Category: ebay

Updates

The is going to be a general update post, with bits of news related to a few of my other recent posts.

eBay

It looks like I’ve made a little more than $100 from the comics I listed on eBay in July. I have the auto-relisting option turned on for most of my listings, so the stuff that hasn’t sold keeps getting relisted. We’ll see if the rest of my stuff sells or if I have to give up and donate it to Goodwill or something. I’ve only had one problem with shipping so far; there’s one package that made it as far as Dallas, TX, but somehow seems to have gotten stuck there, and hasn’t made it to its intended recipient in Austin, TX. I’m hoping it shows up this week, otherwise I’m going to have to give the guy a refund. Media Mail isn’t insured or guaranteed in any way, so if it’s lost, there’s not much I can do.

Equifax

According to the FTC, it’ll probably be possible to switch from the cash payment to the free credit monitoring option at some point:

For those who have already submitted claims for this cash payment, look for an email from the settlement administrator. They’ll be asking you for the name of the credit monitoring service you already have. Or, if you want to change your mind, you’ll have a chance to switch to the free credit monitoring.

I initially chose the cash, before realizing that it wasn’t actually going to be anywhere near $125.

Warren Ellis

I mentioned some of Ellis’ upcoming work in a post on Saturday. His weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays, and the most recent one contained some updates. It kind of sounds like the new WildCATs book might not come out at all, which would be a bummer. Batman’s Grave is still on the schedule, as is the new Trees series. So he’s got some comics work coming out, but it sounds like this might be the last new comics stuff we’ll see from him for a while.

Related to the WildCATs thing, I’m a little worried about where DC is going in general. This piece by Rob Salkowitz has been getting a lot of attention. I’m not sure I think things are that bad for DC, but who knows.

SDCC

After SDCC, I ordered a copy of the program book on eBay, as I’ve typically done in recent years. It finally showed up yesterday, so now I can spend some time reading it and fantasizing about what it would have been like to be there. On a related note, Maggie Thompson has a column up on the SDCC blog reminiscing about 50 years of SDCC. I always like reading her columns.

more on SDCC and eBay

It’s been a very hot day here in New Jersey. I’d much rather be in San Diego today, but I’m doing my best to entertain myself and maybe even get a few useful things done here at home. Some of my eBay auctions ended, and I actually sold a reasonable amount of stuff, at almost reasonable prices. I had one TPB sell for $1, which was weird, since I thought I’d set the minimum bid on everything at no lower than $3, but I guess I screwed up on that one.

The highest prices I got were on the Akira TPBs, which all went for slightly more than my $12 “buy it now” price. It’s always a bit funny when auctions end up going higher than the “buy it now” price, but it can happen. One guy bought all three books, so now I’m faced with the problem of finding a box that can fit all three. I found a Priority Mail flat rate box that’s the right size, but I only planned on using Media Mail. I don’t seem to have any other boxes that are the right size. So I might go out and buy a plain box in the right size tomorrow, or I might just punt and use the Priority Mail box and take a hit on the shipping.

If I was trying to make a living at this stuff, I’d be doing a horrible job. Selling stuff for $1, shipping Priority Mail because I’m too lazy to buy a plain box, and so on. But since I’m in it just for the sake of clearing up space in my apartment, it’s fine.

I haven’t spent too much time today looking at SDCC news, but I did look at the list of Eisner winners. Tom King won in several categories, and his work is honestly about the only stuff on the list (both winners and nominees) that I’ve read. I’ve read the Ed Piskor X-Men stuff, and that was good. I have Sean Murphy’s Batman: White Knight, but haven’t read it yet. I’d like to read some of Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer stuff someday. And I’ve read a lot of the Brubaker/Phillips stuff, but not My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies. So there’s plenty of stuff there that I’d like to read eventually.

This short NPR story covers a bit about the history of the con, which is now 50 years old. And there’s some other mildly amusing coverage of the con up at the NPR site. There’s a playlist of videos from KPBS up on YouTube, including interviews with Scott Shaw! and Mark Evanier. (Though they call Scott “Stan” and omit the exclamation point he uses at the end of his name.)

not at SDCC 2019, day one

Once again, I’m not at SDCC. Instead, I’m suffering through a heat wave with the rest of the unfortunate souls stuck in New Jersey this weekend. It’ll only be in the 80s today, with some rain, but it’ll be back into the mid 90s tomorrow through Sunday.  Getting out of New Jersey’s summer heat and humidity for a few days has always been one of my favorite things about the San Diego con. (And the weather in San Diego looks pretty good this year: low 70s every day.)

I realized yesterday that my eBay auctions will be ending during the con, on Saturday and Sunday. I’m not sure if that helps or hinders things. On the one hand, anyone at the con probably won’t be looking at eBay. On the other hand, everyone not at the con (a much larger group) might be seeing more comics coverage in the news than usual, and might be more likely to check eBay for comics-related stuff. I have bids now on 6 out of the 31 books I’ve listed, and (assuming everyone who wins pays up), I’m guaranteed to make at least $20. So, that’s not great, but it’s not horrible either. It’s enough to buy a couple of sandwiches, I guess.

All three volumes of Akira that I’ve listed have gotten bids, and were the first items to get bids. I just noticed that I finished reading those volumes four years ago today, and blogged about it. Akira remains popular, possibly because of the upcoming live-action film. That’s apparently on hold now, but it’s still likely to happen, maybe in 2021 or 2022.

I haven’t had much time to look at today’s news out of the con, but I did read a bit about the DC Meet the Publishers panel. Most of the current stuff I’m buying and reading right now is DC, so it’s always interesting to see what’s going on with them.

selling some more manga on eBay

After yesterday’s work, posting a bunch of graphic novels to eBay, I decided to dig out some old manga and set up some more listings today. I started with the last nine volumes of the Rurouni Kenshin manga. (I’d already sold or given away the first 19 volumes. I posted about reading the last few volumes in 2017.)

This time, I decided to try eBay’s “multiple listing tool.” That worked out fairly well, but with a few bumps. The tool is fairly hard to find. It’s available from eBay’s Bulk Listing Tools page, along with a bunch of other tools. But you really have to look for it. They don’t really advertise its existence. It lets you set up a template listing, then duplicate it a bunch of times, then edit the copies. So I used it to create a “Rurouni Kenshin Vol xx” listing, then went through and replaced “xx” with 20 through 28, and uploaded photos for each listing. The main issue I had with the tool is that, if you accidentally navigate away from the page, you lose all your work and have to start over. It doesn’t seem to save your work at all. Nor is there any obvious ability to save the listings as drafts rather than posting them right away. Aside from some obvious problems like that, it was definitely easier than if I’d had to set up nine listings from scratch through the default interface.

I have a bunch of other manga volumes I might also post, including a complete run of Ai Yori Aoshi. I’m not sure if I’ll do that today, or wait for next weekend. Maybe I should do it today, while I’m still motivated.

Selling some comics on eBay

I haven’t sold anything on eBay in a long time. The last time, I think, was in 2008, when I sold some video games. So that’s a little more than ten years.

I just recently put together a pile of about two dozen trade paperback and hardcover graphic novels that I want to get rid of. I’d gotten to the point where my accumulation of completed graphic novels was getting a bit out of hand, and I really needed to clear up some space.

I initially thought about giving them away to charity, but I thought they were probably worth too much to just dump them on Goodwill, and I couldn’t find a comics-specific charity that I thought could make good use of them. Then, I thought about selling them all at once to a dealer, but I didn’t think I’d get much money out of that, or even get that much interest from anyone.

So I, somewhat reluctantly, decided to go with eBay. Since it had been so long since I’d sold anything there, I had to figure out how things work nowadays. There used to be a couple of freeware or shareware programs you could use to easily set up a bunch of listings and upload them all at once to eBay, but it doesn’t seem like any of those are around anymore. There are some web-based services that help large sellers manage their inventory and auctions, but they’re not really for guys like me who are just posting a handful of items, and not making a living running an eBay store.

I initially tried to set up the listings using eBay’s mobile app. The app lets you scan UPC codes, then tries to find a matching item, and sets up a listing for that item that you can customize. For me, I think that was a waste of time. It only found about half of my books. I went ahead and saved those as drafts, intending to clean them up on my desktop PC and post them. But I found that they were mostly miscategorized and fairly useless. By the time I was done cleaning them up, I would have been better off starting from scratch.

Well, anyway, I was working on these listings on and off all day, and I’m finally done. I have two dozen books up on eBay now. You can find them all on my eBay user page. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of interest I get. Listings are free now (up to 50 a month), so it doesn’t cost me anything if nothing sells.

I also have some more manga volumes I want to get rid of. I might dig those out and list them tomorrow, if I have time. After that, if things seem to be going well, I’d like to get rid of some individual comic books, probably by selling them in sets.

It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t go to Garden State Comic Fest last month, and that I’m not going to San Diego Comic Con this year. At either show, I probably would have brought home a bunch of new comics and books that I don’t have time to read, nor space to store! (Oh, and, holy cow, SDCC starts next week! I didn’t realize it was so soon!)

eBay – old video games

I just listed some old video games on eBay. I only wanted to put up a few simple listings quickly, so I just used eBay’s most simple listing method, pulling in item details based on UPC. This method backfired on me, though. Every one of the games I listed wound up with “Gran Turismo 2” in bold letters above the stock box art photo. That was the first game I listed, so I guess some bug pulled it from page to page as I was listing stuff. While you can revise listings on eBay, it seems that you can’t fix something that’s wrong in the standard layout that’s generated when you pull in an item description. Very frustrating.

I tried the eBay online chat support, to see if I could get it straightened out. In the end, I’m not even sure if I convinced the support rep that anything was wrong. I think she thought I was just too stupid to navigate the “revise your item” page. Oh well. Everything else in the listings is right, so I just added a line to the description asking people to ignore the “Gran Turismo 2” heading.

These are old PS1 and PS2 games that nobody’s likely to want anyway. I just thought I’d toss them up on eBay to see if I could find them a new home rather than tossing them in the garbage.

In looking through other listings for PS1 games, in particular, I was surprised to see some games going for more than they originally cost. Apparently, the “black label” version (vs. the “greatest hits” version) of some of the old games is considered collectible. I guess that’s no stranger than some of the stuff that makes certain comic books more collectible than others (price variants and so on).

eBay weirdness

I was looking for something on eBay today, and stumbled across a very odd seller. He’s selling some pretty pedestrian stuff for really high prices.

I wonder if he just got the pricing wrong somehow, accidentally adding $1000 to everything. Or if this is part of some kind of weird plan, setting up an ID that’ll be used for a scam at some point.

eBay and other stuff

The 15 eBay auctions I put up last Saturday are all done. I sold everything, though a few items only sold for the $1 minimum bid. Well, the purpose of this was more to clear up space than make money, so I guess that’s OK.

Meanwhile, I got a few DVDs in the mail Friday via Peerflix. Everything looks good, except for the Dune miniseries, which is missing disc 2, so I don’t have the last episode.

getting rid of stuff

Of the 15 books I posted on eBay on Saturday, I’ve already sold two at the “Buy It Now” price. Only one other book has any bids on it, though. Hopefully, I can get rid of at least 5 books, if not 10 or 15, before the auctions close.

It’s been a while since I’ve sold anything on eBay. I like a lot of the new features. The shipping calculator integrated into the listings, and the ability to pay for and print shipping labels on-line is great. I picked up a small scale at Staples, so I can make sure I’ve got the weights right. Now I don’t need to go down to the post office at all. I can just weigh the package, print the label, and dump the thing in the mail. Nice.

I’ve sent out eight DVDs through Peerflix so far. I’ve received one DVD (Mystic River), and six more are on their way. The six DVDs coming in are not ones that were near the top of my want list. They’re all basically what I’d consider second-tier titles. That’s OK though, since that’s basically what I was trading off.

I’ve also discovered PeerFlixTalk.com, an independent discussion board site for Peerflix. There’s some interesting discussion going on over there, along with some pretty esoteric stuff about people’s preferences for mailers. A couple of Peerflix employees hop on the board now and again, so that’s a good sign. A few people seem to be dead-set against the new “peermailer” system, where you just print out a template on two pieces of paper, then fold them into an envelope of sorts. Apparently, Peerflix used to send out envelopes, like Lala does.

I only just got the mailers from Lala, so I wasn’t able to send anything out until today. I sent out 3 CDs, and I’ve now got 3 CDs coming in already. Two of the CDs I’m getting are titles that I have on casette; I’m trying to gradually replace all my old casettes and LPs with CDs (or digital files from iTunes or wherever), and Lala seems like a good way to do some of that.

So, in a nutshell, I’m gradually creating a bit more shelf space, without resorting to fire. With Peerflix and Lala, even though I’m probably getting in about the same number of titles I’m sending out, I’ll still be clearing some space, since I’m tossing out some old clamshell and jewel cases. The new stuff will either go in paper envelopes or thin cases. And, for the DVDs at least, I’ll probably trade some of them back out right after I watch them.