I’m in decluttering mode and have various small items to get rid of.
When I try to list them on Ebay.fr, there is no option to add costs to post to EU. Only France.
Can anybody advise, please?
Leboncoin is a lot more popular in France than ebay.
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Hi,
I have just started selling on eBay again.
It is possible to submit a postage price to the rest of the EU or elsewhere.
You need to check the box for international postage (further down under the option to post to France and then specify any exclusions.
Ps some things I have learned since using eBay again:
To avoid unnecessary fees list your item at the highest starting price you think you can achieve as an auction. That way you don’t need to pay a reserve price fee or buy it now listing fee.
For the first couple of things I listed I paid €7 in fees, which was quite a big chunk of what I made.
When you first start selling again you are limited to a maximum of 3 items and €200 total value per month.
After successfully selling a couple of things and getting good feedback I managed to get my limit increased to €1000 per month and 10 items by getting in touch with eBay.
Anyway hope that helps. I did think about leboncoin but had heard so many stories about scammers and nuisance phonecalls that I opted for eBay instead.
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Thanks for your replies.
Are you using Ebay.com, or Ebay.co.uk? Cos in Ebay.fr there ain’t no option to post internationally. 
I gave up selling on Ebay many years ago due to buyers who were scammers:
- claims that postage and packing costs were too high and threatening negative feedback unless refunded;
- claims (supported by Ebay) that items were received damaged although no proof (photos) of damaged was ever provided.
If I wanted to sell in France, I’d now use Leboncoin or Facebook Marketplace.
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Ah, OK, I’ve found a new place to click that leads to International delivery.
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I’m very glad you managed to find it 
Never had any of those although have used Ebay to flog stuff for many years. Last week I sold my ‘not quite camper van’ as a project.
I protect myself from the postage scam by adding words to the description along the lines of “delivery will be … and there are no alternatives to this”
Never had a jection on the grounds of condition. Overkill on photos in the descritio protects against this to some extent and if someone tried it on I would insist on supporting evidence before agreeing
The problem is that Ebay will almost always support the buyer - irrespective of the lack of evidence.
Ebay will refund the buyer, so that you will not have any choice.
Fees are based on % final sale price + listing costs. My fees were €54 on a sale of €3755. Pretty fair, I think, particularly as 5% will be deducted and donated to the Red Cross - see below.
Within a few weeks, and after the buyer has paid, our partners at PayPal Giving Fund will automatically send the donation to your selected charity and send you a donation receipt. eBay will also credit you an equal percentage of your fees.
Reserve prices are expensive - eBay doesn’t like a ‘no sale’ and are not refundadable or ‘rollable-over’.
I’ve bought & sold hundreds of items on eBay, generally without problems.
I completely agree with @captainendeavour that starting an auction high is the wrong thing to do - start it at 1€ - you’ll get more interest that way.
Before either buying or selling on eBay research when the item’s likely price will be - do this by searching for “completed listing”. If the item is sold fairly commonly (and I would not use ebay to sell items which are “rare” on the platform1) you will get an idea of the price, and how often the item in question sells - no point listing something if hundreds of other people are doing so but none of them sell.
BIN vs auction - BIN (buy it now) means you will get the price you want, within reason, but will have to wait, auction means that the item will sell (again, within reason) in a fixed time-frame but might not get as much as you want.
The only way to protect yourself against accusations that the postage was too high is to include it in the price and offer free postage - I suggest only doing that for BINs where you can increase the item price accordingly.
eBay charge on the total item price including postage so you pay the same fees either way - it used to be that postage was not counted for the fee but too many people sold items for 99p with £100 postage to scam eBay out of fees so they changed it. It galls me that eBay now effectively tax P&P but that’s what you get when a load of idiots p*ss in the well.
Agree, plenty of hi-res photos helps the item sell and helps it achieve a good price in the auctions.
It doesn’t tend to help so much if a buyer is determined to rip you off. Most don’t it has to be said but the only thing you can do when someone wants to return an item is say yes - just maybe if it is an honest buyer and it’s a “I changed my mind” thing you might get them to pay the postage, but they only have to tick “not as described” and you’re paying LaPoste to return it. Some buyers just do it in the hope you can’t be bothered and they get the item, and the refund (to be fair a lot of higher volume sellers of low value items do just cut their losses at that point).
There are things I would not sell on eBay because of this - certainly clothes and jewellery as you’ll hit the buyers who either want to wear it once and return it, or those who are genuine but assume “try it on and return if I don’t like it” is OK because all the big Internet clothes retailers allow that (I suspect the bigger retailers don’t like it much either but they sell enough to cope with the relatively high rate of returns).
Talking of returns…
It’s a bit more complex but, yes basically they do these days. It was not always thus - I remember an item that I suspect the seller never posted, certainly they could/would not even provide proof of postage and made it clear it was my problem.
In fact they were right - I’d paid £25, eBay charged £15, non refundable, to even look at a case and without “proof of non-delivery” wouldn’t have done anything anyway.
The only thing that you can do is to used a tracked/signed for service. That way you protect yourself from item not received but that’s about it.
The one thing that you can do if you think a buyer is scamming you is to report them - unlikely to help you in the short term but if a buyer gets flagged a lot eBay will take action.
Finally the only other time I had any bother was a few months ago - bought a motherboard, the seller supposedly dispatched it but I then started to notice something very odd in his listings and feedback which suggested the item had been “sold” multiple items simultaneously and returned at least once. My threshold for being mucked about dropped to zero and, as it didn’t turn up, filed “not received” as soon as I could - which I won as there was no proof of delivery.
In the end it seems the seller was not (well mostly not) trying to scam me - Hermes had lost it and it arrived some 8 weeks later. I did the honourable thing and sent it back to him.
Finally the best way to reduce eBay fees it to watch out for the promotions where they reduce final value fees to 20% of their normal rate (they do in the UK anyway, don’t know about France).
1] For various reasons I’d be cautious about buying an item which only rarely passes through eBay as well.
Thank you to both of you for your insights. I have never sold a lot on eBay. Just a few items ten years ago and now three things
The reason why I mentioned starting the auction at a high price (by this I mean still offering value to the buyer but not so low that you would be gutted to sell it for peanuts) is because I had read a suggestion on the eBay forum that if you don’t have a lot of feedback on eBay you may only get a couple of bids so best to start it off at a reasonable price.
To give an example I just sold a Gaggia Classic coffee maker (bought for €225 4 years ago and barely used). They are now selling for closer to €400, at the time it was on promotion).
I listed it for €149 euros and sold it for €183. So didn’t exactly make a profit.
What would you have done differently? Would you have started it at €1?
Any tips appreciated!
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It is always difficult and I see there’s quite a wide spread of prices for these expresso machines - if it is any consolation yours was not, by some measure, the lowest of recent sales.
The higher prices seem to be UK sales, I don’t see another in France, so that might have worked against you if the item is more popular in the UK.
For the best price I would have researched the going rate, probably have listed on ebay.co.uk in English, even better if you have a relative in the UK who can do the postage for you and avoid import duty.
I would not have included personal reasons for sale, saying that your husband prefers capsules suggests to a potential purchaser that they might also prefer capsules. I would not have made excuses for the packaging either, people don’t expect 2nd hand items to be perfect but maybe if the packaging was damaged in a house move, the machine was as well, despite you saying otherwise. If that was in response to a specific query you don’t have to publish the answer on the listing.
I would have pushed any reason to buy yours specifically - recently descaled, smoke/pet free household, extra accessories - anything like that.
Your photos are good, I’d probably have started with a BIN at at 270€ or thereabouts plus some for postage - so maybe €290 in total with an “accepts offers” set to automatically sell above €270 (people love to think they’ve bargained you down). If you paid 225€ getting that plus clearing eBay & postage fees is doing well - unless something has become *very* desirable you probably aren’t going to make an actual profit on a 2nd hand item.
If it hadn’t sold in 1-2 months I’d drop the price by 10% and see if that got any takers, finally you can put it to auction.
Yes, you have to be a bit brave starting low but things on eBay have a habit of finding their own value - a popular item in good condition will not sit at 1€ for long and if you get plenty of interest a bidding war can only be in your favour.
Here, I *might* be more cautious. As I said I don’t see huge numbers in France so starting low does risk there not being much interest and you getting lumbered with a sale for only a few € - that said one which sold for over 300€ in the UK started at £10 and got 33 bids compared with the 10 that yours received.
EDIT:
Yes, there is a slight danger of this - but everyone has to start somewhere.
If you have some more expensive items to sell and are worried about this then find some cheaper stuff to shift and get some feedback - you probably don’t need many items but if buyers see that you have 100% feedback it will boost confidence.
These days (as previously discussed) eBay is fairly good at supporting buyers so it’s less important than it used to be.
Oh, and it probably doesn’t need stating but all my experience is with eBay in the UK - as with everything else the French experience is likely to be different.
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Thank you so much for your thorough, detailed and very informative response. Very appreciated!
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That’s OK, nice of you to say so - one more thing which seems to have disappeared while I was editing the post is to include links to product reviews (especially video ones but make sure that you watch them yourself).
eBay has got very strict about links in listings, but you can still provide URLs as text for people to cut and paste and good product reviews help push the idea to prospective purchasers that this is the expresso machine that they want in their lives.
Bullet point lists of features are good as well.
Also it can be useful for current items to mention the going retail price (but make sure you take into account the real world prices) and I think that might have been helpful in this case (strengthen the idea that the buyer is getting a bargain).
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So much brilliant advice. Thanks again!
I will bear it in mind when I list my next item which is meant to be my medium format camera. Just am so attached to it, am not sure I will put it up for sale. It is just a shame I am no longer using it …
Photographing it reminded me how much I liked it!
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