Ebay Exhaustion

Every time I sell on Ebay, I promise myself that I'll never do it again. Ebay seems like such a dream; millions of web surfers with billions of dollars, all looking for new and exciting ways to be separated from their money. And all you have to do is put your item up for sale and wait for the money to come in, then you ship it out and you're done. But every time I play the game, my ebay dreams turn to ebay nightmares.

This time, I had to sell 40 of my books, and I thought, "Well, it can't be that bad."

In reality, you have to do the following:

1. Scan each book cover
2. Crop the scanned photographs to show only the book cover
3. Find a description. Sometimes ebay doesn't have a description, so you have to go to Amazon.com. Sometimes even Amazon doesn't have a description, so you have to write one yourself. Usually I just type a few paragraphs from the inside of the dust jacket.
4. Decide on pricing.

If you can get through one book in 12 minutes, which is really fast, you can be done with 40 books in 8 hours.

The next day, you have to do the following:

4. Upload the photographs you took
5. Set up the auctions
6. Run the auctions

Assuming you are ultra-fast, steps 4-6 take at least 6 minutes per book, which is a minimum of four hours. Auctions usually last seven days, so you are constantly answering questions from ebay bidders like, "What's the condition of my item?" and "How long does shipping take?"

Once your auction finally finishes, you now have to collect the money and ship the books. This involves:

7. Sending invoices
8. Chasing after reluctant customers
9. Generate a list of names/addresses and a list of the books to be shipped to each.

Ebay helps to generate invoices and track auctions, so that part only takes an hour or so.

Then comes the hard part; the shipping. This involves:

10. Trying to stuff the books into manilla envelopes.
11. Once you realize that the books don't fit into the envelopes, driving out to the liquor store or back to the office to find some emty boxes.
12. Tear apart the house to find tape and scissors.
13. Weigh, address, stamp, and apply the requisite postage to each box.
14. Load boxes into the car.
15. Drive to the post office during business hours to leave the boxes full of books on the post office's desk (since they don't allow you to ship packages from home any more, thank you Muhammad Atta.)

The above takes approximately 4-8 hours, depending on how well you've planned.

And now, to count my money. My apartment is a mess, snippets of tape, bubble wrap, and carboard everywhere, but I've earned a paycheck. Aaaah.. $150 big ones in my paypal account. $3.75 per book, which isn't bad considering I was going to throw them out. But wait! Now comes the last step:

16. Pay your fees.

Ebay charges about $.70 per listing, plus they take a cut of your profit. That's $28.
Ebay also takes a cut of the final sale price. That adds up to $20.
Then Paypal takes a cut, about 5%, for performing the service of borrowing your money. This adds up to $7.
The cost of manilla envelopes, bubble wrap, and tape comes out to be about $15, and that's being conservative.
And don't for get all the money you spent on shipping, about $35

That leaves you with about $45. So, for 40 books you're never going to read again, that's not so bad, right? But, think about 8 hours of prep time, 4 hours running your auctions, followed by 6 hours packing and shipping, you're talking about 18 hours.

And now, we calculate our wage:
$45/18 hours = $2.50 per hour.

That's less than half of minimum wage.

Now I'm no facist, but I think that they may have been on to something with those heaps of flaming books.