BabylonPI]

Well I've bitten the bullet and registered a new account as a business seller. I've relisted all of my items and a few for my parents too, including a trailer with a start price of £300 which already has 4 watchers!!

If this sells, does it count and do I get gold???

[LineRunnerFlameBurning]

I've just had the weirdest day. I decided to try Gumtree and have had more sales and interest there in a day than I've had from ebay in a month.

Advantages:

Cash at the door, so no worries about 'SNADs'
No fees
No waiting for PayPal to release money after 21 days
No aggressive messages from scam buyers wanting to keep the item plus a refund
No worring about Seller Account Status

Disadvantages:

People have to ring you up / come to your front door / front room. (But that can happen with ebay anyway for Collection.)

What am I missing?

[LineRunnerFlameBurning]

Babylon Yes you will get gold!

[notcitrus]

Well I got some items listed on Monday, but little interest so far: here

Also have created photobucket account for pics of nappies for listing on clothnappytree, and have some things to go on Gumtree.

I'm even more motivated as I opened my payslip today and had nasty surprise - I thought this was my last month on full pay, not first on SMP...

[CagneyNLacey]

Oooh that's interesting, LineRunner. I will put an ad on my local Gumtree now and see if anything happens soon, thanks for tip

[BabylonPI]

Woohoo!! We're up to 15 watchers and two msgs asking me to end early!!
I've politely declined and shall let the auction run

[dizzyday07]

I have listed a few bits to hopefully go before we move next week!

[LineRunnerFlameBurning]

And you get to put loads of free photos on Gumtree.

I have to say that my 'ebay training' makes my Gumtree adverts look pretty good - keywords, accurate descriptions, nice photos. Thank you ebay!

[notcitrus]

Ooh, that CollectPlus service looks good - there's a shop for it on my nursery run. Time to create bundles of baby clothes...

[VoldemortsNipple]

I've hot over 20 watcher on two pairs of shoes. One pair are trainers that dh bought off eBay but didn't fit. We have the money back on them already. I also put Dr. Marten's on for 99p because the soles had a lot of wear to them :)

[EmptyCrispPackets]

Ive listed some unwanted gifts, kids books and shoes. Lots of watchers on some of it.


Im interested in the business seller thing as last month I had to stop listing as the branded products totted up. What do I have to do? Do you pay more fees?

[BabylonPI]

I haven't paid anything so far

I know I won't be able to take advantage of free listings anymore but hey ho

Only downside so far is that I can only have 10 listings until DSRs start to arrive

[BabylonPI]

I am going to look at gumtree too

[eatyouwithaspoon]

I have listed 11 items of clothes and 6 have 1 bid so far (only a £1 or 99p), all ending this weekend . I have a loft full of girls and ladies clothes that no longer fit - plus sorting out a bag to sell by weight to local recycling group as not worth listing individually.
I have been looking on Facebook - alot of places have facebook local selling pages - I am not sure if its ok to mention the dreaded fb on here but it might be good as there are no selling fees?

[CagneyNLacey]

Bloody hell, I love Gumtree! Put something on late last night and got a text for it this morning. Thanks LineRunner!

[LineRunnerFlameBurning]

Good old Gumtree!

Can someone tell me, is it frowned upon to list an item on Gumtree and ebay at the same time? How would that work?

[lljkk]

Out of 45 items, I have
bids on 5
37 watchers on 10 items (including most of those with bids)

I'm very satisfied with that, especially with 2-5 days still to run on many.
And about 10 more items to list next FLW.

My problem is I see too many things on my premises I am tempted to list, having to sit on my hands almost.
Does anyone know, Free-listing-weekends are limited to 100 items, and 99p items are free to list up to 100 listings per month, but does that mean I could do 100x99p listings in a month, AND 100 FLW listings per FLW, even if there were 2xFLWs in a month, or is the free cap = 100/month from all sources?

If there were 2xFLWs in the same calendar month, could I do in that month
100 x 99p listings
and 2 x 100 x FLW listings? Or 300 listings in total?

Sorry if that's garbled, hopefully someone knows what I meant!

[lljkk]

LineRunner Ebay rules allow you to advertise & sell stuff elsewhere, Gumtree doesn't take a cut of your sale price so they don't care. No conflicts.
BUT, on Ebay you'll sometimes get private msgs: "Can I come collect today & buy that from you today for £10?" type of thing, which is potentially a temptation to let them come, they collect & pay, and then you could end the auction on Ebay saying you sold it elsewhere but having paid no fees inspite of using Ebay's advertising service.

It's immoral, obviously, and against Ebay rules.

[LineRunnerFlameBurning]

I think you can, Iljkk.

The normal 100 per month quota is for auctions starting at 99p.

The FLW quota is for items starting at at least £1.

[Tortoise]

I'm in. Listed lots on FLW and just had email about free listing all this week! I'm going to be busy I think lol.
Have a fairly new business account to run at same time so its going to be tricky to do 30 hours on that and list on other account.

Babylon Did you know that as a business seller you are self employed and need to register with inland revenue for tax?

[BenedictsCumberbitch]

I got that email too! Free listings between the 1st & 6th September, gonna make the most of that.

[PurpleFrog]

No, BenedictsCumberbitch, free listing between 1st and 9th Sept inclusive!