Selling on Ebay

Even though I've been selling on Ebay for quite a few years now, every once in a while I get a high point. Well yesterday I reached a high point. 3 auctions of items I was selling sold. One of them I thought would take a long time to sell, like the romance novel book I've had for sale for the last 5 years or so. Anyway I put it up on a 10day auction, someone was watching it for like six days and about 2 days before it was to end they bid on it, well then someone else bid on it. Long story short an item that started at a buck, I ended up selling for Ten. That is not my largest sale, but one of the big ones. I usually sell buttons and trading cards for a buck or two, once I sold some videos for $20 or $25 bucks so I think those were the biggest sale I've had. I can't quit my day job just yet because I'm lucky if I sell one item for a buck a month. Part is due to not having many items up for sale at one time. But recently I had my all-time high of 80 items on sale 1/2 of them were regular auction format, the other half are still in my Ebay store as in-store items sitting on the shelf as it were. Of course I would one day want to have enough regular sales every month to be able to quite my daytime job and sell on ebay full-time. That unfortunately is easier said than done. Buttons and penny-anti trading cards don't cut the mustard, so I sell an occassional CD or video, once a DVD. I've thought of trying to sell DVDs and CDs in bulk but again there are no guarantees.

All those late night "Make a fortune on Ebay" infomercials are bologna, they use what is called "Drop shipping" which is very risky and only makes money for the company that is doing the drop shipping. In a nutshell, you buy stuff from the drop shipping company, put the auctions up on ebay, they do all the order filling and shipping you pay them a fee and maybe get some money from the sale.

Family Frodo

Today (Saturday 27 Jan 2007) my mother and I had our picture took for the 50th anniversary directory of my families church. The photography studio was Olan Mills (olanmills.com). For at least the last 10 years (I'm guessing here) or so they have been using computers to process the proofs for the photos. Many years ago you would get your pictures taken, then wait several weeks for the proofs to be sent to you, then you picked which one(s) you wanted and waited a few weeks for your portraits to arrive. Now the proof process is done with computers so within a couple of minutes after your pictures are taken you view the proofs on the computer screen pick which ones you want and then wait for your portraits to arrive in about 4 weeks. Pretty cool eh?

Blogging More Often!

Ahhh it feels good to blog every now and then. My biggest problem is coming up with something to say. Not good for someone who has dreams of writing sci-fi novels and screenplays. I'm not much of a writer and don't do it too often so there goes the dream of making big bucks as a writer.

I am getting frustrated with my financial situation. Barely making enough money to "Afford" a rent, but still not quite able to afford to do it. Loads and loads of late fees and over-the-limit fees on credit card(s) that went BOOM! And sometimes not being able to make the minimum payments which are now almost impossible to pay. Definately without a huge loan and soon.

Photos in buckets and stuff

Blog it, blog it, blog it,
Write it up and blog it,
Whatever.

OK so I have officially joined the ranks of the photobucket society. Mostly for my Ebay selling endevers. I used to use Sparedollar, because the first month was free and then, at the time I signed up, it was only $4 per month. Then they raised the price to $5 a month and eventually $8, then they were bought out by InkFrog and now that costs $9 per month for 300MBs of image hosting. Photobucket right now is FREE with 1GB of image hosting. To save money I will drop the InkFrog soon. Heck I saved money this month anyway by letting my Netflix accout cancel out since my credit card went BOOM! and it will be sometime before I can get it back down, unless I can get a huge loan soon.

At work we are almost done with our archiving of documents so we will soon have to move on to other stuff. At least that is what our nice office manager says. That means when people ask me what I do at work, I won't know what to say. D'oh! I wasn't going to mention work here much if at all.

Wind it UP!