The Muhlestein Family

Finally sold the laptop!

October 5th, 2005

Yea! Horray! It took a few tries but I finally sold the laptop.

Here is the secret of my success this time over the previous times.

1. Use the buyer protection tools. This is the most important one I think. eBay has a newly implemented feature that allows you to limit certain buyers out. You can check a few different options like: “Limit buyers in countries I don’t ship too.” and “Limit buyers with negative feedback.”. The most important one, and the one I think saved my Laptop from being bought by a Nigeria Scammer was “Limit buyers who don’t have a Paypal account.”.

   I still got all kinds of offers from scammers who wanted me to ship the laptop to their sister attending College in Nigeria but they couldn’t actually click the buy-it-now option.

2. Use a reserve. A reserve costs 1% of the reserve price but the fee is refunded if the item sells. My reserve price was $13.50 but since the item sold eBay gave it back. This protects you from the next item.
3. Start the bidding low. The low bid attracts buyers at the start. Once they start competing, the item should go up to a fair value. It’s cheaper to start the bid low too. My initial cost was about $5.50 to list the item not counting the reserve fee. If you start the bid higher, the listing cost is higher and it isn’t refunded.

Summary:

Listing Fees: $18.90

Final Value Fee: $35.31

Refund Reserve Fee: -$13.50

Total: $40.71

That isn’t the real total though. You can’t accept more than $500/month with a Paypal account unless you upgrade. Upgraded accounts charge you 2.9% on received money though. We have a new Paypal account that we upgraded (goes to an old bank account) so that we can use it only on large items. That way my current on we can still use as is and not pay 2.9% every time we get money.

Paypal fee: $43.00

So all in all it cost around $83 to sell the laptop. That doesn’t count the FooBar first attempt!

Edit: I payed for shipping too, that cost another $63.33 for UPS 3 day Air.

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