Vox Publica

As followers of my blog (and my friends in facebook) know, I have been using lista.com for a few weeks now, mostly as a buyer (they give you a bunch of free points when you sign up), and finally as a seller. Well, after some calculations I've decided that Listia.com is as bad a business for "sellers" as Mary Kay.

In the last week I've listed or had people listed a bunch of small, lightweight stuff: scrapbook embellishments, beads pendants and little bottles of perfume. I offered free shipping in all of them, and put minimum bids so that it wouldn't end up being a completely losing proposition. Still, I pretty much lost money on everything I "sold". And by losing money I mean that I will end up having to pay in shipping costs more than the number of credits I got for the item in question.

While listia.com sells credits for 10-cents each, the value of each credit is actually about 1-cent. If you post a $5 Amazon.com gift card code in listia, you will get about 500 credits for it. That means if you want to buy credits all you do is buy the online gift card from amazon, then post it on listia, send the code to the winner and pocket the credits.

Meanwhile, postage starts at 44 cents for letters and $1.22 for one-ounce packages.

This means that the minimum amount you need to make out of anything that you offer free shipping for is 44 credits for things that will fit into a regular envelope and 122 credits for things weighing less of an ounce that you will put into a small package. You probably need to make some more credits to make up for the cost of envelopes, bubble wrap and packing tape. Note that I'm not considering at all the value of the item or of your time - it's a given you are giving those for free.

But in my experience so far, it's hard to recoup the actual shipping costs. We put about a dozen things for auction in listia and those that ended went for amounts of 42 to 154 credits. All those things will cost me between $1.22 and $1.56 to mail (I'm reusing envelopes but I will have to buy more masking tape, so let's add that too). So basically, at the end of the day, I'm spending more on shipping than I'm getting on credits.

While I love "selling" in listia - it's nice to know that people want things you have and are willing to "pay" for them and I have a bunch of beads I want to get rid of, I'm done with free shipping. My next experiment will be to charge actual shipping costs (postage + mailing costs) and see if people actually bid on my stuff. If not, it's back to freecycle :-)

Now, that doesn't mean I'll give up selling on listia at all. While it doesn't pay to list things with free shipping, it's a great place to get rid of the Coke Rewards points you get with coke products. Each code goes for about 5-credits - so if you drink a lot of coke, you can get something from your dirty habit.