Selling Books on eBay Part 2

I feel like about once a month I spend time doing something online and then look back and think “wow that was a mistake”. Recently I decided to clear off my bookshelf and sell a bunch of books on eBay. It’s one of those ideas seemed reasonable at the time, especially since I figured out I could list the books pretty fast by just entering the ISBN number and having eBay pull up all the information about the book for me. Listing all the books on eBay was pretty easy, but here is what happened:
a small number of the books sold for what I would consider a “good” price…but most of the books sold pretty cheap. I started most of the auctions at a penny because I really didn’t care how much they sold for and I wanted to save on insertion fees. I set my shipping prices high enough to cover actual shipping cost plus the cost of the auction itself. But as it turns out, eBay seems to be glutted with used books and they don’t fetch a lot of money. (note to self: in the future, buy used books on eBay instead of new books on Amazon) Another problem was I totally underestimated how long it would take me to stuff books in shipping envelopes, write addresses on them, and haul the packages down to the post office. For the amount of money I made on eBay for the books, it just wasn’t worth the time. I would have much rather have just donated the books to a thrift shop and let the money go to a good cause, and the thrift shop might have been able to get a little more money for the books than I did. From now on, I think I’ll stick to selling only bigger-ticket items on eBay.

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