It’s not quite over yet, but I’m wrapping up another round of selling things on eBay. I’m still waiting for payment on some items. I still need to get to the post office to take care of the items I can’t ship from home. Thankfully, though I ship international, very few of my auctions are heading overseas. By tomorrow night, it should be all over but the shouting. And by the shouting, I mean, whatever the people I am shipping all these items to have to say. Hopefully (if I’ve done my job right) I don’t get any complaints. But nothing’s perfect. I might have to take a couple items back or issue a refund or two, but I’ve sold a fair amount before and never run into major issues with this. There will be a couple that might go unpaid as well that I have to monitor, because when you have this many items going, that’s to be expected. It happens. Some individuals just require a bit more prodding than others when it comes to payment.

In this case, what I’m shipping are the remnants of my Magic cards, long sitting around unused, and some of my video game collection that I don’t use anymore. Some lucky person out there gets a Candelabra of Tawnos (left, in all its glory); some other lucky individual now has the first four Mega Man games for the original Nintendo. I only moved those items out to San Francisco because I knew they had some value. And sure enough, I did get good value out of what I sold. The question is whether or not it was worth it.

If you want to do something like eBay right, you have to put together a lot of info. I had over 250 individual lots going on this time. That’s hundreds of photos, hundreds of titles, hundreds of unique descriptions. I don’t care how much boiler-plate you use, if you want any level of success with something like eBay, you’ve gotta mix it up a little. And before I put a single thing on there, I did research to figure out price points on eBay based on past sales. While the auctions were going I fielded questions, I adjusted prices as time went on to try and foment action. I ordered the shipping supplies and did my best to prepare as much as possible ahead of time. But I didn’t know who would buy which lots. I couldn’t do much more than wait to see what people chose to get together and then package appropriately. On top of that, I didn’t want to get supplies for items I didn’t end up sending (and I still ended up with too many toploaders), so I waited as long as possible to get an idea of what would actually sell. I still have to pack up about 50 different lots, though in fairness, I’m waiting for many of those individuals to pay. I spent most of yesterday printing out shipping, packaging up lots, sending out invoices, figuring out shipping on some of the foreign lots. And I spent many, many hours in the weeks leading up to this getting all ready for it.

Part of the reason I was willing to put in so much work is because I knew there was value in what I was selling. But I could have spent all the time I spent taking photos of cards taking photos at all the parks right around here. I could have spent all the time I spent writing up verbiage writing stories that I cared more about than a narrative that would help a sale. I could have spent the money I spent on the shipping supplies on drinks and shows. I do think I got good value, though. The converse of all that is that I didn’t spend all those hours out spending money on things I didn’t necessarily care about, trying a drink somewhere that wasn’t that good or yet another mediocre burrito somewhere. Instead, I spent plenty of nights on my couch poking away, watching hockey, grading exactly how I should describe this card or that before I finished up and moved onto the next lot.

I could have just dumped all my items into a few lots and called it a day. I probably still would have gotten decent value for my video games. In fact, I actually tried to sell them all individually before and ended up reselling them in lots by system this time, which strangely performed much better than I could have imagined. Last time I tried to sell Conker’s Bad Fur Day on its own and nobody bit. This time, in a lot with six other games, it managed to bring in much more than any of them would have got on their own based on my research. In addition, I paid much more attention to dropping the price points and watch some auctions quickly shoot past my original price point after cutting prices. In the end, a large portion of my sales experience on eBay seems to basically be the adage that’s true of most other things in life: you get out what you put in. I put in a lot of work this go-round, knew I had items with value, and got that value (and really, more than I expected).

I don’t know if I’d do any of this again any time soon, though. Thankfully, I’m done for this go-round. Everything that I have at my place right, it’s stuff I want. I don’t see myself moving the record collection any time soon, or even small pieces of it. Ditto for the tapes and the board games and books and the video games that remain. And I honestly, I don’t have much more beyond those items that really makes sense to sell on eBay. Besides, this round of sales isn’t quite over. But there is a nice sense of finality. I have nothing against Magic. I think it’s a fine game. But I have no need to hold onto something I never have any intention of using anymore. I lugged so many things from place to place in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and took years to move them even though I had long ceased using them: role-playing games, Magic cards, comics. It’s not a judgment of those hobbies and their implements. It’s just not who I am anymore.

In the end, I was willing to put in the time. I don’t know if I’d recommend it for you (the generic you) unless you are willing to do the same. I made a fair amount of money due to the happy confluence of having some items that people still find valuable and putting a lot of time in to getting that value. It’s not some magic place where you just dump something really quick and suddenly gain money. I might have found some better things to do all that time. I might not have. As I joked last night, it’s the real-life equivalent of grinding in an RPG: my rating goes up, I get some extra money, and it takes way too fucking long. There’s a reason you do that, whether it’s because you need the experience to move on to whatever’s next or you are looking for some new toys. Maybe this is the same.