We did it once again. We broke through the 2.48€ barrier by selling mobile phones. Nokia 8800 Siroccos, to be precise. A fine phone, for sure, especially since it gives a 200€ - 300€ profit margin for us So, before fees and postage, our cash balance shows 2.700€. I estimte that we have around 300€ in fees and other costs so we have earned a net total of 2.400€. Not too bad. However, I am really interested in seeing how payment for the products sold develops.

I made some really interesting experiences regarding the sales of our other items so far: Half of Ebay’s population are notorious liars. I don’t know about you, but for me, an online purchase is just about the same thing as buying something in a shop and that goes as well for the part where you walk up to the cashier and pay for your purchases once you leave the shop. Obviously this way of thinking is not the way of thinking for most ebayers. There are like three fractions: 1) Instant payers, who use paypal to settle their bills (very accomodating for both sides), 2)  Fast regular payers, who use online banking and the like and get their payments through to you in 3 business days and finally 3) notorious late payers. Group 1) makes a total of 5%, group 2) is good for 25% and group 3) is the remaining 70% of ebayers.

The most funny thing  however is, how upset those late payers get, once you put a very strict payment management into place. I e.g. start to issue the first official warning after 7 days without having received payments. I issue an automated mail AND I open a “dispute case” in Ebays dispute system. It is especially the latter part that upsets most people, because from there on it gets very official. Once i would close that case as unresolved, I would get my money back for that transaction (fees & provision for ebay) and could sell this article off to someone else. The buyer however would get a warning, and two warnings get you booted off ebay (in theory). I think, this is only fair.

Most ebayers however don’t think so They think they probably got like some couple of weeks before their payments are due and they even claim from the beginning of the very first warning that 1) they have either never received my payment details or 2) have just paid the bill. My personal statistics however show me, that if a customer has not paid after 10 days, he will never pay. So, after 14 days, which is the minimum processing time this whole dispute system takes, I close the cases where the customer has not paid me until then, get the customer punished and move on to sell the stuff to someone else.

This time now, we have had some high quality items on sale. 5 nice phones for around 700€ to 800€ each. I sold one to Austria, one to Portugal and the remaining three to Germany. Austria has paid already by paypal and one german customer has already interacted by telling me that he just paid for them buy transferring the money via online banking. I am anxious to find out how the rest will process. One “0″-reputation point customer is amongst them, which i usually see as a real problem. It is usually some person new to the system and not really being aware of what she/he is doing. Particularly not, that they have just gotten in a legal binding contract to pay me 800€ for a new Nokia mobile phone. Well, as I learned by selling the airguns, I am approaching those “0″rep customers proactively by telling them straight away, that they are suspicious and that they have to follow my ruleset very closely to get this transaction done in everyones favour. I think, it is the best way to find out early what someone’s real intent is, because from the tone of his/her reply I should be able to find out.

So, this will be one major task next, week, to collect the money and make the profit in the books a real one by getting the money in the cashbox

Other than that, we will have to make ourselves some thoughts about the follow-up strategy and especially about how to boost this sites popularity. As I will also be on a holiday trip with my lovely girlfriend next week, it will become quite a quit week, but thats good as we really did put some work into this over the last weeks.

I just hope, that M. is alrght, as his blog is down for almost 4 days now and I haven’t seen any new posts. Cheers and have a good night everyone.