Probably Would Have Been Less Trouble To Keep My Botcon Exclusives
Normally, Chrissy and I go to Botcon together and get a Primus package for each of us. The Primus package entitles you to an exclusive set of figures, which usually end up being very expensive on the secondary market. We buy two sets of all the exclusive figures. Chrissy will sell her stuff on eBay, and this will pay for our trip in most cases (maybe not a trip to Disney World, but it would still help offset our costs). This time, however, I had an awful lot of trouble.
Chrissy put the exclusive toys on eBay for a five-day auction. Many other people put their own sets on eBay, and the ones that sell first get the most money. Five days was too much time for people to wait and compare our auction with others. It would have been better to put the items on a three-day auction because the ones that ended first all got higher bids. We could have easily made a few hundred dollars more if we had ended the auction sooner. The problems didn’t end there, so the blame isn’t completely on Chrissy.
The winning bidder on our box set was from China. The auction stated that it was for US bids only, but somehow this person ended up winning anyway. As opposed to canceling and re-listing the item, we decided to go ahead and ship it to China. However, shipping to China costs a lot of money, more than twice what we had stated for domestic shipping. We had to inform the auction winner that shipping would now be $65 instead of $30. He was not happy, but decided to pay the extra money to ship the item internationally.
The rest of the auctions ended without incident, although not totaling as much as I would have liked. One guy even won three of our items, so we agreed to reduce the shipping on multiple wins. I took everything to the post office and got in line. I grabbed a bunch of the boxes they put out for free and wrapped everything up in bubble wrap off the shelf. I began filling out address slips and insurance forms. The post office normally supplies Priority Mail packages for free, but now they have a new service for Flat Rate Shipping which cost a little more.
I didn’t realize that the boxes that I packed the items in were Flat Rate Shipping boxes, and therefore I got reamed on shipping. The boxes that I thought should have shipped for $7 or $8 ended up costing $18 each, including the insurance and confirmation. Much more than what I had charged: $10 to one guy and $15 to the other guy with the multiple auctions. So that was $36 on shipping for two packages that should have cost around $15. And the post office had closed while I was in line, so it was too late to switch back to Priority Mail boxes.
When I got home from my two-hour stay at the post office (I had international forms, shipping confirmations and insurance forms to fill out), Chrissy informed me that one of the packages had not been paid for yet. Why am I shipping something to a guy for free? So I had to call the main hub to retrieve the package. A few hours later, the Gary hub called back to let me know that it was being sent back to my local branch on the next truck. I couldn’t just take the package back the next day, I had to get a refund on the shipping first. On the third day, the winner, and I use that term loosely, paid for the auction.
I thought I would be able to pay less for shipping this time, so I took the items out of the Flat Rate box before going back into the post office. They’re supposed to have Priority Mail boxes in the lobby, but they only had the tiny ones out and they insisted that I use the Flat Rate box again. I told them that I didn’t want to pay $18 again, and that I just wanted the regular Priority Mail because these items were less than a pound and would probably ship for much less. The total cost with insurance and confirmation was $19! So I got reamed on shipping anyway and still ended up paying way more than I charged.
And now the lady at the post office hates me.
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