Methodology Exercise – Selling Collectible Magazines on eBay

A mylar bag, backing board, 5 sheets of chip board, and a 9″ x 12″ envelope costs roughly 60 cents, to protect a magazine for mailing. The whole package weighs 12 ounces. Using First Class Mail, it’ll cost $4.11 to mail. Since this is a magazine, it qualifies for Media Mail rates, which will cost $2.63. Since the buyer pays for postage, I just saved him $1.48.

If I sell a magazine for $10, and eBay takes 10% of that, plus PayPal’s 3%, that’s $1.30, which means I keep $8.70. Subtract the cost of the mailing material, and that’s $8.10.

Once I get going with bulk orders, it’ll take me approx. 10 minutes to process the order, then another 15 minutes to drive to the post office to drop it off (I will most likely drop off multiple orders to maximize the trip). Add to that the initial time of photographing and cleaning up the magazine’s picture(s), and posting on eBay, which totals about 10 minutes.

So total time, if I don’t bulk process, is 35 minutes to earn $8.10, which is $16.20/hour. If I bulk process, I can get this up to $20/hour, and if I can sell higher priced magazines, I can bump it to $25/hour, which equates to $50k/year. If I can hire someone $25k/year to do this for me, I take home $25k/year.

All this methodology does little for me right now. But if I can apply this process to a larger company, knowing that I can save them a penny here, a dime there, in mass amounts the savings is substantial.

I shall now copy this post and add it to my blog to help attract business:)

P.S. My postage calculations are based on my sending this package to Berwick, Maine, zip code 03901. I live in Southern California, so I always estimate for the furthest distance within the continental U.S., excluding Alaska.