I finished my first eBay sale today. I feel so accomplished.
I recently bought some used XBox games at Electronic Boutique. I can't say that I have ever really been happy with my ElBo experiences, but I keep going back there for some reason.
The games that I got were Fatal Frame and Blackstone. Fatal Frame is a kind of weird adventure game where you take pictures of ghosts that appear in order to steal their essense or something. I didn't really like it because there were cut scenes every 30 seconds of something trivial that could have been eliminated. The control was also bad.
Blackstone was a good game, but it's very complex for the type of game that it is. The screen gets a little cluttered, and it doesn't look as good as D&D Heroes.
I decided to take the games back to the store to trade them in for something else. After all, these games are on the shelf for about $50 - even on the used side of the store.
I spent a half hour or so looking for a game to buy instead of the two I had. I figured that they'd give me at least enough for both of the games to cover a new game. I chose a racing game. The price was about $50.
When I got to the counter and told the guy that I wanted to trade in my games, he took them and inspected them. They were both in good condition. Barely played. Then he said, "$15 for each."
$15 for each? $!%? What kind of trade-in deal is that? They're selling it on the shelf for close to $50. Even reselling them at $25 (half of the new cost) they'll be making $10 on a 60% markup! Nothing should be that easy.
There is a certain convenience factor with dropping games off at the store and taking the crappy trade-in value. But the thing is, there's a better way.
I told the guy to forget it. After all, I spent a lot of money on those games originally, and I wasn't going to take such a huge hit on my trade. As he offered it, I would give him two games and $20 to receive one game. Totally not worth it.
On Sunday, I listed Fatal Frame on eBay. I really didn't know what I was doing, but it was really easy to figure out. I used my regular eBay buying account and clicked on the link to sell stuff. A half hour later (after taking and uploading pictures) I had an item for sale on eBay.
I elected to include a buy-it-now option for $26.50. I figured that this price was what I was expecting from EB, plus the eBay listing fees. Since the shipping is charged separately, I didn't have to worry about adding that to the listing price.
Only 3 hours later, my game was bought at the buy-it-now price. Sold!
After having some troubles sending out invoices (now that I know PayPal has an automatic way to do it, I won't do it any other way) I finally got a response from the buyer. Actually, it was simply money in my PayPal account.
eBay automatically deducted their fees from the payment, which turned out to be $0.30 more than expected. But I set a flat rate of $4 for shipping, and by printing USPS online shipping labels, I saved $0.15 from the shipping fees and still get Delivery Confirmation.
One neat thing about the PayPal payments is that I recently signed up for this PayPal debit card. It's not a credit card. It's just like a bank check card except that it's tied to the credit (actual money) that is in my PayPal account. After the payment for this game I had $34 or so in my PayPal account. I used the debit card to pay for the postage, which came right out of my PayPal payments.
The really neat part about this card is that after I sell my other game on eBay, I'll be able to walk right into Electronics Boutique and do exactly what I set out to do in the first place - buy that new game. I won't even have to handle any cash!
I have a couple more games to sell, obviously, and I hope they will go as smoothly. If so, I'll try selling some of the bigger stuff that Berta had been complaining that I hadn't done already.
