Sell items online.

After PayPal takes their fee, I made around $98. I am so grateful for this break! Money is getting short. I have 2 more items to go. True, these are small dollar items but you have to have some small sales to make the big ones. I have one person planning to buy a $50 item and one might get one for $70. Fingers crossed!

It came out to around $37 after all the fees had been taken out. It’s not much but when you don’t have any other income it was a nice little windfall. I sold a book for $2 a few weeks ago and after mailing and Amazon’s percentage, I made 75 cents. Dismally disappointing. After I decided not to use eBay, it still cost me around $6 to pay them off even though I didn’t sell anything. Amazon despite their huge fees still seems to be the easiest to deal with.

Okay, I did better on this sell. I’ll end up with $11.65 after my expenses. I would have gotten $7 if I had sold it to a second hand shop. I took care of the game so I do deserve more. I checked out the vender chat area. Wow! What an eye opener. I think I’ll decide to be happy with what I make. Venders make virtually nothing on books and even lose money. The other problem is customers being unhappy and returning merchandise. Sellers with a large inventory and storefront don’t do too badly on those transactions but the small business like mine always loses money. Well, I’ve got to remember to keep records of my losses and gains for the IRS. If I lose too much, I can claim business losses. This could prove to help me in the end. I must have been in a bad mood this morning because this feels like fun tonight. I could spend less on postage if I didn’t spend extra for insurance but it’s a small loss to protect myself against a bigger loss. I don’t think I’ll insure books but video games or card deck sets are worth more. If they’re damaged in the mail, I’ll be the one who loses the most. At least I can repay the customer for damages without it coming directly out of my pocket.

After Amazon’s fee and postage yesterday: $10.50 + 3.99 = minus Amazon’s pound of flesh and postage, my profit was 6.98. Not worth the trouble. It was a video game so I had to add insurance. that made it mor expensive to send. I got another order today. Their pound of flesh nearly $4 and postage will probably be about the same 15.00 + 3.99 = 18.99.
18.99- approximated $8 fees = $10.99. Postage may be less expensive because it is a book. We’ll see. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood. I would not have made this money at all if I weren’t trying this.It is around $18.00 I didn’t have before.

I can see that without careful yet cheap packing that sellers will not make money. Amazon allows $3.99 for shipping yet $3.92 of that is Amazon fees. I make $10.57 minus my shipping fees. Those will probably be $2.00 unless I figure out something better. $8.57 profit with hassle. $7 without hassle. See where this is going? No wonder sellers charge so much! Maybe profit comes in volume sales or selling as a store front. Store fronts cost $40 a month but you save the 99 cent transaction fee. Selling over 50 items in a store begins to saves you but you still have a 15% seller’s fee. Okay eBay. Get it together and show me what you have!

I spent the day trying to figure out how to sell at either eBay or Amazon marketplace. I thought at first that eBay would be easier but I got snagged on some details with PayPal. They do have a great 10 item to do list that would be helpful if I can figure out the financial end. I ended up listing 7 items at Amazon markets mainly because I could figure out how to do the financial end. Amazon gets a nice chunk of the profit but at least it seems fairly clear cut. It’s also more money than I could make selling these items at a yardsale or buy back store. I decided to only listed low cost items until I get the hang of this. The other thing that made Amazon easier was that they have a list of everything I’ve bought since 2002. It gave me ideas for stuff I could sell. I easily compared prices of other sellers against my prices. I’m not ruling out using eBay. Some of my other items might fare better there but I still have more to learn. I just hope that I can make potential customers happy. I really need the money. Amazon does put a hold on new seller financial transactions for the first 14 days—roughly June 24th. The pits but I do understand why. It’s to weed out fraud and unethical vender behavior. At any rate, I’ve begun my journey into entrepreneurship after ages of inner debate and speculation. Yah ME!