buying tools on Ebay

[George]

It's very common as many dealers sell on eBay. There are some crooks, so do your reference checking before you get carried away and are sorry.

George

[Fly-by-Night CC]

My apologies - I misread/misinterpreted - I thought you only came out $50 ahead of what you shelled out for the 5 you sold; didn't realize you effectively got the one you kept for "free".

[Fly-by-Night CC]

Another angle, I don't believe, anyone has mentioned is that if a previous auction falls through (buyer backs out) then many sellers just relist the item and it appears identical to the previous auction just with new dates.

If in doubt, consider the seller's positive *and* negative feedback ratings and read the feedback.

[Robert Bonomi]

ROI is usually expressed in 'annualized' terms; assuming a 30-day turnaround, it's an annualized rate in excess of 2200% If the turn-over period was shorter, the annualized rate is even higher. Definitely not something to sneeze at. :)

[Todd Fatheree]

LOL. I feel like a presidential candidate. Should I release my tax returns for last year?

todd

[Todd Fatheree]

Well, I'll admit it might have been ambiguous on the first post, which is why I looked up the actual numbers to clarify and stated it a bit more clearly. Even clearing $50 plus a free router would have been worth it, in my book. In the end, I cleared about double that plus the router. Which, by the way, I just mounted in a table to try some router table work for the first time.

todd

[Doug Miller]

Medical records too, and military records if applicable.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

For a copy of my TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter, send email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.

[xrongor]

just to comment on this, if you arent a very experienced ebay seller, it really is time consuming and annoying to sell stuff. but if you get some listing software (the free one from ebay is plenty good) spend a couple hours up front making standard auction templates set up so all you have to do is snap a pic and type in a new title and description. get a little experience, and dont babysit the auction, it only takes about 10-15 minutes of your time to list something, put it in a box, ship it, everything. and its not hard work. multiple similiar items go even faster. 40-50 bucks for an hours work, basically answering a couple emails and shipping 4 routers isnt bad at all. if it takes you 3-4 hours to pull this off its questionable. toss a free router on top of that 50 bucks and how can you possibly go wrong.

the only real pita is if you have to go real far out of the way to do your shipping. so dont do that

randy

[xrongor]

strictly from a business standpoint:

thats a 10% roi in a very short period of time. lets say it took a month. if nothing went wrong, you would more than double your money every year. even if 5% of the deals go completely bad and you lose the cost of the router + shipping thats still around 4% roi in a month. not too bad really...

lets compare that with having the money in the stock market. much less roi there. 30% in a year would be about the best you could get and 10% is the average. per year, not per month.

or you could let it sit in a savings account and do absolutely nothing... just like sitting on the couch and doing nothing instead of making a few bucks off routers. the time investment would be low. even less if you dont get emotionally attatched to your auctions.

i dont think its really such a bad deal. people have their own ideas about what their time is worth and how much effort they want to put into ebay, so really i think the deciding factor is how much of a pain it is to run the auctions.

not to mention it actually turned out to be a free router and 100 bucks.

randy

[J. Clarke]

But if he "tied up $100" that way then it would be permanently "tied up", where his $500 was "tied up" for only a few weeks.