My First eBay Sale


A few weeks ago I received a first time sellers offer from ebay. Essentially they lured me into the underworld of online selling, by allowing me to list three items free of charge.

If you’ve ever read my previous blog entries you know I don’t keep much clutter in my house. Besides a whole bunch of books, (read, partially read, and will read one day but still haven’t read), I don’t have a whole lot of items in my house to sell. But I have always wanted to try to sell something on ebay, so I scoured the house for an object I no longer wanted.

I came across some old workout DVDs that I haven’t been able to use since my surgery. I had no idea what they were worth, so I poked around auction listings to find similar items. I listed a series of three DVDs for 99 cents plus $6.95 shipping and handling and waited for the bidding to begin. Three days before the auction ended I received my first bid for a little over $7.00. Then minutes before the auction ended a minor bidding war began, by the time it was all said and done the DVDs sold for a little over $14. Not a bad profit for something that was sitting in my house collecting dust.

Using eBay was simple and making money while sitting in my PJs wasn’t half bad either. The problem came when I went to the post office to ship the DVDs. The line at the post office was really long, even though I went to an out-of-the-way post office at 2:00 pm in the afternoon. Having to drive to the post office, during working hours, and waiting in line, definitely didn’t seem worth the $14 profit I made.

To get the most out of ebay it seems I needed to auction off a whole lot of items at once. It would certainly seem more reasonable to wait in a line at the post office if you were selling 10 or 15 DVDs and making a $5 – $15 profit on each. Maybe I should dig around the house for other items to sell. With a big enough list it might be worth trouble?

8 thoughts on “My First eBay Sale”

  1. I sell regularly on Ebay. The post office is definitely one of the biggest hassles. Finally, I figured out shipping via Paypal. You enter the package info and print out a shipping label. The money comes out of your Paypal account. Nice and easy. If it is an overseas or APO shipment, you still have to wait in the line though.

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  2. Fianna — I’m assuming you had to purchase a postal scale? Where did you purchase one and how much did it cost?

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  3. I have never tried selling anything on EBay (probably, because I don’t like to sell. period) but I can understand why people buy things there. It’s a plcae where you can find just about anything for a reasonable price (especially when noone else wants it).

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  4. Congrats on your first sale! I concur with fianna, Paypal shipping labels are the way to go. No standing in line and it even sends an email to the customer with a tracking number.

    I bought my scale for about $30 on eBay. Of course I sell a lot of stuff on eBay so the scale paid for itself pretty quickly.

    Let me know if you have any more eBay questions, I’d be glad to help.

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  5. Sorry, I didn’t see your response until now. I was lucky and received my scale as a castoff from my office. But as Ben said, you can buy them on Ebay and other places on the web.

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  6. I don’t think I’ll sell enough items on ebay to purchase a scale, though I have been scoping ebay for it. I did sell two more items though and my grand total now stands at $86.58.

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