Any of you guys sell stuff regularly on Ebay?

Wow, been a long time since I've been on here ;)

I'm a complete Ebay newbie, starting listing my first ever items last night but already I've been badly stung.

I'm selling a couple of DVDs, each one seperately. I was going to ask like £3.50 for the dvd and £1.60 postage to send them recorded delivery (so there's no arguements about proof of delivery) and Ebay has *&%£ed me in 2 ways...

1. The max postage it allows for a boxed DVD ise £1.00, problem is a 100g DVD and case costs about £1.30 to post, why should i lose money on postage because their limits are wrong? They suggest making the postage free and adding the cost to the asking price...makes sense I guess. So I stick the DVD on and put a BUY IT NOW price of £4.99 and with free postage waheyy :)

and here's the really pissy bit...

2. I didn't know this but once someone has bid...anything, no matter how small, your BUY IT NOW button that you've paid extra for disappears! it only works if there's no bids!

So someone could get my DVD for £0.99 and it'll cost me £1.30 to send it to them! AWESOME!

Is it me being stupid or is Ebay a big old pile of crap?! ;)

ebay is garbage

I love ebay it's saved me thousands of dollars over the years. It can be a collectors goldmine if you know what you are doing.

The changes to postage for DVDs and books in the UK and AUS sucks bigtime.

To avoid the situation you described you need to make your starting bid above the cost of your postage.

You can also run strictly "Buy it now" no bid auctions.

In order to do a strict buy it now listing, you have to have 5 or more ratings. I messed up with the 'buy it now' auction once too. I had to cancel the auction and pay for the listing fee mistake.

I sell frequently on ebay.

The only way to get around the fixed shipping items is to put your item in another category. Doing that, removes your item from the DVD category, which means if anybody goes into that category, or searches within that category, your item wont show up.

Which begs the question...

How many people actually search within a specific category?

I know that I don't.
I just type what I'm looking for in the search box without any thought to what category the item may be listed in.