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Selling Stuff Online -- Is Ebay Really Worth It?

Recently, I tried selling a few printer ink cartridges online and I was really dissapointed. I tried both amazon.com and ebay (which charged me a listing fee) and neither one has worked. I'm not really sure how to feel about the whole experience, but I know that there are many pf bloggers out there who have much success with buying and selling stuff on ebay and/or other websites.

How do you do it?

Is it worth the time?

Where do you acquire the stuff to sell?

Personally, I think it is likely that this will be my first and last experience doing this. It took me about 15 minutes to setup the auction on ebay and I found that there were way too many options and it was confusing as a first-time user. Finally, I got the item listed only to realize that I was going to be charged a listing fee -- all for an item that might not ever even sell.

Since I have so many other things that I could be doing with my time, doing auctions that only make me 5 or 10 bucks a pop just doesn't seem to make sense. Even if I were doing 4 of those a week, it would still only be about 15-20 bucks per hour. And then, you still have to pay taxes on that money. All of you professional ebay and/or online sellers out there are paying taxes on all that money you make, right? Subtract from that the costs of the merchandise that you're selling and there goes the viability, right?

I'm dying to hear a counterpoint here, so if you have one, please leave me a comment.

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