Advice for selling high price items on eBay, Anyone have specific experience with this? Options

[Jeremy]

So I'm looking at selling my unwanted Botcon Shattered Glass figure collection, which should probably net me well over $1,000. Before listing, I just wanted to see if anyone had experience with selling really valuable items on eBay. I've already assumed I'll be using the full shipping trio of delivery confirmation, insurance based on value, and probably signature confirmation, but I'm a little nervous about tying that much money up with the whims of a buyer in a system where you could get swindled in multiple ways. Anything else I should know to really protect myself so I don't have to worry about it for a month or more after the item has been delivered? Anyone know offhand what the fee calculations will be for eBay and Paypal? It's a potential big gain situation, but it seems rather stressful and risky as well.

Thanks in advance. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon-hotrod.gif)

[Kalidor]

I sold the Botcon set of mine that had the seeker jets in it for about 850 bucks. I just treated it like any other auction. Kept good email communication with the bidder and insured it with delivery confirmation. If you check in advance what the shipping will cost with the extras (Which is usually only a few dollars more) and let them know or just charge a flat rate "Insured Shipping w/confirmation" for was close as you can estimate it plus or minus 3 bucks you should come out fine.

My toys never left the foam but I did take the certificate out and put it in a folder. I had forgotten about that and he emailed me back wondering where the certificate was and I panicked... luckily I found it and shipped it out to him at my expense.

At the end of the day, it was just like any other auction for me. I might have had a thing in there about the right to refuse bids with less than 5 feedback or something but I can't remember.

[Jeremy]

Yeah, I was actually probably going to do it as a "best offer" auction, say I'd just cover the shipping myself, and probably be a little picky about who I'd accept an offer from. Calculated shipping would be another option, since that's fairly easy to do on larger items if you own a bathroom scale. Then I'd just pay the insurance I guess, kind of hate to skip insurance on something really valuable.



This post has been edited by Jeremy: Apr 7 2012, 10:04 PM

[Cheetimus Primal]

I'm finding that fixed prices and best offers will end up with you underselling yourself. only do that kinda stuff when I'm trying to turn a quick buck. When I wanna wait it out and try to make it big I auction stuff off. There's not a lot of SG stuff out there for sale so honestly you could do AMAZINGLY well with just a straight up auction. And if you don't like the way it's going you can always pull it down and relist it differently.

[Jeremy]

Hmm. I've never been much into the whole "start the auction off low, see what happens" thing. I'm sure I'd want my opening bid to be pretty high, and I'm not sure if people would like that. I don't think I've ever even used a reserve. I've always seen "best offer" as a chance to take your time and wait for the right buyer, with the right price.

Been using either fixed price or "best offer" for almost everything in the past couple years, unless it's something that I can't seem to sell, then I'll sometimes resort to auction style with a low opening bid.

[Yertle]

It was a nail biter when I sold my 2011 set to a Chinese Buyer for over 1k but I had ended up having no issues. I did get insurance and international shipping provided a tracking number, but the most important part was regular communication. While it is true that you have some of the worst eBay luck, I think it should work out

[Kalidor]

I start all my auctions off at 9.99 and offer free US shipping and find that I do exceedingly well.

[corgsopal]

You may want to establish some buyer requirements on your account to thin the riffraff. You can set it to block buyers with no paypal account and buyers with a history of not paying for the items they buy. You can also block by country if you don't want to sell internationally. The buyer requirements are in the site preferences section of the account tab in your My eBay page. The selling fee for auction style listings is 9% of the final selling price including shipping. If you sell it as a buy it now with best offer, the fee is calculated on a sliding scale that I don't have memorized. Paypal's fee is 20 or 30 cents plus 2.9% of the payment amount. If the item sells for over $250, then all you need to do to protect yourself from fraud is ship it to the address on file for the transaction after payment is received with signature confirmation. Granted that only protects from them claiming it didn't arrive. There's no protection from the buyer claiming you misrepresented the item. Make sure you take tons of pictures, post them in the item description as embedded html (to avoid picture fees) and be as explicit in your written description as possible. If the site deems you a new seller, your payment will be held in PayPal until 3 days after the tracking shows the item was delivered. If you're established, you'll get it right away. In either case, the buyer has 45 days to file a protection case. If a case is filed the money will be frozen in your PayPal account until a resolution is reached.