Orkish Ebay Aftermath

Unless you’re fascinated with Ebay sales analysis, you’ll probably want to skip this post entirely.  I’m only writing it for some historical perspective based upon this year’s Ebay auctions.

In total, I’ve collected (to date) on 33 of 38 auctions.  At the point I’m writing this, they only ended three days ago, so I fully expect that some people will be tardy in paying (perhaps waiting for payday this weekend?).  Still, I can’t know for sure how many will pay, so I’ll just move forward with the numbers I have on hand.

Description	Amount
Auction Total	$745.53
Shipping Collected	$171.00
Ebay Fees	-$118.75
Paypal Fees	-$41.04
USPS Fees (trip 1)	-$128.34
Total	$631.06
Unpaid Auctions	$0

Things that are worth noting from this?

1. EBay is not a super efficient means of selling.  Sure you hit a large audience, but between Paypal and Ebay, they’re taking more than 17% of the total haul.  Selling locally would be far easier.
2. It looks like I actually turned a profit on shipping, but in actuality, it’s pretty tight.  Once you figure that Ebay and Paypal take their 17%, I only really collected $124.98.  I guess that does make for a 5% profit, but keep in mind that I didn’t have to buy any packaging or shipping containers this time (I used what I’ve saved up for the past year or so).  Surely I wouldn’t have more than $5 in fees there.  Plus, I do have one outstanding package that I haven’t yet sent (because he sent the payment an hour after I got back from the post office).  That will likely eat up the extra $5 on it’s own–or close to it.
3. I had my first auction end for $.01.  For a while, I had two that were hovering around that with little to no bidders, but I wound up cancelling one of them.  The other , a lot of ork sprues/bits, went for $.01 plus $6 for shipping.

EDIT: It’s before this post went live, and I managed to get everyone to pay and ship out all of the items within 7 days.  As a result, all of the totals in the chart above are updated, but the figures and ratios throughout the rest might be off a bit.

The overall prices are significantly lower than my IG auctions last year (42% of retail as compared to 73% last year).  Why that is, I’m not sure.  Some possibilities include:

1. Those auctions were held in April, and not January–perhaps I didn’t wait long enough for people to save up funds after Christmas?
2. IG are a more powerful army which presumably has a larger player base.
3. I also put the IG up for auction right when the new codex was released.  This allowed those players to buy into the hype at that time.  I meant to do this with the Orks, but procrastinated way too much.
4. I had a larger selection of IG models available.
5. It’s also possible that 40k has lost steam as a whole from last year.

It’s not clear to me why the sales have dropped, nor do I intend to do as detailed of an analysis as I did last time.  I’m content with getting rid of the stuff and cleaning up the garage just a little bit more.  I’m pretty sure that I’ve already sold enough Orks to cover any of my upfront costs as well, so this money should be pure profit.

And the added bonus?  I get to start the year off in the black.  Frugal gaming lives on!!!!