eBay Selling

FedEx can be cheaper than the USPS for shipping very heavy items. However, I do not condone using FedEx for any reason whatsoever. Surprised?

FedEx has a terrible reputation for damaging and losing packages. In my own highly unscientific study, I found that most of the sellers I’ve talked to about using FedEx are not happy with the service. More of them report problems than anyone I’ve ever talked to about USPS.

It doesn’t help that I’ve only used them once and that one package was completely destroyed. The package looked as if it had been thrown off the truck and run over, and I think that part of the box had indeed been run over. FedEx then refused to pay for almost $700 I was out for the sale price and the $50 or so more for the shipping. I found out that the fine print allowed only for the company to pay for the price of the item if you had a receipt. Since the item was about 30 years old, I obviously didn’t have the receipt.

If you don’t have a receipt, they will pay for the item to be repaired. The item in question only had one repair facility- over 1,000 miles away. I was instructed by FedEx to send the item there at my own expense, then to pay for the item to be shipped back to me. Then, I could apply to have the repair costs reimbursed if the whole process met with their guidelines for reimbursement.

In other words, FedEx “insurance” isn’t insurance at all. It’s a rip off and the slight cost savings of shipping with them isn’t remotely worth it.

So, when is insurance actually necessary? When it’s cost effective to get it. That includes expensive items or extremely fragile items.

It is incorrect to assume that insurance on an expensive or fragile item is there to protect the buyer from loss or damage. It isn’t. Insurance is for the benefit of the seller. You are legally responsible for getting the package to the buyer. It doesn’t matter whether they bought insurance or they didn’t.

If there is a problem, the seller is the one who has to try to get the insurance to pay- not the buyer. This makes it important for sellers to get insurance on expensive items whether the buyer wants it or not.

I see a lot of disclaimers on listings that state something like “I’m not responsible for uninsured packages” or “Not responsible for your item once it’s been mailed.” In reality, the seller is 100 percent responsible.

Like I mentioned with delivery confirmation, there are a lot of circumstances when spending extra money on a package just isn’t warranted. The same is certainly true for postal insurance. If you ship through USPS, you have the option to send items with or without insurance. If you have an item that is easily replaceable and inexpensive to ship, there really isn’t any need to insure it. There are buyers that insist on every item they buy being insured, but if you don’t offer insurance in your listing, you are not obligated to insure anything. You can send the item as it is, and in the very rare circumstance that something happens to it, simply send another or refund.

If you sell 50 inexpensive items a month (worth $50 or less) and buy insurance for all of them, you are paying $85 a month for insurance. If you ship 50 of these same items and one of them goes astray, you will pay only the refund costs of the one item.

Delivery confirmation is the USPS way of tracking packages. FedEx and UPS have different systems. The USPS version uses a long number code to track packages after they have been scanned. The number may be scanned at any point along the way. Sometimes it’s scanned somewhere in the middle of the trip. Sometimes it is not scanned until it arrives at the final post office of the journey.

To get a better track on where it is, you can use the USPS personnel. If you go to them in person to get delivery confirmation put on a package, you can then ask them to scan it immediately. Without asking for this service, it often will not be scanned for days. This can make customers nervous when they can’t find their tracking number on the USPS website. I’ve even had buyers accuse me of lying when I told them that it was already sent and had delivery confirmation on it.

If you don’t want to take every package needing delivery confirmation to the post office, there are a number of home shipping programs that will do it for you. Endicia is one of them. It will create your delivery confirmation code at the same time that it prints your postage.

If you sell fairly inexpensive items, it’s usually not necessary to insure the items or to get delivery confirmation for them. I’ve seen sellers who spend $3 to insure and confirm a $2 item. This drives up the shipping costs and turns off buyers. If the item is very inexpensive, it would actually be cheaper to replace or refund the amount if the package goes astray than it would be to do all of that.

For expensive and/or very heavy items, though, delivery confirmation is a must. Without it, the buyer can say that the item never arrived and you have very little recourse. The new PayPal seller protection has not yet gone into effect and even then there may be ways for the buyers to make trouble.

If you send a heavy item, you’re investing a lot into the postage costs. If you have to refund, you will have to refund the shipping price too. You then lose the item, the time the listing, packing and shipping took and the price of the postage you bought. With delivery confirmation, a buyer doesn’t have any leverage to try to scam you. If the buyer leaves a negative, you may be able to get it taken off with proof that the item arrived. They can’t win an eBay or a PayPal complaint and your investment of time and money is safe.

It is possible to buy items on eBay and then to turn around and sell them on eBay for a profit. One way that some people do that is to shop in the wholesale category. The category is an enormous resource for bulk items. To get the best deal, find the biggest lots. Those will give you the lowest per-item price, leading to a higher profit on each sale of those items.

Before buying, however, it’s important to checkout the competition on the items. If there are plenty of the item being sold on eBay, the price you get for each one might not justify the price you pay for the item wholesale. Look for items that are not being sold in multiple lots. If the seller has 20 similar lots, chances are that he has sold many, many lots of these items before. That means that many other eBayers have bought them for the same reason that you will and the market will be flooded.

Many sellers use their Me page to tell their buyers a little more about themselves. It’s easy to start one and it’s easy to edit it later. The only problem is that the page can’t be erased after it has been started. If you change your mind about having the page, you can erase all of the text, but the blank page and Me icon will remain.

If you do decide to start one, consider the type of information you include. I’ve seen far too many people put their kids’ pictures on the page, their personal information- even their address. This page is accessible by anyone online and it should not have too much information about you. It should portray you as a person they want to do business with. A name and a simple picture can make you seem more accessible and real without inviting unwanted attention into your life.

One of the new feedback changes is expanded PayPal protection for eBay sellers. In September, every U.S. seller will get some expanded protection against chargebacks and some claims made by buyers. Getting chargebacks from buyers has been a risk as long as PayPal, and Billpoint before it, has been around. Though it’s relatively rare, buyers can come back months after a sale and try to have the charge taken off their credit card if they used it to pay through PayPal. This was often investigated by PayPal. The site would attempt to negotiate with the credit card company to stop the chargeback.

Unfortunately, those attempts usually failed. Credit card companies want to keep their clients far more than they want to protect honest sellers. So, the resulting chargebacks have caused serious problems for sellers over the years. Many have refused to use PayPal at all because of this risk. With the new protection, selling on eBay and using PayPal will get a lot less risky.

When you ship a lot of things it can be hard to keep track of the postage receipts. But, they are valuable deductions for the end of the year. If you have a tax file that you keep throughout the year, be sure to put every post office receipt in it. That $1.62 may not seem like it’s worth keeping track of, but it can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for many sellers. Missing out on a deduction that size is leaving your hard-earned money on the table.

If you use a postage meter, many have a receipt function that allows you to print a receipt directly from the meter.  If you use PayPal shipping, you have will have a record in your PayPal account that can be printed out. However you keep track, if you can keep those records all year you will have a sizable deduction that will make the taxes on your eBay earnings a lot easier to bear.

The seller dashboard is a new feature of the My eBay area. It has been ridiculed by eBay sellers since it first came out in its beta version. The point of the Seller Dashboard is supposedly to let sellers know, all in one convenient area, how that seller is doing. It rates sellers according to how well they are doing with following eBay rules and pleasing customers. It also tells them whether or not they are PowerSellers and whether they are reciving the PS fee discounts.

If I were eight, I would love hearing that I’m following directions well and am doing the things I’m supposed to do. I would probably ask for a pretty sticker and perhaps a lollipop. As an adult who has been selling through the site for eight years, I’m a little less than enthused. It’s actually pretty insulting to think that eBay devalues our intelligence so deeply. If I weren’t following the rules, I would have had auctions pulled and would be well aware of that fact. If I weren’t keeping customers happy, I would certainly know that too. Do I need to go to the Seller Dashboard to find out whether I’m a freaking PowerSeller? Um, no.

My dashboard even went so far as to tell me that I have lost my PS status. Yes, I did. I lost it two years ago when I moved from full time to part-time selling. After two years, I’m pretty well aware of that fact. In other words, this was more money wasted *cough* Skype *cough* that is probably responsible in part for the recent fee increases. Adding a feature that no one over the age of eight could possibly need is simply not cost effective. Or nice.