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Reputation Matters

My grandparents recently moved to New Mexico from California and they had to get rid of a lot of their belongings first. Not only did they need to pare down in order to fit into a smaller place, but also in order to raise some cash to finance their trip to the Southwest. Like most old folk, they’re on a fixed income and don’t have the extra funds to stay in motels, pay for gas, and certainly not to rent a storage unit to stash what won’t fit in their vehicle.

First, they invited their children to come to their house and take anything they wanted. They wanted to make sure that anyone who had their eye on a piece of furniture or cherished heirloom need not wait until probate to inherit it. Unfortunately for them, no one came and no one expressed interest in any items that they were willing to part with.

If they were in the Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex, I would have recommended they come to Easysale. As an Easysale Ambassador, I would have earned a cool $30 myself for the referral. Because there aren’t any similar services in their old area, I asked them if they had ever considered listing their items on eBay.

My grandparents are pretty tech-savvy. They at least know how to operate a digital camera, upload images, and use eBay’s interface. Though they have never sold anything before, they have an okay reputation from making 4-5 purchases a year and promptly sending their payment. This is chump change in a market where people run entire businesses on eBay, shipping hundreds of goods a month in what amounts to a full-time job; still, the lack of negative feedback and longevity of their account should inspire some confidence.

Their impression was that unless you have a solid reputation, it’s not worth listing items for sale. This was something they picked up from talking to peers and also from their own buying habits. My grandfather pointed out that he doesn’t bother with auctions (preferring the buy it now button) and passes over cheaper items that lack the professional layout of established businesses.

People like him are fairly common in an arena that depends on trust and confidence to make up for the lack of brick-and-mortar reliability. The recent changes at eBay have made things even more difficult for amateur merchants to enter the fray, especially if lots of time passes between transactions.

Saying nothing of the professional appearance and dedicated response times, how much can a high reputation like one afforded by using Easysale actually affect the success of an online auction sale? A field experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Economics (“The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment,” Vol. 9, #2, Jun 2006) confirms my grandfather’s suspicions, almost. A randomized and controlled field experiment compared sales of identical item batches between new seller identities compared with an established seller with high feedback points.

Predictably, the high-feedback user performed better. The study found a difference of 8.1% of the selling price in buyer’s willingness-to-pay.  Just another reason to trust your eBay listings to a professional!

Detailed Item Conditions to be Mandatory by July 27

One change announced in Ebay’s 2010 Summer Seller Update was increased specificity with regards to item condition. This will be useful for buyers trying to determine whether “new” means “newish” or ”refurbished” or “still in the package” et cetera. As of May 10, this new system should be in full effect.

The descriptors will vary from category to category, but the Announcement on eBay’s Seller Information page states that up to six item conditions will be available. This is another response from eBay that was developed in close cooperation with buyer and seller feedback.

This is not just to improve buyer satisfaction, but also to drive more traffic to eBay from other sites that help consumers comparison shop online. The new conditions were developed with the idea of keeping things simple for buyers while still adding detail to item listings. It is interesting to note that not all categories will be affected. This is a good thing. Not everyone is a jeweler or collectible expert; short of waiting until PBS’s Antique’s Roadshow comes to town, your best guess will do for antiques where the “condition varies so dramatically.” Also exempt are event tickets, real estate, or gift certificates among others.

Those who list their own items for sale on eBay should be advised that this is not simply a usability upgrade. Using the new informative terms will be mandatory by July 27 but users are encouraged to begin compliance immediately. Check out the item condition lookup table to see if these details apply to your items for sale.

In some cases, items will be “automatically mapped” based on the previous descriptors, but users are encouraged to double check to ensure that their listings are accurate. Well-intentioned sellers will likely not be given the benefit of the doubt for too long if they fail to accurately use this new system.

This is just another reason why you should trust the qualified staff at Easysale to list your items for you. In addition to being up to date on all of eBay’s published changes, they’re also knowledgeable about “trade secrets” that lead to higher sales and more money for you! From pricing to item descriptions, the dedicated professionals at Easysale will do their very best to maximize the selling power of your items.  For those who want to do it on their own, eBay recommends the following “best practices”:

Best Practices

• Start using the new item condition values as soon as they are available.
• Ensure that your item description aligns with the item condition you specify—you cannot have contradictions between the two.
• Continue to fully describe the condition of your item in the body of your listing and make sure this description is consistent withthe new item condition value you choose.
• Continue to identify in your listing any defects or other information a buyer should know in order to make an informed decision.
• Provide plenty of photos that complement the item condition and description.

E-Waste As A Moral Tragedy

Imagine this life: The sunlight, reddened as it sneaks past a latent layer of atmospheric pollution, is partially blocked by the billowing clouds of black smoke smoldering from the night before. Your shallow lungs ache from your daily vigil in front of fiery altars of consumerist waste. The sight of burning circuit boards is as commonplace as flora once were. You’re surrounded by women, elderly, and children workers whose faces are blackened from the ubiquitous ash; tears in their eyes are merely an occupational hazard from the toxic air. Get ready for a fourteen-hour day of crudely extracting precious metals from discarded, defunct electronics.

It may seem like a scene from a post-apocalyptic blockbuster, but this is daily life for the 100,000 employees of this recycling village in Guiyu, China. Most of the waste is from circuit boards, the toxicity of which is proportionate to their affordability in the United States.

If you recycle your electronics, you may take comfort to know that your electronics were safely recycled in much more modern facilities. Surely our waste isn’t in that pile in Southeast China, right? Unfortunately, much of that waste is from American homes. In addition, many of it was taken to facilities by well-intentioned consumers who believed they were doing the right thing by paying to have it recycled. Capitalism (more specifically, globalization) dictates that the cheapest and most profitable processes outcompete more expensive ones. As a result, it’s often cheaper for domestic recyclers to ship waste to China for “recycling.”

To say nothing of the environmental impact from the fuel of shipping tons of trash across the globe, recycling has a different meaning in developing nations. It’s a very toxic process to manually remove certain metals, and most ends up burned in makeshift campfires by workers for pennies a day. A lack of opportunity and education means that many of these workers don’t even know about the local prevalence of cancer or infant mortality. When people die of lead or mercury poisoning, the toxicity of their work environment is often not even considered.

It’s a troubling state of affairs, but ignorance is not bliss; in fact, the greatest obstacle to a sustainable future may be the denial afforded by trendy “Green” products or propaganda from the recycling industry that trades small change and satisfaction for guilt and certain trash. It’s an uphill battle to change public perception enough to demand that all recycling plants stop this exploitative practice in the name of cutting costs. Until then, responsible recycling may take more work on the consumer side.

People need to do their research to find out whether their local recycler exports waste. Better yet, people should buy products free from mercury and lead. A lot of European companies make lead-free electronics and have to deal with much stricter requirements on the manufacturing side of things. Until then, the best option for your used electronics may be ensuring that it ends up used in someone else’s home. If it has value, it can be sold on eBay, craigslist, or through local newspapers.

If the value is more than $50, it may be worth your time to check out an Easysale store, with 5 convenient locations in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. You’d be doing more to avoid the destruction of our planet, and you may make some fast cash without much effort. Just think, at a recycling plant, you have to pay them to take your e-waste. How awesome that you can save time, earn money, and do the right thing all at once!

eBay Localizes Online Classifieds for U.S. Market

In March of 2005, eBay launched Kijiji. It was a primarily international effort to host local online classified advertisements. Over the course of the next few years, a series of mergers expanded the localized online communities to cover most of the world. This name evidently has a lot of brand recognition outside of the United States, where Craigslist tends to be the internet resource for local internet transactions.

eBay owns a minority stake in craigslist and has been involved in litigation with them over whether this venture is fair play. eBay sued first, arguing that their economic advantage was “unfairly diluted.” Craigslist countersued, arguing that eBay has unfairly competed and misappriorated proprietary information for Kijiji.

Perhaps in an effort to move past this, or maybe just appropriate branding, eBay is launching eBay classifieds in select cities in the United States. Some of their pitch seems to be directly related to how the service is superior to Craigslist, whose link-heavy, minimalist design has remained largely unchanged since the days of dial-up internet.

“All those links you see on some sites? You won’t encounter that clutter here.” Other advantages include being able to view seller history, hit tracking, “rapid response times” for customer support, and faster posting of ads.

Another notable difference is the moderation. What’s promised is a family-friendly experience. Craigslist, on the other hand, is consensus-moderated and has easily accessible adult sections for the raunchiest of merchandise. In many cases, functional prostitution occurs in their personal section. Personals were scrapped from the design of Kijiji, which again, will now be launched in the United States as eBay Classifieds.

One reason for Craigslist’s success has been their pricing. For the most part, Craigslist is free. There are only a few services in select cities that generate revenue for the San Francisco Bay Area corporation, specifically paid job ads in San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland, and Washington D.C. Also, brokers sponsoring apartment listings in New York City are required to pay $10. eBay Classifieds promises to be 100% free, and offers many of the same services that craigslist has–including housing for sale and rent, carpool listings, information for artists and musicians, lost & found listings, and more. In fact, only the rants & raves section (an explicit gallery of internet crackpottery) and the adult sections (including personals) are absent from the site, found at ebayclassifieds.com. Other advantages include the expanded pets section (including livestock and animal services) and legal advice.

According to Alexa.com at press time, Craigslist.org is the 6th most visited sites in the United States, immediately followed by Amazon and eBay. It’s no wonder that eBay is encroaching on the classifieds territory, as there’s plenty of money to go around. I spent the day browsing for housing on the classified site; yesterday, there were around 15-16 housing ads for the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Although that number is certainly dwarfed by the number available on Craigslist, eBay’s brightly-lit aesthetic lends itself well to promotion. Additionally, the clearly-defined fields for things like square footage and whether pets allowed will likely make searching for things more effective if the idea takes off.

Saul Hansell of the Bits (Business, Innovation, Technology, Society) section of the New York Times Online points out that eBay has an ”uphill battle”but has the advantage of a higher budget and more dedicated staff. Hansell points out the cleanliness of the interface as a potential advantage.

Stay tuned.

Vintage Toys Coming Back!

In the 1996 family comedy Jingle All the Way, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad duke it out to obtain the last Turbo-Man toy in order to make their respective son’s Christmas dreams come true. Arnold has a new job now (it was his last comedy), and I haven’t seen Sinbad in anything since, and the movie has a 16% at Rotten Tomatoes. But if there were to be a sequel rooted in truth, the Turbo-Man toy would end up in a box in the attic with the othermust-haves of yesteryear.

In spite of all that anticipation, toy crazes are remarkably short-lived. I recall fist-fights at the mall over Tickle-me-Elmo, shrieking Furbies, and kids mourning the death of their egg-shaped virtual pet keychains. But it wasn’t long before these toys were forgotten. Retailers make or break their yearly sales based on avoiding Turbo-Man-like shortages and an article in the North Jersey Register suggests that it’s now, not even at the mid-year point, when retailers really develop their strategy for craze-creation.

One such strategy is bringing back old toys. The article reminds us of ”Mighty Beanz” from 2003, which admittedly I must have missed. Harold Chizick of Spin Master explains his plan to reach “a whole new group of kids”: “These things have a natural life cycle,” adding that reintroducing old toys can revitalize demand after about six or seven years after the buying frenzy cools down.

The Mighty Beanz have “triggered a bidding war on eBay,” which makes me scratch my head and wonder what other toys will make a comeback. In some cases, the resale value of old toys can greatly exceed their original value; in Furby’s case, it brings up aging anxiety over the use of the term “vintage” to describe something ubiquitous in 1998.

Your empty nest may be a maturing investment. You may even be able to use disregarded previous presents to finance this year’s holidays. If you think that you may have the next-previous-big-thing, head on over to any one of easysale’s five locations and turn that trash into cash!

Remember that the item must be appraised for at least fifty dollars.  But if you don’t know how much an item is worth, that’s what our trained staff is for. For more information on what sells, please view our guidelines.