Money! (It's a gas)

After almost exactly two years, I'm finally getting to the bottom of the eBay pile. Maybe I'm overstating it slightly in the title. There has been money, of that there is no question, but for the most part it's not been a gas. Much of it has been mindless tedium; there's been some rumpling disappointments (that's like a crushing disappointment but with lighter weights) mostly in the areas of postage - either miscalculating the cost of it or fragile things getting broken in transit - but also more general stuff like items not selling for what I thought they were worth, and some buyers being worse than moronic; some dogged determination (it took 22 attempts - almost a year - to sell that damned walker for instance); but there have been some highlights too, some of them even approaching exciting.

I could bore on for hours (or pages, since I'm writing) but to avoid putting you to sleep I'll choose two examples from each side of the eBay boxing match*. In the red (for excitement) corner, the highlights include:

The Biscuit Tin

When my Mum died in 2011 we spent well over half a year emptying her house ready for sale. We threw away loads of stuff, naturally, but I'd already had six months' examples of what would sell on eBay (ANYTHING), so things that I might previously have binned I decided were worth "having a go" with on eBay. Into this category fell the old biscuit tins that had lain gathering dust in the outhouse since my Dad died in 1993. He kept nails and screws in them, and I don't think my Mum ever went near a nail or a screw in her life. She certainly wasn't going to start after he'd gone. I thought there was a chance they might be collectable, so I took a photo of all of them - there were 5 - and put them up as a job lot for £7.50.

The next day I woke up to a message from someone requesting additional pics of one of the tins - a Huntley & Palmers one with a motif of common birds. In the original photo you could only see the lid. My initial reaction (that it was a bloody nuisance) gave way to a feeling that I ought to play along, so I posted pics of the other four sides. My interested party turned out to be a French collector of British biscuit tins:
"In France it is very hard to find good tins. British tins are so beautiful and elaborate."

After exchanging a couple of messages, the lady made me an offer:
"We are interested only in the HP tin (we like tins with birds) and wondered if you might be prepared to accept an offer of 85£ for it plus postage."

I had to read it twice. Eighty-five quid?? For one tin??? Was she serious? Did she mean Euros? No, she was serious and she was bidding in Sterling. Crikey. Later (once the tin arrived safely in France) she was kind enough to send me a photo of it nestling in her collection. It had been spruced up, polished and burnished, and sat proudly on one of the glass shelves that line her apartment (almost certainly a bijou apartment, being French and all). I got £25 for the other four tins in the end too.

The Buffalo Nickel

Word was, this is a very collectable coin. Not being a numismatist I had no idea, but a quick Google suggested it could be worth anything from $50 to $150 (most if not all the sales being in the US). I stuck it on for £14.95 - have you ever tried to take a photograph of a small coin so that a buyer can get an appreciation of the condition? - and watched excitedly as a bidding war started that saw it sell eventually for over £100. I sold an Indian Head penny the same week. Between them these two coins fetched £150. As always with these things, I end up wishing I'd had a few more!

Contrasting with the above examples, in the blue (for disappointment) corner, we have:

The Very First Thing I Sold. 

An early lesson in the black art of setting your starting price. The 14" portable TV with built in VCR that provided the majority of my entertainment in the apocalyptic days post-separation and, later, was all Nikki & I had room for in our first flat. Listed (before I'd learned to wait for Zero Listing Fee weekends) for 99p and sold to the only person who showed any interest for... 99p. So that's 89p after eBay took their cut.

The Ceramic Plaque 

I'd bought this as a Christmas present for my parents during their heraldic phase (a brief period following our holiday discovery that the Beresford family have a crest, and a coat of arms) and it hung on the living room wall for over 40 years. I never really did know whether they liked it or whether it was tolerated because it was a present. One of those things you hardly even notice is there after a while.

It sold for £46.50, which I was pleased with. I was less pleased that having survived 40 years with the Beresfords, less than 4 days in the company of Royal Mail was enough to break it into two pieces, requiring a full refund and a total failure of their "compensation" scheme (yes, I did make a claim and yes, it was denied). I think the guy who bought it was even more disappointed than I - it was the third one he'd had arrive broken.


So there you have it. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm glad it's almost over. The crates are all gone (well, they've reached the bottom of the stairs. They're on their way to being gone) and I took a load of cardboard boxes and other packaging material to the tip this weekend, so the study is returning to a semblance of order. By the time I've sold these last half dozen items we'll have made almost five grand in those two years (although "made" is another overstatement - you can hardly count it as profit when you sell, for instance, three grand's worth of bedroom furniture for 500 quid), which has bought us some nice new furniture for the revamped living room and allowed me to be unusually generous when sponsoring mad friends who walk, run, bike, or grow moustaches for charity.

*See what I did there? Boxing match. Things get posted in boxes. Eh? Eh? Sometimes I even make myself laugh.

Used Dust Collectors

One of the most depressing aspects of our recent trip to Toronto was discovering how devalued an extensive array of "collectible" plates can become over a period of 30 or so years. It's not the intrinsic value - or lack of it - that depressed me. I hardly gave a second thought to the money side of it. What I found much more upsetting was how easy it is for someone, even someone of above average intelligence, to be convinced by well-meaning friends that something is worth collecting, and will appreciate in value. And thinking how disillusioned he must have been as the reality of their value slowly dawned.

eBay is saturated with these things, more often than not being offered at around 5 dollars (for something that could have originally cost anything from 50 to 150 dollars) and with no bids. To be sure of a sale at the best price, collectors are forced to keep all the original boxes (I found three large cartons full of them in the garage) and paperwork. This paperwork, tricked out in full Reader's Digest or Franklin Mint stylee, declares their "certification" of being part of a "limited edition" the limit, in most cases, being a run of 150 firing days. Imagine how many plates a modern ceramics factory is capable of churning out in 150 days and you'll get an idea of just how limited these editions were. Or not. Even with all the appropriate certification and authentic packaging the value, 20-30 years on, is on average less than a quarter of what you paid, assuming you can find a buyer at all.

I did eventually find a dealer who advertised that they were prepared to take on plate collections from estate sales. I emailed them a list and received a reply a couple of days after returning home, to the effect that they were already "fully stocked" with those items.

I did enjoy one moment of delicious irony though. While I was searching for some idea of how to get rid of the collection in the simplest way that would maximise the return, one of the pages I ended up at carried an ad for used dust collectors. Lower down I found a second ad, this time for "quality" dust collectors. Yes, I thought, I'm clearly in the right place.

The absurdity of following

Bearing in mind that we've recently been to Toronto and, as always with holidays, have therefore been spending more time "out and about" than usual - shopping, drinking, eating, watching the unfamiliar TV - it's as if the culture was thrown into a kind of relief by virtue of it being (only slightly, agreed) alien.

Somehow the brand names on the clothes, the celebrity magazines telling you how to be like someone, the adverts exhorting you to drink the same vodka, or coke, or juice as your "hero", all seemed more than usually visible, and definitely more than usually intrusive.

Isn't it the ultimate in sad that there are people who really believe aping the products that someone successful uses will give them their life or in some ill-defined and abstract way make the wannabes more like the... bes?

Free advertising, reflected cool. It's all shit, really.

Shake your booty

For reasons I won't bore you with, we're doing a fair bit of sorting out at the moment. It means we've uncovered a lot of boxes marked "eBay" - more out of a desperate hope that they might somehow list themselves and walk out of the door, than with any expectation that we'll ever actively engage in their sale - as well as making life-changing decisions to finally throw out that box of bubble wrap and the futon base that's a bit split.

Having (almost) confronted the eBay demon, we started considering other options for tat disposal, the most obvious and convenient being a car boot sale. There's one held every weekend at Bowlers, so we decided to pop along there today for a bit of a nose, suss out the competition and get some idea what second-hand books, CDs and DVDs sell for these days.

This short visit was a revelation on many levels, the first being that in the approximately thirty years between my last car boot sale (as a vendor) and this (as a browser) Nothing. Has. Changed. Except perhaps that, here at least, some indoor pitches have power, and vendors plug their tat in to prove it still works. Oh, and it's £15 for a pitch now, when it used to be a fiver. But broken down pasting tables? Check! Dog-eared paperbacks? Check! Unrecognisable bits of kitchen paraphernalia? Check! Old clocks, mirrors, grandma's teeth mug, scuffed toys, jigsaw puzzles in broken boxes? Yes, they're all still there. Might be exactly the same stuff as I used to pick through thirty years ago as far as I can tell, apart from the DVDs of course. We didn't have DVDs in 1980.

Most DVDs look to be selling for a pound or two. Some vendors had attempted to arbitrarily apply a range of pricing based on some vague perception of rarity, popularity or whatever, in 50p increments starting at £1. Others just applied a tatty notice stating "all DVDs £2" to a boxful. But whatever pricing was in operation, we never saw anyone browsing the movies. We later discovered this particular venue has a bit of a reputation for carrying snide merchandise, which was a bit disappointing as we've a couple of dozen to shift. It wasn't just films - no-one seemed to be in a buying mood. Punters in general were a bit thin on the ground; surprising for such a sunny Sunday. Maybe having such a large sale every week in the same place suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Certainly, on the face of it, we'd be hard pushed to make back our pitch price, which kind of defeats the object. Anyone want to buy a model Ferrari?

Let there be light...

I mentioned recently that we've been living in the shadows for a while. On the landing, at least.

A couple of years ago I installed a security light switch. A clever little beast with a built-in timer and a photocell which provided a wealth of options on when it would turn on, and off, and how many times, and on what days. Versatile enough to make even the most observant tea-leaf believe there really was someone in the house on those all-too-rare occasions when we go away.

Shame then that those clever electronics weren't also resilient electronics. Call me picky, but I'd have thought a light switch should be able to withstand something as simple as a blown light bulb. I'm not talking massive electrical storm, direct lightning strike, or rat-inspired short-circuit. Sooner or later, your light bulb is going to turn up its toes. A light switch whose electronics are fritzed by such a common occurrence shouldn't, to my mind, be allowed on the market. But there you have it. First dead light bulb... one dead light switch.

In my normal procrastinatory fashion it's taken me several months to shift my ass into gear but today I finally coughed up the £1.48 for a replacement switch - and fitted it! Not another electronic one, mind. No, that would have set me back at least ten times as much, and probably gone pop again the next time the bulb blew, so it's back to the relative simplicity of a standard two-way for us. Let's hope there are no burglars watching.

ZoomZoom

A few years back I joined ZoomPanel. You may have heard of them - they run online surveys on behalf of marketing companies to gauge opinion before adverts, products, etc come onto the market, and also keep tabs on the public's views on issues of the day. With a self-selecting audience I'm not sure how meaningful the results of the latter are, but let's not get sidetracked with that.

In exchange for completing their questionnaires, members rack up points which can then be exchanged for "gifts." When I first received an invite to sign up it sounded like a bit of a laugh. Register my opinion (always an attractive proposition) and win some prizes while I was at it.

Two things weren't immediately apparent:

• the rate at which points would be accrued
• the value of the "gifts" on offer

The reward for any survey is usually around 50 points, but with survey requests only arriving sporadically, often with several weeks between, the maximum rate at which points can be won is limited. The reality is worse than that. Surveys are often oversubscribed, or aimed at a different demographic, so I'd often answer a few questions only to be told that the survey had closed, or they were looking for someone with a different profile.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but it did seem after a while that some quite useful marketing information was being gathered before the survey suddenly announced it was full, or decided I didn't fit the bill. Not only that, but every survey always asked for information - gender, location, age etc - that was already available in my profile. Tedious, to say the least.

Even so, with the eagerness of youth (this was about three years ago) I pressed on, keen to make my first 1,000 points and gain access to the cornucopia of delights available to me. Gifts are arranged in "portfolios" which require a certain number of points before they can be opened. 1,000 points for the first, 2,000 for the second and so on. When eventually I began to approach the thousand-point mark, I took a look inside the first portfolio.

Hmm. Nothing much there to get excited about. I decided to press on towards the 2,000-point barrier. It's taken more than three years, but I did eventually reach it. Sadly, the prizes in the second portfolio proved almost as uninspiring as the first, so I cut my losses, ordered two things from the first portfolio, and cancelled my account. What had appeared to be "a bit of a laugh" actually proved a complete waste of time. The surveys took around 20 minutes on average and to reach 2,000 points I must have completed something like 40 of them. Over thirteen hours effort in exchange for two objects worth no more than a couple of quid.

So why am I telling you all this?

Well, the first of my two shiny new toys arrived yesterday morning. A small tripod "ideal for use with all types of camera."

Unfortunately, mere seconds after removing it from its blister packaging, I made the mistake of trying to deploy the legs. One of them snapped off in my hand.

When I stopped laughing I did wonder whether it was worth breaking the other one off and using the pathetic thing as a monopod. One more look at its cheap plastic construction was enough to dispel that idea. It's now in the bin, along with my ZoomPanel account.