Got the most egregious lowball offer I've ever received since I started eBay and I just couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity.

Someone who has lowballed me on offers in the past using the offer system sent me this message offering $100 shipped for almost 50 brand new and sealed DVDs (list contained multiple repeats) that I have listed price at a total of around $320 after a 15% discount.

The guy specifically mentioned the list was items priced at $3-4 a piece but tried sneaking in several items I had priced at $15-30 each thinking I wouldn't check or bother doing the math.

The lowball was already ridiculous, but wanting free shipping on a nearly 50 item order is just such a slap in the face that it feels like ragebait. Immediately got put into the block list.

Anyone else have stories of lowballs this bad?

What’s this happening

Hi everyone! I’m newish to flipping and kind of got into it accidentally - I saw a lot of cool and funky stuff on estate sales and figured I could buy what I liked in a lot and sell off the rest. I didn’t really mean for it to be a business model, more of something to help offset the cost of buying the pieces I wanted to keep. Well, now I’m eyeball deep in really cool stuff, but I don’t need to keep all of it. We had a neighborhood wide yard sale a little over a month ago, so I don’t want to host another one, but selling everything en masse on Facebook marketplace seems eye-twitchingly painful. So I thought about setting up a temporary website/store front on something like Shopify or Square, and posting the sale on Facebook marketplace (featuring pictures and prices of the things I’d like to sell, not just a flier or something).

I also don’t mind posting in Facebook groups about it, as I intend for the sale to be local and will have disclaimers and a box they have to check verifying that they know purchasing the item is an agreement to come pick it up at a specific date and time (will likely use something like signup genius to organize this).

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but given the amount of items I’d like to clear out, it seems like it’d potentially be easier than listing individually, or in lots (I’ve noticed people want *steep* discounts on lots or bundles on fb marketplace). I figure a storefront automates a lot of the back & forth questions, and encourages people to read the item description rather than ignoring it and asking every question I’ve already answered.

Any chance it could work? Or is it more likely a time sink that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Plates. I live in an old town with old people who still collect pewter. I know now way too much about plates. The various patterns, manufacturers, blah, blah, blah, etc. I don't care. Most of the pewter around here is cheap shit. Do you know why I know its cheap shit? Because they spend all their time complaining about it in the estate sale lines.

Costing me as much as $9.92 to send a 1lb box 4x8x6 to some areas now and that is with eBay's discount. Some places are only $6.67 and that's a nearly 50% disparity.

I don't understand with how much prices differ in more expensive parts of the US, so why can't eBay adjust prices and still offer free shipping so a buyer in CA might see a price that's $3.25 higher to offset the difference in cost?

Oddly I looked into it and shopify has apps that adjust prices based on location for this exact reason. I think eBay should as well.

Especially when a lot of the stuff I sell...nearly all is sold with free shipping so putting in calculated shipping would pretty much kill sales.

1lb items that sell for $20 shipped, I'm starting to just pass them up now because the shipping and fees leave me only $6.13 to higher priced shipping areas whereas cheaper areas leave me $9.38 and I can't really have any say in where I sell it to.

I always grab cheap silver at yardsales, flea markets etc, just like anyone else. I don’t keep tabs on the spot price as I never sell it, it just goes into the soup for safe keeping.

I was just at a flea market, and one dude had at least 20 crossed off prices written on the same little coin holder, clearly just being repriced as the silver price ebbed and flowed.

Silver guys- what’s the method? Just price high and hope to never have to go in and change all your labels? I’ve been to booths with hundreds if not thousands of individually priced coins. How are you not getting flooded with people the morning after a huge spike, trying to buy your stuff before you could get in to re price it?

On eBay which would you rather have? 10 watchers or 10 people with item in their cart? Neither is a sale but which one do you think will actually convert and why?

What have you learned lately? Could be through a success or a failure. Could be about a specific item, a niche, flipping in general, or even life as learned through flipping.

Do please keep in mind the difference between shooting the shit and plain bullshit and try to refrain from spreading poor advice.

Try to stop in over the course of the week and sort by New so people are encouraged to post here instead of making their own threads for every item.