Mr. Choo Choo, I asked once before, what is your name?
Anyway, even if the fees were 5 cents, the 99 cent sale would have been a waste of time. Even if I got the entire 99 cents, it's still not worth the effort to box, label, and take to the PO. For eBay to take 75% of a sale value isn't even a joke, or a crime. I don't know what it is. No wonder there aren't many 99 cent sellers anymore.
The value of all the types of items I sell is very depressed right now, and I'm not sure why. Yesterday I went up in the attic to pull down some stuff that was collected years ago, but never sold.
Old technical books that used to sell for $25-50 a copy. Books over a hundred years old that used to sell for $50+
What do I find? Multiple copies of these books listed, selling for under $10, most unsold. I remember when my copies were the only copies listed and were desirable. It's like now they are garbage. How depressing. Many of my items follow the same pattern. I have a lot of material in the attic and garage collected over the years, which essentially is now worth nothing or close to nothing.
I don't think these items would have any more value elsewhere. In fact, they wouldn't even be seen or sought for, because there is no traffic.
The eBay changes, in general, haven't done anything to dampen my desire to sell. All they do is take a little extra money away. But all of a sudden the sales ain't there. They WERE there in January, now they're GONE. Over the years, the "to sell" months were January through June, September through November, with Jan-June being the BEST months to sell in. Not this year.
It's very disconcerting, and yea, I'm sorry if I'm pessimistic. At the current moment, this is worse than the months following 9/11, which I thought were bad times.
I don't want to list on sites that have 0% STR. I don't want to keep material siting around "ready to pack" just in case it sells 5 months from now. I have 3rd party software (Auctiva) for managing all my activities. I have nothing for these other sites, only the sites themselves. Extra work/effort I don't want or need. I built my own infrastructure around selling on eBay, and semi-automated it with Auctiva utilities. I don't want to work manually. I'm used to taking an item out, photographing it, listing it, and having it gone in 10 days. If it doesn't sell, I put it back in some box and forget about it for months. I can't do that if I list a ton of items spread across multiple sites where it might sell in 6 months. I'd never find the item to package it!
So yea, I'm disgusted right now.