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

I listed about 100 items at half.com when I was listing stuff at Amazon, and made two sales in two years.

oh god. How high did you have your prices, compared to others?

$3 to $5 above the lowest price, depending on the item. I never tried to beat the lowest price at either place.

Hmm. Well, at least for the first few I've listed, I've kept my price within a dollar of the lowest price. We'll see how it goes.

I don't see myself going to Amazon, though. Something like Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, for example. There are a dozen people who sell it used at $5, several people have it brand new for $6-7.

At $5, the 15% commission is 75 cents, + $1 transaction fee + 80 cent closing fee is $2.55 that Amazon gets out of my $5. Other cds, like Sonic Youth's Experimental Jet Set (a dozen used under $2), are pretty much implausible to sell there.

But yeah, Amazon was dead easy back when I was selling off my collection and the bottom hadn't fallen out of the market yet.

I haven't sold anything there but a few DVD sets and VHS tapes in nearly 3 years. Sorry dude, you missed the real gravy train unless you have some high-priced collectible shit.

more like selling your SOUL amirite?

Jeeeezus. But yeah, you're right.

Maybe CDs will have a vinyl-esque revival 15 years from now?

insaneclownslaughingatlittleboy.gif

Do you know about this?

Messageboard for Amazon 3rd-party sellers.

I did not! I will check that out. Thanks for the advice, Rock Hardy.

Fair warning, that messageboard is the most depressing thing you will ever read.

Hey Kevin, I ripped-to-HD or burned a copy of every CD I sold, so more like turning dead weight into free money, amirite?

One small plus of selling on Amazon is that you make a small profit from shipping (about 75 cents per item). So, you can still list a CD for next to nothing and make at least some kind of (very meager) money off it.

Yeah, otm. Find a cheap source for #0 (6x9) bubble mailers. I got mine in 25-packs from Sam's Club for about 17¢ each.

yrrite!

17¢ per mailer, not 17¢ per 25-pack

Can someone please make a convincing argument why I shouldn't sell off my Black Keys, Ted Leo and Mclusky albums on eBay this weekend? Because every time I hear a song from any of those on iTunes shuffle nowadays, it just makes me groan and skip to the next track...

Going once... twice...

(I prefer eBay, btw -- start 'em at $5 to $8 BuyItNow prices, then trade in the non-sellers at the local store.)

I started out using both Half and Amazon and eventually gravitated toward just Amazon. The other day I managed to get rid of my Beat Happening boxset for $105!

$3 to $5 above the lowest price, depending on the item. I never tried to beat the lowest price at either place.

― a new Rock Hardy screen name because I can't find the old one (Rock Hardy), Sunday, November 23, 2008 2:23 AM (6 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

does this work? how long does it take to sell on amazon like this? surely stuff priced like this just never sells?

I have about 20-25 cds on Amazon that still haven't sold after several months, despite being within a dollar of the lowest cost option.

So...a long long time.

I just sold that Cardiacs double album for £40 on Amazon (others were asking £70 but I decided not to be greedy). Might conceivably have got more for it on ebay, but also might have got less without a reserve, and as it only cost me £12 I'll take £28 profit without grumbling.

ebay takes 10% off all music sales it seems. anyone know a way to reduce the FVFs? looking at my bill from them this months, its pissing me off.

i dont like amazon cos of their independent seller-crushing moves, plus they seem to take more of a cut.

amazon seems less hassle ...

much less hassle but the fixed fee is large enough for it to make selling cheap CDs a loss-making enterprise.

e.g. in my email today (I am liquidating my CD collection):

Item: Hot Shots II [Audio CD] The Beta Band
Condition: Used - Very Good
Listing ID: 0706E2I7XBM
SKU: BJ-W3JS-67EP
Quantity: 1
Order Date: 2009-07-20
Buyer's Price: £1.95
Shipping: £1.21
Amazon Fees: £-1.47
Your Earnings: £1.69

Postage will cost me 90p, so i have made a grand total of 80p on that.

Here's a CD that is worth rather more (sold yesterday):

Item: At the Movies (Soundtrack) (Audio CD) Morricone, Ennio
Condition: Used - Very Good
Listing ID: 0710E4NS954
SKU: YR-6U21-Q0KA
Quantity: 1
Order Date: 2009-07-18
Buyer's Price: £8.00
Shipping: £1.21
Amazon Fees: £-2.52
Your Earnings: £6.69

i fished out a couple of the more valuable CDs and put them on ebay, but life is too short to sell a whole CD collection on ebay

discogs

i fished out a couple of the more valuable CDs and put them on ebay

What's your username?

there's a tendency to try and put cds on amazon so you're the cheapest, which just ends up in a spiral of reducing prices.

i have a minimum amount i'll put cds on for, always use recycled packaging and think that, once you've reached a certain price, it's not hugely unreasonable to post second class. i presume many of the bargain priced cds are posted by people from their place of work.

I've only been selling stuff worth at least 10 bucks on Amazon and have made a couple hundred of dollars over the last few months.

http://www.abundatrade.com/

not posting my ebay username, but just got £40 for a tour CD tonight. no idea why i didn't do this before.

does eBay insist on sellers offering free p&p for CDs now, like they do on DVDs? I sold a couple of dvds recently and it really pissed me off that I could no longer even cover my (justified and absolutely fair) costs for this...

(hmm, why I choose to mix the caps up on doovdes I have no idea)

ebay.com.au still lets you charge postage for DVDs! (and CDs)

does eBay insist on sellers offering free p&p for CDs now, like they do on DVDs?

Hell no! How does that even work for DVDs? I've been selling CDs for like five years and start all my listings at £0.99 - a CD in a normal case costs £0.90 to post first class in the UK at the moment

http://www.abundatrade.com/

Just for kicks, I went there to see what they'd offer for the Orange Juice CD reissues on Polydor, which are now out of print and going for $40 - $200 in various places.

Their offer?

5¢ each!

the no postage on dvds is fucking annoying. esp when things like dvd box sets arent cheap to post.

not posting my ebay username

No worries - I was asking as a potential customer, though.

np, i don't actually have anything on there at the moment

Not Amazon or eBay but Music Magpie. Has anyone, UK based, used this 'service'? I'm considering it, I understand it's better for the 'unwanted' rather than the 'collectable' CD albums. Some reviews sound shocking but a friend sold a few CDs and got a cheque within a couple of weeks, so maybe it's worth a shot. Oh, and you can also put together 'a sales list' and I've just topped £100, so that makes it tempting.

asked this on another thread but here seems more appropriate:

What's the cheapest you can sell a CD on Amazon, without losing money, assuming postage for a CD costs £0.90 and you're not able to just throw your packages in your work post?

(UK prices)

£0.90 + the cost of your packaging + £0.01

£2.50 is as low as I would go when I was liquidating. It broke down like this one, which I apparently sold for £2.48:

Buyer's Price: £2.48
Shipping: £1.21
Amazon Fees: £-1.57
Your Earnings: £2.12

And then about £1 on p+p, leaving me with about £1 profit and a bad taste in my mouth because Amazon were taking more than half the money the customer was paying. Remember they take a cut of the shipping too (for a CD this is 28p).

Details here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=3149301

i really hate that ebay wont let you charge for postage on CDs anymore. just means even lower profits than before. and its already low.

I just put a few dozen CDs up - some of it brand new well known stuff, some of it random crap I can't imagine anyone wanting, some of it whothefuckknows - starting at £0.99, but w/ a message in the description saying 'yeah, if yr buying this in the UK I'm going to charge you £1 for postage, be a sport and add this on please'. So I guess I just have to wait and see if buyers are going to be chancers or play nicely

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.

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".)