Here's the $11,000 Ninja Gaiden cartridge, with the ALMIGHTY H SEAM! "FACTORY SEALED WITH THE H SEAAAAAAAMMMMMM" I had retarded neighbors that thought that the game was called Ninja Ame when I had it when I was little because the kanji for Gaiden sorta resembled the letters A-M-E apparently (there's that word again), despite the fact that the fucking kanji had GAIDEN clearly written directly underneath them.What I don't understand more than what the above paragraph outlines, is the fact that ebay seems to think that everyone is an ultra-millionaire just selling their stuff into the drain for swap meet fun! Now, I don't mind giving my standard 80% per transaction to ebay, they have to keep their hookers and Cristal both on tap! But when you factor in what Paypal (also owned by ebay and used by I'd guess 99% of ebay sellers at this point) takes from you for accepting payments, you're not making that much selling a game that you bought new for $50, for $14.99 plus that paltry $2 shipping charge. And therein lies ebay's problem. I've always padded my shipping (I do it by weight) by about 6-7 ounces. When people get an item and they see that they overpaid on shipping, they give you a bad rating for shipping charges. (Or so they'd have you think, my "true" shipping charges rating was 4.7/5.0, the made up one is like 4.2 or whatever triggered the ebay spasm, threatening me) Why do I pad the S&H charges, you ask? Well, padded envelopes aren't free, tape isn't free, packing materials weigh something and therefore aren't free, GAS is not free. I don't think that adding in 75 cents or so to every transaction is too much to ask to (not) cover these things. Ebay provides no ability to add for shipping and handling, and if you raise the price... welp nobody buys overpriced products. However, ebay still makes money even if your item doesn't sell. So now I'm apparently (I use that word a lot) on the verge of being disabled from posting new auctions. Fuck you, ebay. Instead of harrassing people that are trying to sell their old NES games for 1/1000th of their original retail price, go after the Chinese bootleggers that are profiting from making crapped-up versions of otaku merch and then buying shitty rebranded american cars with the profits they make.
So my second topic is, why the fuck do people buy sealed videogames? And they buy them at INSANE prices, too. I was seeing how much my Ninja Gaiden cartridge for the NES would fetch. I'm going along, I see $3.87, $11.00 w. instructions, etc, and then I come upon $87.22. WHAT?! Oh, it's sealed. What the fuck does that matter? You get a game to PLAY it right? Otherwise it's just a lump of gray plastic with a sticker on it and some electronics inside. I mean maybe if you were a Terminator and had a Famicom cart slot in place of your exoskeleton having an asscrack because sentient robots don't have a waste system, you'd have some use for it without a Control Deck. But not only will these people never see the lump of gray gaming goodness, they'll never read the manual or open the box! Now I'm normally a "to each their own" kind of guy, but this actually makes me throw my hands in the air and roll my eyes. Another auction had 33 "sealed" games (including Ninja Gaiden) that went for $1095 -- but with free shipping. Granted, they're still less than they would've been at retail -- just $33.18 a piece, so that's somewhat vindicating if they kept games they paid over $40-$50 for expressly for the purpose of reselling them for profit. If they didn't, they must be some OCD freak, or rich idiot that bought multiple copies of games so they could re-enact episodes of Video Power or whatever in their house. I see a purpose in collecting games if you enjoy them. I do not, however, see a point in keeping a bunch of factory-wrapped boxes in your house just waiting for doomsday to come and burn them and you to a crisp.
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From my past experience with ebay, unless you sell bootlegs, really high end stuff, or stuff that you found for next to nothing, otherwise it's next to impossible to make any money from it. Furthermore most people who buy from ebay are looking for bargains and hard to satisfy. I stopped selling off my stuff unless I couldn't get rid of them via other means.
Yeah I've been on ebay since 1998 or so as a buyer and around 2003 as a seller, and I've always noticed certain "trends" on ebay. I never expected to make a living on ebay, and I DID make around $4000 last year on crap I had in my closet or just stuff I didn't want anymore, but when you factor in various things it's almost not worth the effort.
Picture taking, uploading and editing, writing descriptions, weighing, packaging, travel time all added up are a pain. And you're right, people are on there looking for a bargain. Those very same people want something for nothing, too. I had a person who has an ebay store buy 2 items from me. This person had sold, in the last 15 days, World of Warcraft sealed special editions for $850 a piece according to Completed Listings. Would you believe this person quibbled with me over charging him the actual cost of shipping (which was a $2 difference) versus discounting it because he bought two things? I never listed a discount and the actual shipping charge was quite a bit. Apparently I was trying to get over on him to the tune of $2... Not to mention the fact that I had someone win an SNES game from me from China and tried to phish me through that auction for a span of like 6-7 months.
Thankfully I'm running out of stuff to sell and I'll be done with this whole stupid thing soon enough.
Oh, and I meant to say that despite making the aforementioned $4k, who knows how much I spent on shipping products, "extra" shipping cost due to ebay's limiting of the amount you can charge for shipping on certain items even if they're huge box set DVDs or whatever, and whatever Paypal dipped into, as well as ebay's pound of flesh.
What really burned me back then was the cost of packaging etc like you described - bubble wrap, envelopes, postage etc - this was the main area that sellers actually could try to make some profit from but then they were grounded. With the fees that both eBay and Paypal wanted, I would have to buffer quite a bit more just to have enough for coffee.
That bit about the guy asking you for discounted shipping reminds me of a recent sale I tried to make for some DVDs (not on ebay though). Some of these guys really turn me off, asking for the sky and not realising that if I did them the 'favour', I might as well not sell anything.
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