LancsGirl wrote: ↑7 Jul 2022, 12:47amStill, people love to moan, don't they?
It depends what your hourly rate is, how many hours you have free in the week, how many sales you do, & how much you depend on them.
Strictly speaking, a vintage HiFi wouldn't just cost you £10. It would cost you, say, £10 + an hour to clean it up, and another hour to process and package properly (including finding a box and buying or recycle packing), plus addition to time to answer questions, drop it off as a PO or courier ... or waste half a day waiting for a MyHermes courier/buyer who never comes. Then if you're unlucky, and have a bad buyer, another 2 hours dealing with correspondence, customer service, return postage and waiting in again for a MyHermes courier who never comes.
So your £90 actually costs you a whole day.
Then repeat that a few times a month, and you're actually losing money/days on items.
At the very, very least, I'd say it cost you £10 + 2 or 3 hours of your time, hence the question, "what's your hourly rate?". If it's £15ph, it was actually, say, £45 + £10 = £55, and you really made half. Now sell half a dozen items a day (equals 12 hour + days).
If you're on the dole, well lucky you, it's a profit. Your time that was worth nothing has now converted into money ... but, be aware, the tax man/dole office is now coming for you (all transactions now have to go through your bank, there are limits to how much you can trade before becoming a business). Some people will work for £90 a day but to keep that up, you also end up turning your flat into a stock room, so your home becomes your work too.
I guess I am responding from the POV of small business rather than one off sales.
Read eBay's own forums to get an idea how bad things go. How badly people's business are effected by random, unannounced charges or algorithm changes etc. Incomes cut in half. Funds frozen in accounts for no or bogus reasons. Shops closed without explanation, and so on. The worst thing is, for me, recent changes have killed off a lot of the small independent traders who really made it all worthwhile, the "finders" they call them in the US. People who found all the interesting vintage stuff at obscure car boot sales.
I've never used a sniping application, how do they work? Can you tune them down to 1/10ths of a second to pile in at the end? It is, however, a good idea to set a figure you are will to pay and stick to it. To avoid that old "red eye" bidding madness at the last moment.