Selling graded cards safely on eBay

[e2d2]

@skiwi

Yep, you are correct about the 3% extra conversion fees, which is a real shame again, but I anticipated for that

The good news is that I’m still happy with the resulting numbers, only I had rather that eBay/Paypal wouldn’t take as big as a cut

To compare this to the current situation in The Netherlands, we have one big site (marktplaats.nl) similar to eBay but it doesn’t offer listings that publicly end on a specified date nor does it allow for auction-style bidding. What it does offer is the ability to put up a listing, option to put a price or to allow bidding, but the bids are not binding. Then after you manage to make a deal with one of your bidders/interested people the common thing to do is to give your bank details, they will transfer the money and then you ship. So in our situation you see correctly that the buyer has 0% protection and the seller has 100% protection (unless you believe in Nigerian princes or my brother in Nigeria…). There’s also the option to allow Paypal but it’s not regulated and everyone thinks that the buyer can easily do a chargeback without consequences, I actually don’t know if this is true though. The downside of this is that it’s a lot harder to reach the professional market, but it does get some things done, and picking items up in The Netherlands is pretty common too as opposed to sending it via mail, though then you’ll need to deal with counterfeit money, but you can usually ride along with someone to a bank where he withdraws money or if you have the same Bank (there’s about three major ones) then the other person can transfer money via his mobile and you can check on your account to see if it’s there. On average the maximum distance you need to travel is about 300km on pretty much only highways with a maximum speed of 120 or 130 km/h, sometimes the roads closer to the starting and end points are 80 km/h.

@skiwi I was not prepared for, but thoroughly enjoyed the level of detail you went into.