Foolhardy Understandings

For those of you who keep up with this blog, I've decided ultimately to ditch OpenWYSIWYG in favor of Drupal FCKEditor combined with Image Browser - Image Browser is a much more intuitive image insertion tool than the one that was included with OpenWYSIWYG, and quite frankly I add a lot of images to my posts and don't want to have to spend up to five minutes navigating folders on my server to find the one I need without even a thumbnail to help me.

However, this post is about eBay.  I stopped working as a manager for a computer repair shop in town for a number of reasons, but in this day and age it is still necessary to earn an income.  However, as we are in the End Times, the Time of Kali, or whatever your personal belief system calls the final days on Earth as we count down toward whatever happens next, I have a strong desire to be with my family as much as possible.

Brigitte wanted this too, and in 2008 spent a lot of time researching sellers on eBay to get an idea of how they do what they do and how much money they tend to earn.  We also did some test auctions of our own and found to our amazement that it was possible to earn just as much, if not much much more, than I was earning working 40 hours a week for someone else.

So when it came time to put in my two weeks, I became determined that we must succeed at all costs, and that this was going to have to be a serious endeavor for this to be possible.

The problem is, my idea of making a serious endeavor on eBay is not only to be as professional as possible, but to also lay down a series of ground rules for our auctions to ensure that we would not get screwed by those "bad" customers out there.

After working on this, and taking some time off when Brigitte neared her delivery date for Yaddo to take over the other functions of the house, and getting back into the swing of it again over these several months, I have come to a simple conclusion about eBay that makes me feel a little stupid.

Most of the customers who buy things on eBay will not buy from sellers that have a lot of rules.

Also, most of the customers on eBay are not trying to screw the sellers.

Furthermore, no matter how many rules you may have, you will probably still end up getting screwed, because there will always be the customer who uses their option to leave you negative feedback as leverage to get what they want.

I wanted to make this a more detailed post regarding this, but since it is late I will leave it at that for now.  If you want to do well on eBay, one of the best things you can do is keep your auctions simple.  We have only just figured this out, and oddly - it works.

Also, eBay is no easier than any other job.  In fact, in a lot of ways it is much harder work.  But it can also be much more rewarding than the average job, and the sky is the limit.  You earn as much as you want to, as long as you are committed to doing the work.