Do you sell stuff...

[firecat]

...on Amazon, Half.com, or eBay?

Which of the venue(s) do you like, and why?

(I've sold on eBay before, which is fine, but it's a lot of work. I've heard selling media on the other two is easier.)

Comments

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

I sell on all of them now and then -- which one you should use for a particular item totally depends on the item. Being about to pass out, I'll try to post some details/explanation sometime tomorrow.

[firecat]

Much appreciated!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

OK, back again. Half and Amazon are very easy to sell on -- very minimal steps to enter your item, no charge for listing an item, and they put the money directly into your bank account, so you don't have to mail back and forth about payment and shipping with the customer at all. But because you can't do up a long listing that people can search for keywords, they are really only for selling things that are *known items*, where people already know exactly what they want and what it is, and will be searching by title (or author, model number, etc.). A copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, fine. A '60's TV-show novelization that doesn't have the name of the TV show in the title, uh uh -- you want it on eBay, where collectors can find it by searching for the name of the TV show in the your listing. Or things it makes sense to sell as a set, you want on eBay. Anything that people would be searching for by characteristics, like, say, a silver raincoat, definitely belongs on eBay.

For something like a book or a CD that you could sell on any of the three, in general the sort you should be selling on eBay are cult/specialty/collector's items that people will seek out and get in bidding wars over, or again, sets or grab bags where it makes more sense to sell them as a group. For anything else, check what the item is going for on all three sites -- often an item will be going for significantly more on one site than the others. Then you have to weigh the price difference against the shipping and the money the site gets from you. Amazon takes a bigger cut, so only list it there if it's selling for at least a couple dollars more there. Both Half and Amazon give you a shipping allowance that will more than cover your shipping expenses, so you get somee extra money that way, compared to if you were charging your eBay customers the exact actual shipping costs.

[firecat]

That's great advice, thanks!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

One more thing -- with one pricey book that probably wasn't going to move super-quickly, I listed it on *both* half.com and Amazon. Last night it sold (for $55) on Amazon, so I deleted it from my half.com inventory.

They probably wouldn't approve of that sort of thing, but hey, twice the exposure, it doesn't cost anything to list on either/both, and as it wasn't something I expected to get snapped up immediately, I doubt there was really any chance it would get sold on both sites at the exact same time, and even if it did, I could just cancel one of the orders.

[firecat]

I've heard of other people doing that. There's nothing in the terms & conditions against it, afaik.