Ebay Adventures continued...

...I wanted to see if you could make money selling the stories yourself. The answer is "maybe" but I think you'd have to workin far greater volumes than I did. I had to buy recordable cds, jewel cases and the stationary for the cd sleeve and envelopes. Even when using odds and ends of paper and recycled envelopes the overheads were quite high. The cheapest I could manufacture the actual disc case and sleeve was around 25p for the disc (got them from the now defunct Jungle.com) and 20p each for the jewel cases. Even if the paper and ink (ink becomes very important to you when you start home printing in earnest - see later) and envelope was free. Ebay fees are also quite high for low value items as a proportion of the sales price. Postage was about 70p. All in all, if I could sell the discs for over a pound, with postage and packing of £1.50, I'd be making something. In all honesty, i reckon the average sales price of the discs was about 50 or 60p.

I was so keen to sell them that I put to many on ebay at the same time - if someone was bidding on one disc, you could always find another one to bid on so there was very rarely a bidding war. I tried to get scientific, listing in different places in different ways and using buy it now occasionally but there appeared to be no pattern. In the end I conceded that in its current format, the kitten stories would have to be a loss leader.

Of course the customers didn't know this - they were forking out a couple fo quid for what was quite a basic product. I'm still amazed that so many of them bought the discs, and that so many liked them. The system I'd come up with was working and I was looking forward to showing off at interview...