I’ve just completed my first sale on eBay, and it went really well. I sold my old Palm Zire 31 handheld, which I replaced with a Palm T|X last Christmas. The buyer paid me earlier this morning, and I’ve just dropped the package off at the post office.

The item sold for $51.07. I added on $6.21 handling fees to cover the cost of the box and packing peanuts. The priority mail postage is estimated at $7.20 (for a weight of 2 lbs. 8 oz.) And the buyer requested shipping insurance, which was estimated to be $2.30. So the total cost to the customer was $66.78.

Now to figure out how much I netted on the sale. I had to pay for the box and packing peanuts, so knock off that $6.21. That is, I didn’t “build in” any profit there. The actual cost for postage was $5.30 (a bit less than eBay’s estimate), and insurance was $2.30. I spent another 50 cents for delivery confirmation. PayPal took their cut of the transaction, which was $2.24. And eBay charged me $1.20 for the listing, plus another $2.09 for their cut of the sale (ugh!).

So (if I did my math correctly) my net on the sale was $46.94. Not too bad, considering that the Zire has just been sitting around collecting dust for the last eight months. The next time around, I need to figure out if there’s any way to reduce the middle man (eBay and PayPal) fees a bit — those two combined ate up over $5 of my profit. I’m guessing there’s no easy way to avoid that, though. I’ve read that some eBay sellers will pad their handling fees to account for things like that, but that seems a little dishonest to me. I need to think about that some more.