A Seller's Critique

You probably knew that you could use Paypal to ship packages and items that people used Paypal to pay you for. But did you know that you can actually use it for all of your USPS and UPS shipping needs, regardless of where the order came from? For free? It's a little hidden and hard to find unless you know where to look, so let's find out how to access it, and see what it can do, shall we? SITE Main account dashboard. If you’re familiar with the Paypal site, then you should be pretty familiar with how to ship an order that you received via Paypal: Next to the transaction, there is a pulldown menu of available options. Select “ship” and you will be taken to the shipping screen to select your shipping service and to fill out all of the pertinent details. Alternatively, you can also click into the transaction itself, which will present you with a mini-plethora of options about ¾ of the way down, of which “Ship” is one of them (along with “Mark as Shipped”, “Refund”, et...

In many online lists of favorite marketplaces, eCrater always seems to end up in the middle of the pack, if they even make the list at all. It’s a very under-the-radar kind of place that many seem to either hate or like, with no middle ground. Its claim to fame are its fees, which range anywhere from 0% to 12.9%, though a mere 2.9% is all that’s required to get your items into Google Shopping. Well, we got a long one ahead, so buckle yourselves in and let’s get started, shall we? SITE SETUP & NAVIGATION This is the main page?! Oh Jesus... The design of the site, honestly, is pretty lackluster in appearance and super-straightforward. I’ve been selling there off and on since around 2008 and I don’t recall any site overhauls, either major or minor, during that time. This can be a turnoff for some, as the antiquated seller dashboard no doubt will be, which offer very little in the way of modern amenities (an example: eCrater just starting offering support for very ba...

I first started selling on Mercari back in April, 2018. Actually, let me rephrase that...I first started TRYING to sell on Mercari back in April. After putting up five or six test items, all priced well below current prices (they had been sitting in my inventory a while and I just wanted to get rid of them), and getting nothing but “likes” (which grew to feel like taunts), I grew disheartened. The final nail in the coffin was when Mercari automatically deactivated all of my items due to "inactivity". Angered, I vowed never to return. Let the above anecdote—which did happen—serve as a lesson to all of you. We live in a society where it's all about immediate gratification; where we succumb to the sameness of routines even as we try swearing them off. So many times I've seen people leave eBay, throw up their inventory on other sites, and then get angered when said site doesn't provide the exact same results with the exact same amount of effort (which in many ca...