Costs

An important thing to always keep in mind is your cost of doing business. When you are selling on eBay you will have eBay insertion fees, eBay final value fees, PayPal fees, inventory costs, auction management costs (more on that laterd), office supplies, internet connection, postage, TAXES and much more. The MOST important cost that you have however is your time.

I can not really list all of the fees for eBay or PayPal because they change semi regularly (always in an upward way). Many of the other costs vary as well, but in order to tell if you are really making money and to deduct it on your taxes you will need to keep track of your costs and expenses.

It is a common mistake for people to simply take the winning auction amount, minus the cost of the item and label that their "profit". In truth though, there are a lot of other expenses that go into it.

In addition to the winning auction amount or the sales price, there is a shipping & HANDLING. This can be whatever price you want to charge amd does not have to be just the price of a stamp. There are eBay rules on this though and that is simply that you can not be doing a "final value fee avoidance" thing where you sell a printer for one penny and $40 s&h. This is commonly done by people who want to avoid paying eBay a percentage of the money.

If you do decide to have a handling charge, keep in mind that there will be customers who will complain that it is more than the cost of the stamp. This is rare, but they will sometimes leave you negative feedback. Now though, eBay has a rating system that includes a rating for shipping, so many buyer frusturations are taken there instead of just negative feedback.