Buying and Selling on eBay: Tips, Tricks, Problems & Questions

Read this positive feedback a few times, trying to figure out if the comment was positive, neutral or negative. Decided it was positive, and matches what I'm shooting for overall, which is "costs more, worth it because you will get what you pay for and nothing short of that."



ATLnoob said:

Bought something on eBay from a seller in Canada. This came in the mail - must be some sort of record for most stamps on a single envelope, and makes me want to take up philately again as I'd have a jump-start on modern Canadian stamps. Amused.

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Whats the best parcel service from toronto to the states guys?

Arrgh. One of my items just sold to a buyer who's a college student with a campus box address. It's the paypal confirmed address, but ebay and paypal aren't letting me purchase and print the shipping label because the address isn't recognized as a valid street in that city, or something to that effect. The "purchase postage" button is grayed out. How do I force it to accept the fothermucking confirmed address so I can print the label?
It seems to want me to edit the shipping address, but of course gives me a warning that if I edit it, I may no longer be covered by seller protection. This is patently absurd. It's like I'm living in a Kafka novel.

Look up the address online, usually they have a page that says mailing address for students and you can add the street in

Depends on value but everytime I would do sig confirmation and insurance to be sure



capnwes said:

Easy fix.

Next time, don't worry about trying to remove it. Select "print another label" form the drop down menu associated with the item. When you print the label, it will add the new tracking number.

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Thanks!

ScottW said:

Arrgh. One of my items just sold to a buyer who's a college student with a campus box address. It's the paypal confirmed address, but ebay and paypal aren't letting me purchase and print the shipping label because the address isn't recognized as a valid street in that city, or something to that effect. The "purchase postage" button is grayed out. How do I force it to accept the fothermucking confirmed address so I can print the label?
It seems to want me to edit the shipping address, but of course gives me a warning that if I edit it, I may no longer be covered by seller protection. This is patently absurd. It's like I'm living in a Kafka novel.

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Its happened to me in the past. I inform the buyer to change his address to something correct that will allow me to print the postage. If not, the option is to either cancel transaction, or tell the buyer to use a totally different address that is STILL confirmed through paypal. This is what I've done, and it has been changed.

Not sure about adjusting and adding sig confirm / insurance...could save u, but I doubt it after tampering with an address. If buyer informs you to change it via eBay message, this may be leverage to use if a problem occurs. I wouldn't know, and would hate to have to find out personally.

@jebarne , great info and tutorial above. I usually restrain from that much editing within my process, but is certainly something to embed if needed.

stevent said:

Look up the address online, usually they have a page that says mailing address for students and you can add the street in

Depends on value but everytime I would do sig confirmation and insurance to be sure

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Did as you suggested and looked it up on the university's website. The buyer has the wrong dang city listed for her university, and is actually in Lexington, not Louisville. This tells me two things: 1. The future is bleak. 2. Being that it was the confirmed address, Paypal's address verification procedure is bunk.

I was able to reformat the address to get it accepted. No more seller protection, but it matters little. It's just a necktie that happens to contain her university's colors. Nothing of significant value, it was relisted at a cheap BIN (with those 200,000 free fixed price listings) to get it out of my house after two auction cycles with no bids.

jebarne said:

[Color balance stuff]

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I mean this in the nicest and most helpful way, but you're doing it wrong. The basic premise that you can use RGB peaks from images of clothing to get accurate color balance in post is just not correct. The RGB peaks not being perfectly aligned with each other does not in and of itself tell you anything about the white balance, in fact they should be significantly mis-aligned in just about all color photos of real objects. The only time they will be perfectly aligned is when your entire image is a field of spectrally dead-neutral gray, basically never. For a more obvious example, go outside and take a picture of some leaves on your lawn, then post process the image using your technique above such that the RGB peaks are precisely aligned, and see how little it resembles reality. I think the only reason the pics in your example aren't too obviously bad is that you appear to be using a mostly gray-ish shirt, but even then, most gray items of clothing aren't calibration-quality neutral. There are similar problems with setting a white point by clicking on something in the background of the image.

You a Nikon guy? I have a D5100 and my recollection is there are a few D3100, 3200, 5200 etc users in here so this should apply the same. The easiest and fastest way to get half-decent color balance is to use your camera's ability to store a custom white balance preset.
1. Go on ebay and buy a "digital gray card." This is an 18% density, spectrally neutral matte gray made specifically for camera calibration. It needs to be large enough to completely fill the image frame when you take a pic of it, so for that reason I went with an 8x10 size. I bought mine from seller "digitalimageflow" for about $10 shipped for two cards.
2. Set up your camera and lighting how you normally would when photographing your items. If you normally use a flash, use it for this too.
3. Hit the "menu" button, then under "shooting menu" scroll to "white balance" and press "OK." Scroll to "Preset manual" and then, on my camera at least, you have to press the right directional key, instead of OK (not the most intuitive). Select "measure" and press "OK." It will ask you "Overwrite existing preset data?" Highlight "yes" and click "OK" and then snap a pic with the gray card filling up the entire frame. The camera will tell you whether the data was successfully acquired or not.

Your white balance is now set. Using that preset in the camera will also give you more consistent results pic-to-pic than using auto white balance.
You may see little exposure differences between pics. Again, it's much faster to fix this with the camera than it is to use post processing software. If the pic looks too dim right after you shoot it, use that little +/- button on the camera to bump up the exposure 0.7 EV or so and snap another, then just delete the bad pic.

Getting white balance and exposure correct in the camera mostly eliminates the need for post processing, which is a colossal waste of time. The only thing I do in post is a little crop here and there, maybe a minor brightness tweak on the one gallery image to make sure it looks nice among the field of other stuff on the bay, and that's about it. Batch resize and they're ready for upload. Also in the interest of speed, there is no need to shoot in RAW for ebay. The files take too long to transfer, open, edit, etc and you have no need for a 16+ megapixel image on the bay anyway. I shoot "basic" (lowest) quality JPG in the "medium" size. The file is ~1/16th the size of a RAW image, but still plenty big enough even after a little cropping to be batch resized down to 1600 pixels on the longest edge.

There are other ways to batch color balance in your post processing software that I will only touch on briefly. Adobe Camera RAW can do it for sure, same basic process where you include a gray card in a photograph, then use the software eyedropper tool to select the gray point, then apply that to all images in the folder. There are also more sophisticated color balance cards than have a couple dozen spots with calibrated levels of gray as well as specific colors, and newer software can similarly use an eyedropper tool to select not only black, gray, white, but also C, M, Y, etc. For ebay though, the in-camera preset with a gray card is fast, sufficient, and doesn't require any particular effort with software.

I reserve RAW and post processing for stuff that's actually important, like pics of my daughter that I'll keep forever. For ebay listings, I just want "fast" and "good enough to sell it."



ScottW said:

I mean this in the nicest and most helpful way, but you're doing it wrong. The basic premise that you can use RGB peaks from images of clothing to get accurate color balance in post is just not correct. The RGB peaks not being perfectly aligned with each other does not in and of itself tell you anything about the white balance, in fact they should be significantly mis-aligned in just about all color photos of real objects. The only time they will be perfectly aligned is when your entire image is a field of spectrally dead-neutral gray, basically never. For a more obvious example, go outside and take a picture of some leaves on your lawn, then post process the image using your technique above such that the RGB peaks are precisely aligned, and see how little it resembles reality. I think the only reason the pics in your example aren't too obviously bad is that you appear to be using a mostly gray-ish shirt, but even then, most gray items of clothing aren't calibration-quality neutral. There are similar problems with setting a white point by clicking on something in the background of the image.

You a Nikon guy? I have a D5100 and my recollection is there are a few D3100, 3200, 5200 etc users in here so this should apply the same. The easiest and fastest way to get half-decent color balance is to use your camera's ability to store a custom white balance preset.
1. Go on ebay and buy a "digital gray card." This is an 18% density, spectrally neutral matte gray made specifically for camera calibration. It needs to be large enough to completely fill the image frame when you take a pic of it, so for that reason I went with an 8x10 size. I bought mine from seller "digitalimageflow" for about $10 shipped for two cards.
2. Set up your camera and lighting how you normally would when photographing your items. If you normally use a flash, use it for this too.
3. Hit the "menu" button, then under "shooting menu" scroll to "white balance" and press "OK." Scroll to "Preset manual" and then, on my camera at least, you have to press the right directional key, instead of OK (not the most intuitive). Select "measure" and press "OK." It will ask you "Overwrite existing preset data?" Highlight "yes" and click "OK" and then snap a pic with the gray card filling up the entire frame. The camera will tell you whether the data was successfully acquired or not.

Your white balance is now set. Using that preset in the camera will also give you more consistent results pic-to-pic than using auto white balance.
You may see little exposure differences between pics. Again, it's much faster to fix this with the camera than it is to use post processing software. If the pic looks too dim right after you shoot it, use that little +/- button on the camera to bump up the exposure 0.7 EV or so and snap another, then just delete the bad pic.

Getting white balance and exposure correct in the camera mostly eliminates the need for post processing, which is a colossal waste of time. The only thing I do in post is a little crop here and there, maybe a minor brightness tweak on the one gallery image to make sure it looks nice among the field of other stuff on the bay, and that's about it. Batch resize and they're ready for upload. Also in the interest of speed, there is no need to shoot in RAW for ebay. The files take too long to transfer, open, edit, etc and you have no need for a 16+ megapixel image on the bay anyway. I shoot "basic" (lowest) quality JPG in the "medium" size. The file is ~1/16th the size of a RAW image, but still plenty big enough even after a little cropping to be batch resized down to 1600 pixels on the longest edge.

There are other ways to batch color balance in your post processing software that I will only touch on briefly. Adobe Camera RAW can do it for sure, same basic process where you include a gray card in a photograph, then use the software eyedropper tool to select the gray point, then apply that to all images in the folder. There are also more sophisticated color balance cards than have a couple dozen spots with calibrated levels of gray as well as specific colors, and newer software can similarly use an eyedropper tool to select not only black, gray, white, but also C, M, Y, etc. For ebay though, the in-camera preset with a gray card is fast, sufficient, and doesn't require any particular effort with software.

I reserve RAW and post processing for stuff that's actually important, like pics of my daughter that I'll keep forever. For ebay listings, I just want "fast" and "good enough to sell it."

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I have a canon t2i that I'm borrowing from my wife. I set the custom white balance against an 18% grey card or mum sell neutral gray 8.

Despite that, I still end up with variable color on khaki, some dark blues, some dark reds.

I've downloaded fotos from some different sites to compare metadata and spent entire nights recreating settings and trying to match. I've shot raw, jpg and a different version of raw that the canon has. The jpgs always come out a bit harsh and any attempt to adjust end up with a blue tint.

Canon has an included SW that does white balance adjustment in batches, but I usually end up with with 1 or 2 that just look off color wise.

I KNOW this takes way to much time. That's partly why I posted because I'm trying to find out how others get consistent results.

However, the issue of dark areas in fotos seems consistent across many sellers. I could fix this with front lights, but not in my current space. So it's the shadow tool for now.

Believe me, I appreciate your suggestions and once I get thru the next 2 weeks, I will experiment more.

I shoot "basic" (lowest) quality JPG in the "medium" size. The file is ~1/16th the size of a RAW image, but still plenty big enough even after a little cropping to be batch resized down to 1600 pixels on the longest edge.
[/quote]Also, I don't worry about resizing as garagesale resizes the images on import.

since we're on the topic of photography...is a DSLR necessary? as of now I'm using my Neuxs 5's camera (not the best, but adequate for now I suppose).

additionally, how do you guys set your backdrops and such? im taking pictures of my items on the floor and the presentation is certainly sub-par - especially in comparison to others auctions on this site.

capnwes said:

I package, weight, print and stick one at a time. Only takes a minute or two each.

However, my labels all have the item number on them....don't yours?

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There is a setting on the screen for selecting shipping options and entering package weight. Once you select it, eBay will retain your settings.

thefastlife said:

at what reputation level (color of star, whatever) do you start to become "respected"

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Take good pictures and sell items that multiple people want. This thread overestimates the value of "reputation."