Overpriced cards

[steve B]

Ebay is a strange place for sure.

Not everyone is looking for a bargain, or at least not looking for what would be an obvious bargain.

When I was selling I'd occasionally ask buyers a question or two after the sale was complete. Especially of there was something unusual about the sale.

I sold a bike part to one guy in an auction, and it went for a bit over retail, maybe 5-6 dollars over on a $20 item. Brand new and readily available a most bicycle shops. (I bought a bunch on closeout from our wholesaler and did really well. ) So I asked out of curiosity why he'd been willing to go beyond retail even before the shipping amount. The answer was that he only had two "local" bike shops. One was a two hour round trip, the other more like 4-5 hours. And as he put it "I won't go to the closer one unless I'm desperate because the guy's a D***" So to him saving a 4-5 hour round trip was easily worth paying a few dollars extra.

Of course we all want to get that card right now and for a great price.....Who wouldn't?

The question about the BINs - A long while ago they changed the fee structure for people with stores. Lower or no insertion fees for fixed price, but a higher monthly fee for the store or something like that. For someone organized it was a good deal. I ran into problems if I had more than 20-30 items a week, missing emails, or not getting stuff shipped quickly enough. Quick enough for me that is, I put handling time as 5 days or something, but typically got stuff out within 24 hours. But a few late night trips to storage for an item I'd forgotten to pick up a few more of was annoying. If I was organized enough to have a few hundred items the store would have been a good deal.

Then they made some auctions free insertion, probably to try to get the ratio of auction to fixed price items back to reasonable.

The ever shifting rules and expectations was a big part of what made me stop selling. But I need to start again.

Steve B