It's expensive in terms of both time and money to list items for sale on Ebay. It takes about the same amount of time to photograph and describe a cheap item as an expensive one. Thus the common advice to sell only items over $50 or some such number. Unfortunately, that's not as easy as it sounds!
We have lots of old stuff which came from parents and grandparents. We also have assorted accumulations of stuff from years ago when we bought boxes of "Stuff" at farm auctions we attended while visiting relatives in Minnesota. In reality I don't have the slightest idea of what, if anything, some of it is worth.
I found a list of unusual items that sell for a lot of money somewhere on the web and here are a few of them.
- Square dancing accessories
- Old rotary phones
- Slide rules
- Wood working magazines.
Slide rules I would have known. I am the proud owner of a K&E Log Log Duplex slide rule I bought for $35 of my paper route money when I was a junior in high school in 1963. I have been saying for years these would become a valuable antique. They were expensive, well made, popular, but not common. Lots of us old guys have fond memories of whipping out calculations with them.
I would not have seen much value in a stack of old woodworking magazines. I've already tossed our old phones into the trash.
So, there are some choices to make.
- I can use the completed auction data to see what an item I am not familiar with has sold for in the past. This takes time but would prevent me from wasting listing fees on & writing item descriptions for things with little value. The process would teach me the keywords & phrases I would have to research in any case to write an item description which will attract buyers.
- I could price everything at a low initial price such as $0.99 and assume the auction method will work to bring in multiple bidders which will result in a market price. This saves time but feels a little risky because a lot of auctions end with a single bid. I am still going to have to spend some time doing research because attracting the right bidders requires me to use the right keywords in the title and include the key features in the item description.
- Craig Stark, the Editor of BookThink.com uses the concept of "Flashpoints" to guide his decisions to purchase books with which he is unfamiliar. He has learned that certain characteristics such as high quality paper, non-fiction, unusual but VERY specific subject matter, etc. tend to define valuable books. If enough of these flashpoints are present he will buy. His goal is sell his books for at least $50 and it has worked for him for years.
As is usual, I suspect the "correct" answer is "All of the above" and that a lot of testing will be required. One more place where selling lots of unique items doesn't scale as well as selling the same product over and over.
{ 0 comments… add one now }