@fohat
Very solid experience indeed with 1000+ sales.
I really like your words of wisdom, "Ebay is a reluctant partner with sellers, but an enthusiastic champion for buyers".
While, I agree with the 10-days getting better audience strategy, I am still sceptical about running a "reverse auction" strategy on all items. Of course, I as a seller don't want to get burnt, no one does. Low starting price and long duration of auction is also recommended by some behavioural economists. For me, hooking up more fish is very important, and a bait that is not so attractive cannot hook so many fish. But I do that only on popular items that I know have seekers always been searching for them. While I agree that I want a minimal selling price, buyers who are hooked at an auction (have placed a bid) quite often raise their final bidding price - than when they are not hooked and not really involved despite watching the auction. There are items that I don't want to list with a $1 starting bid, because they have fewer followers despite their rarity - like some of your records I believe. I may then list them at higher starting price.
There are some updates of eBay and PayPal since 2013 - we are now double charged after PayPal's separation from eBay. eBay is still charging at 13%, and PayPal charges separately during the transaction, I believe more than 3% and perhaps even higher than 10%. I was Okay with them, but now I hate them both, after I got scammed by some cunning and unruly buyers from a far-east country who abusive the "buyer-protection" policy. Long story short, these abusive buyers from the far-east ruined my items to unsaleable state, yet demanded a full refund. PayPal's policy is that they
always refund buyers' request of refund based of the "item not as description" reason, and eBay is almost the same. When I asked them to look at what happened in the real world outside the Internet, with all the chat logs and screenshots and photos, their answers are, "we only know and care for things available on the Internet, e.g. tracking number". There were cases that happen to some sellers, where the buyers asked for refunds and what sent back were bricks and cardboard, and of course, still getting full refunds. According to what I have read, the only chance to reverse their decisions is when you use a lawyer. I wish I have studied law instead.
Because of being scammed by buyers I now owe eBay money - I already used the initial payments from those buyers to pay rent and other basic living expenses like health care before they ruined the items and then demanded money back using PayPal's policy. As an academic slave after my boss retirement the whole group got laid off, I have been looking for and attending interviews for another postdoc position ever since. While working on myself every day to raise my quality against the resistance coming from protectionism in industries and in the conventional academic institutions, I could only try to learn to be smarter in earning money "on the side" using online platforms like eBay.
Then if paecific.jr has 1000 Unsavers and 1000 Model F, and with the strategy (above, which I agree with) "waiting at least a week after each sale", he can sell only 27 Unsaver and 27 Model Fs per year. And it takes > 37 years to empty the warehouse, if he has 1000 pieces each. Assuming Unsaver sells at $300, and Model F sells at $150 which are totally under-estimating but if people see same rare keyboard after keyboard keeps on pumping out to the market over an extended period of time, the market will adjust too. Then an average earning per year will be $12,150 and $1,012.5 per month which is kind of enough to get by but definitely not enough to buy a house or convince someone to marry you. Perhaps also use all extra earnings to invest in some other ways.
