Trick or Treat?

Having spent all week packing 30 parcels ready to send items off to my eBay auction winners it feels great to have finally put the brown tape away. Nearly all the items are now posted and it’s time to count up how much I have made, however before I enjoy this treat there are a few tricks to overcome first…

Unfortunately I haven’t quite finished yet as one of my auction winners has decided that they do not want to pay me for the item they won. Despite the fact that a bid on an eBay auction represents a contractual obligation to complete the transaction this particular buyer has decided they would like to purchase the computer game they won elsewhere.

Once I pointed them to eBay’s user policy requiring buyers to pay for items they have won he then decided on a different approach claiming this particular game would not work on his console. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually pay up or if I will have to report him to eBay for not paying.

Another frustration is one buyer that has sent an eCheque payment via PayPal which takes 7-9 working days to clear. A quick search suggests that this payment method is preferred by fraudsters as they hope to receive the item before the payment clears so that they can reverse the payment. Because of this I have followed PayPal’s advice not to send the item until I receive the payment.

Now onto the treats….

In total I received £280.47 for the 28 items that I have been able to dispatch so far. Taking advantage of a free listings offer from eBay kept my costs down, although I still ended up paying £18.07 in final value fees and another £15.80 for PayPal to manage the transactions. The Royal Mail must have loved me with UK postage costs of £50.38 and posting the two items to Germany costing me an additional £15.49.

In addition I spent £7.50 on a box of chocolates to thank my partner for her daily trips to the post office on my behalf, plus 60p to park the car on the one occasion that I did the post office run.

Which means a total profit of £172.63, although this could eventually by higher if I receive the other two payments that I am waiting for.

This sounds good but represents a lot of hard work. Photographing and listing the items took about 10 hours, answering questions probably took another 2 hours and about 6 hours were spent wrapping all the items ready for posting. This equates to an hourly rate of £9.59 per hour which is disappointing in comparison to my last eBay effort where I earned over £24 per hour.