I've been so busy with work and trying to sell cards that I haven't had time to do much photography.  I did get some great pix in Hyannis a couple weeks ago and some more good stuff at a reception for a christening I went to last weekend, but I haven't had time to photoshop the photos, clean them up, organize them, and so forth.  It's just been either work or eBay the last couple weeks.  Here's one picture I took (at the office, of couse).  Somebody in my building went out and got one of those "Dream Cruisers".  Isn't it gorgeous?  Wow.

On the eBay front I continue to sell and sell.  Part of my unlimited set is gone now, and I've gotten the right price for it, and I continue to identify rarities or obscurities in my collection and put them up for sale.  I am happy to report that I am at 90% of stage one and expect to make it there by the end of the week.  Cool beans!

But I have learned one important lesson about selling.  Selling in bulk may allow you to ship more product, but it definitely costs you money.  I sold a set of 8 revised dual lands back on the tenth of September for $122.50.  In preparation for the end of that auction I got another 7 dual lands together and was prepared to sell them as a batch.  But I decided not to.  As an experiment I decided to sell the 7 duals as individual auctions (here they are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).  They went for a total of $139.60.

Sold as a batch, they went for $15.31 apiece.  Sold individually? $19.94.  That's 30% difference!!!  Viewed from that perspective it makes sense to sell individually unless you have a very small market (say you are selling on a table on your front lawn... maybe a couple dozen people swing by and look at the items, chances of selling them all individually are remote.)  But on eBay the market is huge, millions of potential buyers, so go for it right?

Well there *are* the eBay fees to consider.  eBay will charge you for absolutely anything you can think of and plenty of things that wouldn't even occur to you.  Back in the early days of eBay there was a listing fee and a sale fee.  The listing fee used to be 30 cents.  That was it.  Then if the item sold there was a sale fee which was this sliding scale thing that was very complicated but generally worked out to about 4% to 5% of your sale.  Nowadays everything costs money.  No longer is the listing fee flat, but it is based on the minimum bid of your auction.  If your minimum bid is a dollar, the listing fee is 20 cents.  If your minimum bid is $49.99 your listing fee is $1.20, and if your minimum bid is $59.99 the fee is $2.40.  As you can see the fee is determined inside some sort of bracketed structure.  Want to add a reserve price?  You'll be charged 1% of your reserve price.  Want to add a buy-it-now price?  There's a fee for that.  Want to schedule your auction to start later in the day or later in the week?  There's a fee for that.  And so on and so on and so on.  Sale fees aside, eBay takes a hefty chunk out of you up front just for listing the item.  To the point where it makes no sense at all to sell anything for under say, 5 dollars.  Ebay will simply eat so much of it that it becomes pointless to sell it.

And of course once your item sells, eBay charges you for a percentage of the sale price, this you would pay no matter how many items you are selling, but the listing fees are paid for each item.  My listing fees for the first dual land auction was 30 cents (I had no minimum bid, no buy it now).  The 7 individual auctions cost 40 cents apiece to list (probably because I set a minimum bid of $9.99, otherwise it would have been 30 cents).  But that is $2.80 to list 7 individual items instead of 30 cents to list one.

Then come the PayPal fees, which generally work out to about 3.5% of the sale price but which have overhead costs causing them to be at least 30 cents as a minimum.  I read an amusing story about a guy who overcharged his customer about 90 cents for shipping, and offered the customer a refund via PayPal.  So the customer got sixty cents.  Ouch.  For items worth about $20 each, the overhead is not really all that relevant, but it would be for inexpensive items.  The PayPal fees would be easier to stomach if PayPal wasn't owned by eBay.  Yes, that's right, you pay eBay to list your item, you pay eBay to sell your item, and you pay eBay to collect the payment for the sale of your item.  Yeesh.  And, to make it even more annoying, PayPal fees are instantaneously applied to any cash transferred, but eBay fees are simply billed to you at the end of the month.  That way, PayPal can charge you a percentage off of the $100 you were paid, instead of the $100 you were paid minus the eBay listing and sale fees.  I hasten to point out again that PayPal *is* eBay.  Double dipping anyone?

After correcting for eBay listing fees, eBay sale fees, and eBay PayPal fees, the group lot went for $14.20 per card, and the individual lot for $17.80.  That's still a 25% improvement in price, even after being robbed charged for eBay's fine services.  Altogether the 8 auctions sold for $262.10, which isn't bad, even if eBay took $23.92 in total fees.  My state government charges 5% in sales tax.  eBay?  9.13%.  Yikes!!!

So from now on I'm going to sell individually and try not to think about the fact that I might as well just set every tenth item on fire since I'm not going to end up with any money for it.