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Ebay Listing Annoyances!

Started by DavePEI, May 26, 2012, 04:43:54 AM

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Matilo Telephones

Bad presentations can lead to very good bargains. I often have bought badly presented items, that proved very interesting or very rare at a good price. Didn´t seem much at a glance, but after scrutinising the pics I saw something others hadn´t.

That is how I got my white Heemaf 55 clock and my S&H modell 26.
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

JimH

#46
Quote from: southernphoneman on December 12, 2013, 08:03:38 PM
in this ebay listing some seller shows how not to pose there phones for sale in a photo, in this case a phone lot of 2554's

 http://www.ebay.com/itm/201000091170

Maybe this listing should've been in the "Modern Art" category.  I'm sure at some gallery somewhere, someone would pay big bucks for this.  All you need is some epoxy to keep them all together!  :D
Jim H.

twocvbloke

Assuming only one bid and collected in person (no shipping it seems):

$119.95 / 50 = $2.40

Clean and resell each phone for $25 a piece, that's $22.60 profit, multiplied by 50, that's about $1130, minus ebay tax, travel and other costs... ;D

So in total, maybe about $1k profit from that badly laid out listing... :D

Matilo Telephones

25 dollar? That is cheap. How much time does it take to clean one up and make sure it works?

If there are no repairs needed it takes me about 3 hours for a Phone.

3 * 50 = 150 hours for 1000 dollar?
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

twocvbloke

#49
Quote from: Matilo Telephones on December 13, 2013, 05:07:15 AM
25 dollar? That is cheap. How much time does it take to clean one up and make sure it works?

If there are no repairs needed it takes me about 3 hours for a Phone.

3 * 50 = 150 hours for 1000 dollar?

They look like older versions of my Cortelco 2554, so haven't got the fiddly amplified handset, so, I'd say it'd take a very short time to clean up for each phone, especially if done in lots of 5 or 10 in one go, or have a bit of a production line on the go and you could probably have them all done in a day or two... :)

And considering the $25 price, a lot of Cortelco phones (new or used) seem to be listed at a high price as they "look vintage", so, price them at something like $25 a piece, they'd sell pretty quick, you could go higher of course, but then risk slow sales... :)

Matilo Telephones

So, 2 hours for one Phone? Still seems a lot of work for that kind of money. My boss pays me more for my time.

Judging by the picture, I wonder if there really are 50 phones. I can see about 20. Perhaps the figure was rounded up a little?

Even then, I wonder if there is enough to make them all complete and working. Perhaps some damage and missing parts. So count on 40 phones. If there are more, it's a bonus.

If I'd want to make a quick buck, I'd make it really quick. So a quick wipe, brush and polish on the outside, make sure they work properly, spend no more than one hour on each Phone.

And then, where are you going to sell them? That takes time and effort. Flee market, antiques fair? That stille means dragging them to an fro and of course spendig time selling them. On the net? That means answering mails, doing some adminstrative work, and of course spending time shipping them. That all takes a lot of speed out of that quick buck. It'll add one hour to each Phone to get them sold.
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

twocvbloke

I never said two hours, "a day or two" is about maybe 8 hours per day (so maybe 8, maybe 16, maybe 4, maybe 12, etc.) of working on them, either in bulk, or a production line (so maybe 20 to 30 minutes per phone, but interleaved with working on other phones in the line to save time), and the other 16 in the day is eating, relaxing and sleeping as you'd do with a 9 to 5 job. Take the base and handset shells off, remove electronic parts, wash & sanitise them (nothing worse than buying a "refurbished" phone with brown crusties in places), blast the inner workings with compressed air to remove dust and dirt, and then reassemble, and all the wile have the handset cables soak in in warm water with washing powder  to clean them up while you work on the phones... :)

The listing states "approx 50 units", so could be 57, could be 46, what you can see is the top of the box, what you don't see is the depth of the box, it's like looking at a door to a room, you're told it's approx 100sq foot, but you're assuming it's 45 without opening the door, it makes no sense to assume something is smaller when you're given reasonable figures, if it was 20, then the seller is mis-describing the auction and can be dealt with under ebay's rules...

When it comes to cleaning them though, personally I wouldn't do what us brits refer to as a half-arsed job, which would just be a quick wipe, brush and polish on the outside in my view, cleaning inside and out isn't hard, these 2554 phones are small and very simple, anything longer than half an hour and you're doing something wrong...  :D

And selling, well, ebay of course, hence my calculations stating "minus ebay tax, travel and other costs", it's the world's biggest marketplace that a lot of people use daily, not everyone uses things like craigslist, kijiji or gumtree, or has the time to travel to markets and pay for something at a stall that may cost a lot more, pot and packing isn't mentioned as that's a separate cost which is covered by the buyer...

Yeah, there may be parts that don't work, but that's why I never gave dead on perfectly accurate figures of what you could earn, anyone who does hasn't bought things to re-sell for profit before, the about $1k profit is an optimistic figure, yeah, you may earn a lot less, but so long as it's more than what you paid then it's profit... ;D

But looking at it like it's an earned wage, that's the wrong way to go about it, $1k, heck even if you make $600, that could buy another bulk load of phones at a cheap price with money left over, which in turn you clean up & sell on, and you get more profit, and so forth, that's pretty much how you earn money doing these things, or you could use the money to pay off bills that you may have, so that $200 investment with a little personal time thrown in becomes a useful tool to bolster the money you already have coming in...

Don't consider it as a job with a wage, consider it as a hobby that pays, after all, there's a lot of people on this forum who do just that, buy lots of phones, keep a couple, clean & sell on the rest at a profit, granted the phones they buy and sell are a little more vintage than 1980s/90s Cortelco phones, but still...

poplar1

Harry, this 2554 haul looks like a good project for you. Since they were in a school, they were probably in classrooms and not used much. If only they weren't Band-Aid color---this has to be the least popular color according to Sonny, who sells to the public.

"C'est pas une restauration, c'est une rénovation."--François Martin.

Greg G.

#53
Quote from: johnnyjt on May 26, 2012, 10:28:53 AM
Yes, this of course been happening for years and in other catagories as well. 
I think some people are either Drunk when they list items in wrong catagories
don't care or just trying to be slick.  There are times when they do get bids.


JohnnyJT    8)
South Phily

I almost never use ebay for selling because the process to post an ad is such a pita compared to Craigslist, especially if I only want to sell locally.  Currently I have a few items on there since they started offering free ads.  When selecting the category, ebay kept suggesting totally incorrect categories that seemed to be just pulled out of their, uh, "hat", e.g. a bike they wanted to put in collectibles/advertising.  HELLO?!  IT'S A BIKE!!  It was a real hassle to try to manipulate and find the right category. 
The idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane.
- Mike Row
e

MMikeJBenN27

#54
Quote from: DavePEI on May 26, 2012, 04:43:54 AM...and eBay doesn't seem to have any sort of mechanism in place to weed out extraneous listings.
There is none, and E-Bay doesn't care about sellers deliberately defrauding their customers.  American Heritage Museum is one such seller.

MMikeJBenN27

I hate it when sellers think anything more than 5 years old is an "antique" and is worth a fortune.  That includes cell phones, which are not old enough to be even collectible, let alone antiques.  I am an old fart too, so I am annoyed by those young whippersnappers!

Mike

RDPipes

Quote from: MMikeJBenN27 on December 11, 2022, 08:30:32 PMI hate it when sellers think anything more than 5 years old is an "antique" and is worth a fortune.  That includes cell phones, which are not old enough to be even collectible, let alone antiques.  I am an old fart too, so I am annoyed by those young whippersnappers!

Mike
They think if its even from the 50's or 60's it's antique, what ever happened to the if its 100 years or older it qualifies to be antique (and not before). They all need to be educated!

Contempra

Quote from: MMikeJBenN27 on December 11, 2022, 08:30:32 PMI hate it when sellers think anything more than 5 years old is an "antique" and is worth a fortune.  That includes cell phones, which are not old enough to be even collectible, let alone antiques.  I am an old fart too, so I am annoyed by those young whippersnappers!

Mike

Oh well, you are certainly not the only one my dear friend Mike ;) Whether on 'Etsy', Ebay, Marketplace or even elsewhere on other non-English sites, I sometimes leave them messages that their phone is not not 'antique' but 'vintage'. which is very different, moreover, often they do not even know that their telephone is only a reproduction, that it is worth nothing more than a piece of plastic or even, the part or the telephone is not not uncommon. at all .