I'm back!!! lol. I actually am planning on starting to go out to more auctions these days, especially this summer Not even so much from a businesss standpoint so much as just to buy some stuff for myself and my home on the cheap though never pass up an opportunity to make a buck.

Good question. I would not ship an item and loose money on it to save my feedback. If I make a mistake on shipping and it eats into my profit I will ship it but not if I would actually be losing money. I will always try to make buyers happy to avoid bad feedback. I always list items as no returns but if I receive a complaint I always let them return the item or give a partial refund if their complaint is valid. In December I sold a platter for $15.00 and accidently had the free shipping box checked. It was going to cost me 12.00 to ship it plus bubble wrap etc...I canceled the sale, refunded the payment and sent them a very apologetic email saying that I had pulled it out to ship and found it had been damaged. I don't know if they can even leave feedback after the sale is canceled but in any case they didn't....and I kept the platter. $15.00 was a steal for it anyway. Maybe I'll sell it next December....

This practice is against ebay TOS and could get your account shutdown. If you make a mistake its your fault not the buyers you shoudl honor these sales. If you did this to me I would leave you bad feedback adn I'm not one to leave bad feedback generally unless I'm outright scammed and someone doesn't ship an item. I saw one seller had underpriced an item. I recognized it and bought out his last 3 listings. He wound up losing over $200 on the sale but still honored it. Now had he nicely asked me to cnacel I probably would have but none the less I got a great deal.

regardless of whether your going to use it or not call up every month and you can get a 30% increase as long as your account is in good standing

I've bought and sold cars and motorcycles in the past but I believe they redid their fee structure in the past year or two so much different. I think they have like an ebay classifieds which is very low cost and then the auctions cost a bit more. Havn't looked into ebay motors in quite some time though.

This is a question I think we all face at times. The shipping thing is kinda the guys own fault from the sounds of it for not knowing what size packages are considered freight but if ebay doesn't tell you that kinda sucks.

I think more common is the buyer who tries to extort free shipping or extra stuff. Now ebay has somewhat improved in allowing us sellers to have some recourse to report buyers and get feedback removed. If your just selling some stuff here and there I wouldn't bend too much for people, if you actually run a business where ebay is a main source of your livelihood a couple hundred bucks isn't the end of the world if it allows you to keep your feedback score.

Bad feedback affects you negatively in search rankings which hurts you in search and you won't sell as much. Also you could potentially lose your power seller and top rated seller status which hurts shipping discounts as well as fvf discounts so if you sell alot of volume and ebay is important to you losing a few hundred here or there isn't worth stressing over if you keep discounts and search ranking which means thousands of dollars.

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What is a typical NET for you on a 200K month?  I know it will vary, but humor me (us) and let us know what your net might have been in one of those months.

It really depends, some months it's fewer transactions but larger stuff, other months its tons of transactiosn with better margins but smaller dollar items people are buying. I would say if I do 200K to 250K I'll net anywhere from 15k to 18k though could be almost 20k on a good month.

My business has realy slowed down quite a bit as I've been forced to raise prices by about 20% to cover my reserves. I get a lot of stupid buyers who buy stuff and then say they accidentally ordered so I have to refund. Well did too many refunds lately and get Paypal calling me I'm at risk of having my account closed but at the very least they want another 10K and want another 5% on top of our current reserve.

I really don't mind, we probably making a bit less but we also doing about a 1/4 of the work we used to do. I'm up for a review shortly, hopefully these recent events don't make them keep the reserve on me. If the reserve gets lifted I'll probably lower prices a bit to be more competitive but raising prices though I was forced into it wasn't a bad idea, make better margins and do a bit less work. If I dropped prices to where I was priort o the reserve I'd be making almost the same money but doing 10x the work.

Posted a screenshot below, as you can see my business has slowed a bit my holds are normaly right up near 100k if not a bit over.