Selling Your Stuff on Amazon Part 13 - Advice for newbies in first two posts

Crowqueen

Yes, there is that.

I normally buy s/h DVDs as they are substantially cheaper than new, even through Amazon, but I just treated myself to season 1 of Star Trek: Voyager new. I've also been buying a lot more through eBay because I get Plus points.

JesaRose

soolin wrote: »

I can't gauge it anymore as I've given up my pro membership due to absolutely dire sales. I'm in the process of removing all the cheaper books and leaving myself just a few hundred higher priced ones to keep me involved.

The Amazon system though is proving very difficult. I thought i had about 1500 items listed, but I actually had more that had completely disappeared. I get a box from storage, search my inventory for each book, most do not come up by SKU number of title on the first attempt. Sometimes I can only find them by authour, then that stops working and i can only find them by SKU. Then the whole system locks up and i have to stop for the day.

THen for every 50 or so books i search for I find 10 with SKUs that I have definitely listed but have completely disappeared off the sytem. They are neither in my closed nor my open listings.

I have no idea what is happening.

They really are a law unto themselves - I can never work out whats going on with them.

Had a customer contact us today (order not dispatched yet) to tell us off for charging her postage as she had chosen the free delivery option, and to cancel the order as she wasn't paying it! Its so frustrating when people have no idea what they are doing and take it out on you - we sent back a polite reply explaining that marketplace sellers do not set their own postage and Free Super Saver delivery is only an Amazon itself option

Kite2010

I had a great seller on Amazon, I purchased a CD on the 21st November, and the only after emailing the seller on the 1st Dec asking if there was a problem as the item hadn't been marked as posted on Amazon, and I got a standard email the next morning saying that the seller had cancelled the order as the product was out of stock.

Okay fair enough, it's not the first time a product I've ordered has been "out of stock", but to wait nearly 2 weeks before cancelling the order without even a personal email to say "sorry"?

Mean I might be but that's a 1 star rating.

mirko

Oddly, after all of the negative posts in this thread... I've just taken a payment from amazon of £90+ today after selling a whole load of stuff.

Admittedly I'd only just listed a lot of it and they were items I knew would sell - just a shame I don't have boxes and boxes of the stuff lying around my house.

Sold a couple of old Buffy box sets for a fiver a pop, I remember spending £30+ for those at some point (maybe even more). DVDs are like VHS now aren't they? They don't hold any value at all. I'm never, ever going to buy a DVD again, they are an awful investment - especially with stuff like Sky+ and Lovefilm around. (Though I do buy 2nd hand boxsets and then sell them on after I've watched them - watched many seasons of 24 doing that).

Crowqueen

DVDs still hold value depending on the title. Blu-ray players can still play DVDs so it's not like VHS tapes, which need another sort of machine to play.

Star Trek and other sci-fi stuff still sells for over £10 secondhand and cost upwards of £25 new. Anime DVDs are still going for very good prices on Amazon. HMV and other main shops still feel able to price box-sets at £25+. DVDs are still released. DVDs aren't very good as an investment, but then commodity goods which are commonly available are never so. I buy mostly s/h but will occasionally treat myself to new on Amazon if the price is good.

Not everyone feels comfortable watching TV on a computer or has the technology to stream through a television. Our location means high-speed broadband is still a pipedream, so although I subscribe to one streaming site (which still has very little content available to the UK - I bought the first series of ER) I have to reload the video several times while watching it, whereas I can just bung a DVD in my computer or portable player or regular player and watch it with no problems. Lovefilm doesn't do the stuff I like either (their selection is pretty bad compared to Netflix, which isn't available in the UK), and a series of Star Trek The Original Series from iTunes is £60...definitely cheaper to buy the DVDs new!

Licensing is keeping the DVD market in the UK afloat. If sites like Netflix and Hulu could get licensed to show their content in the UK, then it would be different. But while the only way to get some series is to buy the DVD, then the format is not dead yet.

mirko

Oh, I'm sure the format isn't dead. I'm just saying I'm not a great fan of stockpiling a "collection" of DVDs in my house. I've realised I never dip into my collection and watch anything - instead I Sky+ everything and rely on my lovefilm subscription!

Just my personal take on DVDs - there's still a lot of life left in them.

Crowqueen

I keep stuff I buy, I like to rewatch. A couple of years ago I went and sold a lot of my comedy and film collection (apart from the stuff I really did enjoy, like Red Dwarf), then regretted it later when I ended up watching Men Behaving Badly and Drop the Dead Donkey over and over again and was too tight to buy anything else.

I think when more of the American TV drama that's popular with nerds like me gets licensed for digital distribution in the UK, things will change radically. So long as you have to live in America to get hold of most of it, then DVDs will still be widely available. At present they are the happy medium - not the most cutting edge but even if you only have Blu-Ray then you can still use them, unlike video cassettes.

Having said that, I know people with huge VHS collections they still largely use and are fiercely protective of. I have a number of tapes myself of films that I can never find on DVD (foreign language/arthouse stuff mainly).

mirko

Crowqueen wrote: »

I keep stuff I buy, I like to rewatch. A couple of years ago I went and sold a lot of my comedy and film collection (apart from the stuff I really did enjoy, like Red Dwarf), then regretted it later when I ended up watching Men Behaving Badly and Drop the Dead Donkey over and over again and was too tight to buy anything else.

Like I said, it's a personal opinion. I don't really like re-watching stuff, I'd rather watch something new. I do however have all of Red Dwarf on DVD and I doubt very much that'll ever end up on Amazon!

Crowqueen

Nothing of mine will end up on Amazon - I don't have a credit card to sign up with.

JesaRose

I will never sell any of my comedy DVDs either - the only stuff I sell are things I won't re-watch. "Allo, Allo" and other british comedies are on constant repeat in my house.

Sales have picked up this weekend and I sold one big one, new games are selling particularly well which is no surprise.