My Biggest eBay Postage Fail So Far

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I would call 2013-2016 my glory years of eBaying. It was during those times that I didn’t let a day go by without sourcing, listing and shipping products out. Every month I was trying to better the last in terms of the amount of listings I had live, the amount of sales I was making and how much profit was coming in. When you’re going through so many products, mistakes happen along the way.

We had an eBay room at one point which was essentially a dumping ground for all of the things we were going to list eventually (the good stuff was stored nicely). The orderly side and disorganised ones eventually met, and it meant that quite a few things went missing once they’d sold. Doing everything in a rush also meant I might do something like send out a computer monitor with the wrong stand. By far, the biggest mistake came when I was tasked with selling our agency’s excess, as we were downsizing to a smaller space.

I had to sell:

Printers
Computer monitors
Conference phones
A whole heap of stationery
The team’s favourite thing: a Nintendo Wii U

We had to get rid of the things quickly, because we were given about 4 weeks’ notice to move from our Farrington office to the Moorgate WeWork. I was basically given the chance to drop all of my actual work to sell it all, so I had to show that I was really about that eBay life.

I was getting things gone. Every day we would have a few more sales coming through, and I’d get people constantly passing by to pick goods up. For some reason most of the sales were collected in-person. (My favourite memory was when someone came to collect the A3 printer and I had to let them the bad news about the massive flight of stairs they’d have to navigate to take it home with them.)

I bundled a few stacks of high-quality printing paper for £8 and sent them to someone called Lee in Catford. Later the next day, I sold the Wii U with Mario Kart 8 for £180, and sent that out. A few days later, I got a message from Lee saying that he’d received a Wii U.

Stress.

eBay was a bit different back then, and didn’t allow you to print off Hermes labels directly through their site. I must have gone to Hermes and input Lee’s details twice.

Thankfully, Lee let me know that he was happy to send it back to me (if I PayPal him the funds to do so). He did it the same day, and I sent it to the real customer within the same week.

The moral of the story is to remember to be on your job when you’re selling things online. I mean in every sense. That means being polite. Sending things on time. Posting things to the right people. Had I taken my time posting the initial item, the person may not have been kind enough to let me know the situation. If I hadn’t sent the Wii the day it sold, I might not have had enough time to get the other person to send it to me, and then back to the actual customer before they realised.