Selling Toys - Horror Stories & "Happy" Customers

So, my frustration isn't with any other Ebay user... just the process. After being stunned at how much my Toynami Thundarr the Barbarian figures sold for (Ookla sold loose for nearly $200), my wife asked me to sell off some stuff she put in a closet a while ago.

She handed me one bin of old Beanie Boo's (at least 50 of them), a box of old Cowboy theme Avon bottles and a box of Pomeranian Dog collector plates. I don't know what any of this junk is worth. So now my part time job is looking this stuff up to see what a reasonable price is, putting together auction descriptions (thank goodness for the AI tool for that), and monitoring auctions.

I always do auctions for my action figure stuff - with lots of success, but it is already clear to me that I need to just post with buy it now prices.

Also I'm aggravated about the cost of shipping buyers want the seller to eat. A small box now costs almost twelve dollars to send across the country - I'm in California and just shipped like 10 boxes to the east coast - but buyers do not want to pay actual shipping costs. I resign myself to taking a slight loss on shipping most of the time, but using a standard $10 shipping fee on an auction is a death sentence for alot of stuff, since the value of the item is less than the cost to ship it.

But I'm also done breaking even on a transaction where after ebay fees and shipping costs I sent the thing away for free.

I wish Dejoy hadn't destroyed the post office and sent shipping costs through the roof.

Sorry, just venting.
 
I do a flat shipping cost for all listings, but that cost varies per item - packaged McFarlane figs are expensive to ship because they are big while MLs fit in the normal sized Amazon boxes. My default for shipping a loose ML fig was $5.50 but the last two I've shipped have both ended up at $5.52 - so that price has to go up. It was $4 just a few years ago.
 
I have not shipped through eBay in years, but I remember when it was $5 flat boxes at the post office. Sigh.

Another reason I never deal with eBay as a buyer now is I'll notice someone will be selling a high-end figure that I expect should probably cost about 100 bucks. That's the hobby. I'll eat it. But then they want $40-80 in shipping. And that seems to be a normal practice.
 
I never quite understand those, but they'll pay less tax on the overall transaction since shipping isn't taxed. Ebay taxes it, but not the government.
 
Yeah, it has to be gaming the system, as most of them total up to what I would expect the real asking price to be at a show or marketplace.

It's probably psychological. At first glance someone thinks they're getting a deal on rare mezco.
 
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