And Now For Something Completely Different...More Complaints
I Got The eBay, PSA and Shipping Blues
A new bit of eBay fuckery is afoot, and you need to watch for it because it could have some tax implications.
I sold two cards and found this in the transaction page for each sale:
Earnings after acquisition costs
Order earnings $38.71
Your cost -$39.99
Net order earnings -$1.28
“Your Cost”? WTF??? I never specified a cost basis of $39.99 on these or any items. I don’t even know where to do that. I then spent half an hour in a chat with an eBay agent to try and sort it out. Apparently, the numb-nuts at eBay decided to make everyone’s lives more complex, er, easier, by adding a cost basis tracker as of 9/15. It was supposed to be (yet another annoying) analytic option for sellers to use, but when eBay launched it, the feature started hallucinating cost basis and inserting them into random listings. Two of mine got hit. eBay’s agent could not seem to figure out where it came from either or why, but said that there are other reports of this problem. It was escalated to tech and has since been removed from my listings.
The fake data doesn’t affect your actual cash account but if you come across it in your sold listings it would be best to notify eBay that you never inserted it and have them remove the anomaly, just in case some IRS agent tries to use it against you in an audit as an admission of the cost basis on an item you sold.
The question I have to ask: why is eBay asking for more personal data from us? I would never, ever let a third party access my tax accounting, so why on earth would I give a tech company access to it? So they can monetize my personal data or hand it over to whatever regime controls the tax system? Oh, hell no. Of course, if eBay is going to screw up and report to the taxing authorities that I sell everything at a loss because their app is shitting out high fantasy cost basis numbers, I guess it doesn’t HURT me. But I didn’t sell the cards at a loss, and I won’t report it that way.
I dunno about you, but this constant vigilance of all the things that eBay tinkers with is getting tiresome. How about no more “innovation”, eBay? It ain’t helping your sellers. Every new feature adds a new layer of items to address and to potentially mess up. Submitting a vintage card listing is already too complex due to the number of asinine “Item Specifics” that have to be addressed. I mean, does anyone in the card collecting world need to be told that a 1951 Berk Ross DiMaggio PSA 5 that is listed in the sports trading card section is a “sports trading card” or that it is made of “card stock”? How about “no”? There is no need to add another thing for me to fill in when I create a listing. eBay is the best venue for DIY sellers, so just let a good product stay good and stop adding to my cognitive load with more damn crap.
Another big American salute (middle finger) to PSA this week. Collectors jacked up PSA prices and extended waiting times on most of its services and had the balls to actually label the decision to do so as “difficult”. Wait, doing your work slower and charging more is a difficult decision? Yeah, I’m just going to have to disagree with you there. Forget owning a home, doing less and getting paid more is the American Dream. I just wish I could get away with it.
I learned a very hard trio of lessons this week. About 30 years ago, I bought a serigraph called “Discovery” by the pop artist Peter Max. I was such an arrogant young twit, I fancied myself an art collector, and this was my first piece. It is gigantic, 6 feet across and three feet tall, framed. Cost me over $2500. When I opened my own office 28 years ago, I hung it over the couch in my reception area, where it has been ever since. Well, I am closing that office and something has to be done with the art.
--Lesson #1: don’t chase bad investments. Sales pitches notwithstanding, run of the mill artwork generally is a horrible investment. For every vastly appreciated Matisse print, there are countless works by other artists that sell for far less than they cost initially. My father was on the Los Angeles Arts Council, and he bought art all the time from emerging artists at the Council’s events. Well, all of those emerging artists resubmerged and when I inherited the mess, I had to give away the art because it was unsellable. Every piece of artwork I’ve bought also has declined in value. That is especially true of serigraphs, which are really just big posters. Anyhow, I decided to sell the Max piece. I listed it on eBay for local pick-up, for months. Nothing except a few lowball offers for a few hundred dollars. I finally decided to ship it. Nothing. I kept lowering the price and lowering the price until it sold for $1,000 delivered.
--Lesson #2: Ok, took a beating on the investment, but it happens. Maybe I net $600 or so? Wrong! The cost to ship something increases exponentially when it gets to a certain size. That stupid poster cost over $700 to ship. I should have taken the local offer instead, but I was too busy chasing my bad investment. If you are unfortunate enough to have serigraphs and you want to sell them, believe the research showing how little they are worth, pop ‘em out of the frames, and ship them rolled. Framed, they just cannot be shipped economically.
--Lesson #3: So, should I have canceled the sale when I discovered how much it cost to ship? It was tempting, but given the insane standards on eBay and the punitive measures if you cancel too many deals (as I wrote about before), I really had to close the deal. I need to save my eBay strikes for real errors, not just my biffing it on a shipping cost.
I ended up with under $200 against an initial investment of $2500. My wife would call me an idiot for the fiasco, except she bought a serigraph around the same time I did that has gone from about $900 to $250. Guess what we are not going to do with that one?