eBay: Watch That Profit Margin on Big Ticket Items!

by Charles
(Roanoke, VA)

I got into eBay selling quite a few years ago and did well selling old Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars which I had found at local swap meets. They were easy to ship, and I had a digital camera which could take detailed enough pictures, so buyers could see exactly what they were getting. I never had a dissatisfied customer (so I made a money-back guarantee part of my standard listing template) and I was usually able to clear $5-$10 on each sale.

So when I saw a working flat panel computer monitor at a swap meet I immediately thought of selling it on eBay, where similar models of monitors had gone for $80-$90. I knew I’d be able to clear $50 easy. I picked it up for $25, listed it, an saw it sell within a week for $75. And that was when my learning experience began.

Shipping a computer monitor from Virginia to Boston took about $20, once I had figured in insurance and delivery confirmation. And the packing and the container for a computer monitor was a lot more complicated than picking up a free priority mail box and tearing up a few newspaper pages, as I had been able to do for a Matchbox car.

Still, I had cleared $30 -- until the buyer contacted me and said that the monitor wouldn’t work. After a few days of trying to troubleshoot via email, I agreed to pay to have the monitor shipped back. I would pursue the insurance claim. I was still $10 to the good – unless I considered all of the time I had spent shipping it, trying to troubleshoot the monitor remotely, etc.

And when I got the monitor back, I was able to plug it in and use it perfectly. So no insurance claim! Whether she had simply changed her mind, or truly wasn’t able to get it to work I’ll never know. I do know this though: whenever I sell electronics on eBay now I spell out exactly my “as-is” policy, and what my expectations are about the buyer paying for insurance and agreeing to pursue the claim.