TS: Selling your CDs.. eBay vs. Amazon -- pros and cons.

with cds its only - perhaps - a loss of a pound, but they dont even let you charge postage for records, which is more of a pain. maybe seeing 'free postage' will make people bid more or about the same im not sure, hopefully.

Yeah doing it w/ LPs is batshit and not at all workable. I'm lucky in that I have more or less unlimited free packaging for CDs but if you have to buy 12" mailers those things cost! I guess for whatever reason £0.99 has become a kind of default starting price for so many things and it's a carrot on a stick to idle eBay browsers, whereas eg £2.49 as a starting price totally isn't

i suppose ebay want buyers to get records sent to them in card-less envelopes.

Has anybody used fulfilment by amazon? I was looking at the page but couldn't work out how much they'd take for selling a CD for example.

Not Amazon or eBay but Music Magpie. Has anyone, UK based, used this 'service'?

Anyone tried this? I've put in a few barcodes of stuff I don't want and I got a valuation of around £10.

I tried the barcodes of some CDs that are never going to sell on Amazon and each one came up as being worth thirty pence at Music Magpie. I didn't get round to sending them off but I suppose if you're having a clear out, it's worth doing. Not sure I would flog anything valuable via them, though.

Amazon have been bothering me for additional information about myself in order to keep selling on .co.uk - apparently they now want to know my passport number or driving licence number or equivalent and may possibly ask for photocopies of recent utility bills and that kind of thing. I found it unnecessarily intrusive and ignored the emails for a while, but I was on the verge of losing the ability to sell there apparently, so I finally had to cave in. Not entirely happy but I did sell a s/h SACD for £30 last night that I originally paid £1 for, so not all is lost!

Go "Discogs" is my advice.

I use discogs too, but if the price on Amazon is right then....

I've currently got a book for sale on Amazon (a book I own; not a book I've written). It is seemingly out of print and looking online seems to be being pitched at the £150-£250 mark. I've no evidence it will sell for this and it may be one of those quirks of the internet that someone puts a product up for sale at a comedy price and it shifts everyone else's belief about how much the book is worth. The lowest price copy on Amazon was £174.99 earlier this week it has been dropping as people compete to be the lowest price seller and has reached £72 or so. This could well be handy for the consumer but I'm struck by how quickly there has been a kind of "race to the bottom", possibly driven by automated price matching.

Feel like I may have mentioned this before, but I have some acquaintances who used that technique occasionally to reduce the price of expensive items they wanted to buy... they would list a totally fictitious beat up copy on Amazon (trying to describe it so off-puttingly that no-one actually bought it from them) at somewhere around the price they wanted to pay for the genuine copy, then let the algorithms bring the price down on the real copy and hope no-one jumps in before them to purchase it.

the https://keepa.com/ chrome extension is good for figuring out what's going on

but yes, basically it's flash crashes etc. due to algorithmic trading. the WSJ had a good piece on it (paywalled, so here's a link via twitter https://t.co/LbaXCmRqEQ)

Weird. Just went on Amazon to sell a copy of Aphex Twin's Syro and was met with this message:

New; Used: Very good conditions You are not approved to list this product, and we are not currently accepting applications.

(It would let me sell a Used - Like New copy).

I can't recall the exact details now, but that happened to me a year or two ago, but it wouldn't let me list CDs or DVDs either new or used. I never looked into it, assuming it was perhaps some kind of cutting out of small-scale sellers in favour of the volume marketplace traders. Their cut was always so ferocious and I was sick of juggling multiple selling platforms simultaneously so I was happy to just let it go and keep up with discogs instead.

If you'd sold a book on Amazon and it had been confirmed as delivered by Royal Mail (UK) ... what would you do if the purchaser came back to you a month after delivery and suggested that it had never arrived? Book around the £20 mark.

That's awkward. I suspect if it came to it then Amazon would be the ultimate arbiter and from what I see it wouldn't be in your favour.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to ask the recipient (or non recipient) to try and make a claim from Royal Mail. Usually it would be you as the sender but if delivery was confirmed I'm not sure you'll get very far.

Also the buyer may have been patient but at the same time a month is quite a long time if it was just in the UK and it would help to feel out where they really stand.

It probably wouldn't hurt to try and make a claim with RM yourself but might be good to see first if the buyer is inclined to try and solve the problem which is evidently not your fault.

I had something similar last year with a discogs sale (I mentioned it at the time on the discogs thread, but don't think I ever posted the conclusion).

I sent an expensive box set to a buyer in France, which was confirmed as delivered in the expected timescale, but the buyer later got in touch to say they had never received it. I raised a claim with Royal Mail, deciding that to do so could do no harm, but of course they got back saying it had indeed been delivered.

The buyer was adamant they never received the parcel, so raised a claim with Paypal, but I was able to respond with the original proof of postage and the confirmation of delivery, so Paypal sided with me, much to my relief.

The buyer must have kept pursuing it and actually managed to get money back from Paypal themselves amazingly. I guess that maybe they were genuine and it really didn't get delivered and they managed to get the French post to admit as such?

I'd say raising the issue with Royal Mail shouldn't do any harm and is straightforward and could be helpful evidence of your efforts to aid the buyer in case they do later make a claim against you through Amazon. Also, make sure to reply to any messages they send you asap, as that would all count in your favour too.

On a different tack, eBay are now ceasing to let sellers use PayPal, so every sale will be heading straight into your bank account. No idea why this is happening, it's measuring up to be confusing as hell but we'll see. Sellers (in the UK at least) have to move over to the new system by the end of May. Bye-bye PayPal (for me anyway)!

yeah we (in Australia) have already moved over to the new system - I thiiink it is essentially so eBay can offer a wider range of payment options at checkout? eg apple pay or whatever.

after the slight inconvenience of setting it up it works fine. only real downside for me is that my paypal balance from selling also acted as my available funds for buying - at least theoretically! I liked the idea of hobby finances being in a separate pot. ah well.

i guess it’s also kind of tidy that they extract their cut on the way through, rather than billing you a month later when you’ve forgotten about it

ebay owned paypal for a while but then didn't own paypal and I assume that some amount of supporting it was going to cost the company more money than doing it themselves.

(UK) Is there anywhere that lists the records/CDs/merch that they want to buy, in an easy lazy-to-use way? I think eil used to? (That is, lists you could easily look through and think "Oh, yeah, I've got that and would sell it for a fiver or whatever".)