I've started listing cards again on Ebay for the first time in a long time. I'm not a huge Ebay fan.
I started selling on Ebay in 2002, but back then I wasn't selling cards. No, I was selling pro wrestling videotapes. This was at the tail end of the VHS era and I was into Japanese wrestling. You could make duplicates of Japanese wrestling tapes and sell them on Ebay without breaking copyright laws. It was a nice little racket for a teenager and I made more money doing that then I did at my part-time supermarket job.
But Ebay has changed a lot since then. The site is far, far more protective of the buyer, to the point where the seller has little protection whatsoever. We all know stories of fraud, and many of us have experienced fraud from selling on Ebay. It's so easy for a buyer to just file an item claim and get his money back, even if he received the item in question in the correct condition.
As a seller, it happened to me enough that I stopped selling on Ebay. The worst case was when I was in college. I had just got back into collecting and I had acquired some extra Wayne Gretzky O-Pee-Chee cards from the early eighties that I decided to flip. After receiving the cards, the buyer claimed they were not in the right condition. He shipped them back to me, filing the tracking number for the return with Paypal.
When I received the cards, I was surprised to see that they were not the Gretzky O-Pee-Chee cards, but a stack of messy Pro Set hockey cards. I contacted the buyer, assuming hopefully he had made an honest mistake. He claimed he set me the right cards. When I showed him photos of the Pro Set cards, he said I was lying.
I contacted Paypal, they said because he provided a tracking number for the return package, there was nothing I could do. When I told the customer service rep that the buyer had returned what was essentially shredded newspaper, they said if it was mail fraud I would have to contact the police. I contacted the buyer with this info, and he threatened to contact the police about me, claiming I was harassing him.
I never ended up going to the police. I figured for the $10 or $15 I was out, it wasn't even worth the effort. It would be easier to just stop selling on Ebay altogether.
And that's what I did. Until a couple of years ago. I returned to Ebay and within a few transactions I had something similar happen. In this case, the guy didn't return the card (a Johnny Bower stick card, which was pretty sweet). He just filed a claim saying it was not received. I was new to modern Ebay selling, and dumb enough that I did not send with a tracking number, figuring the cost of tracking was so prohibitive in Canada that no buyer would be willing to pay extra for it. I got nailed for being naive and it made me hate Ebay more.
So, why come back? It's really the largest marketplace for cards, that's why. I would prefer to sell on COMC, and let them handle the Ebay stuff. The problem is that COMC is way behind in accepting packages right now. Also, COMC doesn't allow just anything to be listed as an Ebay auction, including stuff like small lots, low value cards, and stuff that aren't cards at all.
This week I started listing a few BINs on Ebay from cards I've pulled over the past year. I stuck to cards that are worth $5 or more and listed BINs that are priced competitively. And yes, this time I will ship with tracking. Hopefully that Pro Set guy is out of collecting cards by now.
I'll post my Ebay sales results here as they happen. Do you have any tips for someone returning to Ebay after a long while?
