New #23: Sell Stuff on eBay

Retail has always been somewhat of a one-way road for me. I'll travel far and wide in search of a good sale (see New #20), letting nothing stand between me and a bargain. Yet when it comes actually making a sale - and selling the stuff I've worked so hard to buy - I always seem to have run out of gas. And when I am ready to part with something, it's usually through a quick goodbye at Goodwill.

However, this apathy toward a sale is not the way I was raised. My parents always shopped to flip an item, selling it to others for more than they paid. They sold these finds in antique stores and even in their own shops. Recently, my dad has found great success through the online auctions of eBay. So with my bank account hurting and my search of something new always itching, I decided to give it a go. And I'm happy to say it was worth the try.

I've always known the basics of selling on eBay, and it really was pretty much as simple as it seemed. You take some pictures of an item, set a price, write a description and put it up for auction to everyone in America. Easy enough. For my items, I took some of the photos myself, and others I stole from the item's company's website. (Hey, all if fair in love and the internet). I compared each item to similar ones for sale to set a middle-of-the-road starting bid. And as for the descriptions, I just laid out as much cheese and fluff as possible to make even a flower-shaped, fuzzy-rimmed picture frame sound like a must-have.

Yet as always, the devil's in the detail - and in this case, he reared his little red head when I got to the shipping part. Here, the seller has to estimate how much it will cost to send an item. But besides how much it will actually cost to mail something (which alone is hard enough to calculate), you have to factor in how much you want to make for the handling part of the "shipping and handling" - all without making a price so high it scares buyers away. I opted to keep things simple the first time around and stick to the price of flat rate Priority mail. No more, no less, and no more hassle.

With all this inputted onto each of my items' pages, it was finally time to hit the "List" button and throw open the doors of my digital auction house. In my eBay ignorance, I expected buyers to start typing in their bids as soon as they saw all the wonderful things I had to offer: the picture frame, a Roxy T-shirt and a Quicksilver cardigan (both new!), and a box of the near extinct Polaroid film. Awesome stuff that I figured anyone would love to have. Yet soon I learned not everyone shared my enthusiasm for these things, especially in the first few days. The feature that tracks how many people have viewed each item sat in the single digits for days. Very depressing, particularly for the girl who checked her eBay page about once an hour, waiting for some progress.

But as time ticked closer to the seventh day and the close of my auctions, people began to show a little bit of interest in the film and the picture frame. Toward the end, there were even a few bids placed. As I watched the little red numbers counted down the days to hours to minutes to seconds, I refreshed the page like a madman waiting for the fabled bidding wars to ensue. Sadly, this never really happened. The Polaroid did the best, yielding two bids and netting me $30. The picture frame sold for - wait for it - $1. Wow. And the two shirts never even got a bid.

While I didn't make as much money as I'd hoped, I did walk away with $31 that wasn't there before. Really, that's nice money for a few things I had collecting dust around the house. And even more importantly than the money (almost), I found a new hobby and slight addiction in selling things on eBay. Throughout the week my items were posted, I could sit in front of my computer with a purpose beyond e-mail and Facebook (and work), and check in on my auctions to see if I'd made any mula. It may still have led to some wasted time, but at least it was all for a good cause: making some money to go shopping.