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

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.

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).

(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".)