Adding It Up – March
It’s time for a monthly update of my Additional Income Challenge where I record any extra cash that crosses my path during the year. I’ve decided to post the new blog for the challenge at the end of each month, giving me the full month to earn the extra cash and work out the totals.
During March I’ve earned £48.29. About 60% of this is from eBay, the rest was from selling a couple of second-hand books on Amazon Marketplace. I went through my bookshelves and CD collection dragging out anything that might have a re-sale value online and that I wasn’t too attached to and listed it on Amazon.
I had a narrow escape with postage fees for one of the eBay items I sold this month. I had a load of old Commando Comics, WW2 comic books that were popular in the 70s and 80s, (the early ones from the 1960′s go for a decent price on eBay!) and have been selling them in bundles of 6. They haven’t been fetching big prices, but since they were given to me a few years back there’s a small profit to be made on each one. One of the lots sold to a buyer in Australia, and I had set the International Postage to £4.50 without considering that someone from the other end of the world might buy them! The only way to post them and still make a profit from the sale price and postage fees combined was to send them surface mail, meaning they’ll take up to 56 days to arrive! After posting them, I emailed the buyer to let him know the rough arrival time and see if it was OK. He emailed straight back and said he was fine with it. In fact he even left me positive feedback despite not even seeing the goods. I suppose good customer relations help after-all! This taught me the importance of correctly listing your International Postage fees…
This month I am patting myself on the back for making money from almost nothing on eBay. Following a tip I found on a blog I read recently, I decided to look at Costco for eBay inventory, given that they regularly discount items. When the monthly offers brochure came through the door I was keen to check out what they had to offer. I noticed that they were discounting 24 packs of Sharpie marker pens, and when I checked eBay for the same product they were selling at double the price. So, without even buying the pens from Costco, I made a listing for eBay and waited. Three days later two packs of the pens sold, netting me over £5 after all fees and costs. The next day I bought the pens from Costco and mailed them to the eBay customers. Not much of a profit margin, I agree, but I effectively earned myself £5+ in my lunch hour as I was able to buy and then ship them while at work. Now I can use that principle over and over again whenever I identify a product at Costco. Shopping will never be the same again!
In other news, I noticed that Amazon’s Kindle publishing have changed their policies regarding fees for overseas authors. Authors in the UK used to have to wait until their US sales had accrued to at least $100 before sending a cheque/check out, with no way of selecting electronic payment. But now they’ve changed it to be in line with UK sales, so the new threshold is $10 – and will be paid by electronic transfer. This means that at some point in the near future I should get the tiny amount of dollars I’ve built up in the US from Unfamiliar Country. Better than a punch in the word-hole!
