There’s a fair bit of activity on eBay buying and selling 95% copper cents, and the coin sorters to distinguish them from the newer zinc variety.  Why the interest, you might ask?  It’s the copper content of the cents that’s interesting.  These high-copper cents, minted for part of 1982 and most of the years before, are now worth more than twice their face value based solely on the copper content.

Basically, each one of these cents has more than two cents’ worth of copper in them.

This mismatch has come about from a decades-long, systematic increase in the money supply.  A dollar today only buys 8% of what it bought eighty years ago.  Since just the turn of this century, it already buys 22% less.  Since there are more dollars chasing the same (or nearly the same) amount of goods, prices rise on average to meet the increased money supply.  The prices of everything are affected, including copper.

The composition of the cent changed in 1982 from 95% copper to 5% tin/zinc, to 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper.  Zinc is a cheaper metal, but a cent is a cent as far as the cashier is concerned — and as far as the Mint is concerned.  Over time, it makes less and less sense to spend the high-copper-content ones.  They’re kept instead, since at some point it makes more sense to keep them for their copper.

For the time being, though, would-be smelters would break the law if they extracted the copper from cents.  They are also forbidden from exporting anything but trivial quantities to countries where it wouldn’t be illegal.  (A similar ban was enacted after silver was removed from dimes, quarters, and half dollars.  The ban has since been lifted.)  What is still legal is shipping them within the country and storing them as just a large pile of cash.

Enter eBay and others.  You can buy pre-sorted cents, by the pound, in quantity.  Not just the older wheat cents (pre-1959) but the more modern Lincoln Memorial cents (1959-1982).  Circulated wheat cents are more sought-after by coin collectors, so they go for a premium anyway.  The newer ones, though, are still widely circulated, but they’re getting less so.

I just saw an auction for 500 pounds of 1959-1982 cents go for $1,200, with free shipping.  This price is between the face value of the money and the market price of the copper in the cents.  The face value of the lot is

500 pounds * 454 grams per pound * $0.01 per 3.11 grams = $729.90

The value of the copper in these cents is

500 pounds * $3.91 per pound of copper * 95% copper content of cents = $1,857.25

The reason for buying is appreciation of the underlying commodity in dollars. (I suppose, also, that the coins themselves become more collectible as time goes on as well.)  At some point in the future it will pay to sell these.  It may even pay to melt them (assuming the ban is lifted after the “easy money” is no longer so easy).  More to the point, though, it’s trading something that holds value with something that is clearly losing value.

Storing these old things is a cost that some people obviously are willing to bear.  People who pulled out their silver dimes are pretty happy now, I’d think; the reasoning for pulling out the copper cents is the same.  Cents are bulkier relative to their value than silver dimes, and far bulkier than gold coins, but the cents are what people can get their hands on at a discount to their true value, now.

I was born too late to see the silver money go out of circulation, but we all have front-row seats to watch the copper cent go away.  And we can watch it on eBay!

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However, I did find a new practice that I found a little hard to believe.  It was hard to believe because I couldn’t imagine too many people buying a gift card this way.  Yet a number of sellers were doing it.

Here’s the idea:

1. List a gift card (say, $500 face value)
2. Charge more than the face value (one I saw listed a $500 card for $569.00 + $4.00 shipping)
3. Explain in the auction how to get cash back by going through rebate sites to bring the price down below retail

So, you start in the hole — $73 in the hole for this particular auction — and then it’s your job to work your way back up to even, or maybe a little bit ahead.

Doing it that way sounds more than a little dumb to me.  I’d rather buy the card with the discount up front.  Wouldn’t you?

But, I’m glad that there are some sellers that tried to sell gift cards this way, because they were almost required to show how to do it right in the auction.  No one would pay $569 for a $500 gift card unless it was fairly clear before they bought the card how that this could be made to be a good deal for them.

Which means the following:  We can now get great deals on gift cards by (a) using the information in these overpriced auctions BUT (b) applying them to auctions where people are already selling the card for less than face value.  Here’s the right way to go about it:

1. Find someone selling gift cards for the store you want.  Ignore anyone trying to sell a card for more than face value. You want to be ahead from the start!  (Also of course do due diligence like checking feedback ratings, track record, etc.)
2. If you haven’t signed up for eBay Bucks, do that.  It’s 2% back on qualifying eBay purchases, courtesy of eBay and PayPal.
3. This one has a time crunch on it (30 July 2010) but you get 8% back from Bing if the purchase qualifies and it’s a Buy It Now.
4. If there’s no time to do the Bing thing, then you can check out other rebate programs to see which one treats you the best.  Be sure to click through the links to eBay from the appropriate sites to get the rebates:
   • MrRebates.com offers 3% back on most eBay Winning Bid and Buy It Now purchases (up to a rebate of $30 per order) plus a $5 signup bonus
   • EBates.com offers 1-3% back on most purchases, with some categories allowing up to $100 back per transaction
   • Cashbaq,com offers 2% back on most purchases, with a $25 limit per order
   • BigCrumbs.com offers 36% of whatever seller’s fees eBay earns on the transaction (this can be over 5% of the purchase price!) along with certain restrictions
5. The icing on the cake is using a rewards credit card to make your purchase through PayPal.  Add an extra 1% or 2% right there.

That’s the right way to by gift cards on eBay.  Start with a discount with a lower-than-face-value purchase price, and go down from there!

(Thanks to Beating Broke for including this post in the Carnival of Personal Finance!)

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I bought some replacement batteries for our wireless phones off of eBay last night (how I can get two of them from Hong Kong, shipped, for under $6, I’ll never know) but when I logged into PayPal to pay, it was a little different.  It actually has been for a while, but I just noticed it.

I still had to change the payment type from “withdraw from my linked checking account” to “charge my credit card,” but the bother screen was gone. That’s the screen that asked me to “confirm” my choice of paying by credit card by clicking on a “yes” button when the “no” button was in boldface.  This time, after I selected  my credit card, it took me right back to the payment screen.

Even better would be to allow me to set my preference for paying by credit card, but regardless, what they’ve done is a change for the better.

Thanks PayPal!   AAAAA++++ Will Do Business Again!

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Swoopo bills itself as an auction site, but the auctions are little more than giant, real-time, horribly-addicting raffles: one winner, with lots of losers – some of them really big losers.  Coding Horror has posted about it twice, and he thinks it’s pure evil.

Here’s how the “auctions” work:

• Bids cost $0.75 each, bought in advance in bundles of 30.  (Red flag #1:  You buy in, with real money, with no guarantee of winning.)
• Each bid raises the price of the auction by $0.15 or less.  (Red flag #2:  The price climbs slowly.  Lots of bids are placed.  A huge number of bids are placed if you’re talking about “penny” auctions: each bid increases the price $0.01.)
• Each bid adds time to the end of the auction.  (Red flag #3:  Sniping doesn’t work.  The low price relative to retail means that there’s a very good chance someone else is watching and will bid over you.)
• The auction does have a firm ending date.  It’s just so far in the future that it really doesn’t matter.  (Red flag #4:  It’s technically not a lottery, but practically it is.)

Some other red flags:

• Very limited bid history while an auction is going on. With eBay you can see the entire bid history of an auction.  On Swoopo you’re limited to the last ten bids.  There can be hundreds, if not thousands, or tens of thousands, of bids that are inaccessible during the auction.  It makes it very difficult to know how many people are bidding against you.  If the “BidButler” is used (an automatic proxy) and if there are a lot of bids placed all at once, you get almost no information about how many people bid against you, or how many times you bid.  All you see is “169 BidButler bids” and the last ten bids.
• The record of the completed auctions is there, but searching them is like finding something in the tax code, with all of the pages mixed up, without an index. There is no text search feature, so if you’re interested in what a particular item went for, you have one option for checking out the price history:  plow through all 63,000+ completed auctions, ten at a time.  The only price history that’s easily accessible is a “recently sold for” price on the auction.  Just one.  The rest you have to find on your own, and who knows even how many times they’ve sold that item?  It could have been just one other time — 43,000 auctions ago.

As an example, there’s a “penny auction” right now for a one-ounce gold bar.  Ballpark retail price for this item is $1,000.  I’ve watched the auction for the past few hours off and on.  Here’s what I know about it:

• I’ve watched the price go up from $18 to $28 in the past few hours. Since it’s a “penny auction,” each bid raises the price $0.01.  So, that means 1,000 bids have been placed in the past few hours.  People spent $750 to place those bids.  Judging by some of the other prices, I’m thinking the auction started at zero.  If 2,800 bids were placed, that’s enough to buy the gold bar at retail, twice.  And the auction isn’t over.
• The “recently sold for” price is extremely misleading. Underneath the picture of the bar is shown: “Recently sold for $216.98.”  It’s true that it did sell for that price: Auction #177136, which ended on May 17th, 2009, at 13:28 PDT.  (The winner spent $697.50 in bids, though, so he only saved 10% off of the retail price.)  But the most recent price it sold for was far less than that: $3.71 (plus $106.50 in bids).  So not only is the quoted price not the most recent price, it’s the highest price I could find with a decent effort.  (Can I say it’s the highest price that it ever sold for on Swoopa?  No.  I went through over 300 pages of past auctions manually and did a google search, but only came up with part of them, and life’s too short.)  Here are 32 auction results for the same gold bar.  The next highest selling price is barely half of $216.98:

Some people got great deals, others got mediocre deals, and at least one guy paid 50% more than he needed to. (At least he won the bar, though.) What’s the craziest part of all of this? The 32 bars cost about $32,000 or so to purchase. There was about $100,000 spent on bids for these auctions. Enough to purchase the bars three times.

There are a few big winners, but a whole lot of big, big losers.  Though I don’t think the solution is to get Congress to do something about it, I will say this about Swoopo:  Stay far, far away.

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I noticed the crackdown in two different places:

• Revising the price of a three-magazine lot.  EBay warned me that my shipping price seemed high for the type of item I was selling.
• Revising the price of a single magazine.  EBay now has imposed a maximum shipping charge for a single item “based on what other sellers are charging and what buyers consider reasonable.”  The maximum shipping fee I’m allowed to charge for a single magazine is $5.00.  If I were to have mandatory insurance, it would have to be included in the $5.00.

Now, at first glance it may indeed seem reasonable that a magazine could be shipped for $5.00 within the US.  I wouldn’t fault anyone for thinking that, but unfortunately this just isn’t the case.

United States Postal Service regulations state that magazines (outside of the periodical rates allowed to publishers) cannot be shipped either by Media Mail or by Bound Printed Matter.  Magazines cannot be shipped by Media Mail because they almost always contain advertising.  Magazines cannot be mailed as Bound Printed Matter because of an explicit disallowance in the Domestic Mail Manual, Section 363.3.1h.  First-class mail, Parcel Post, and Priority Mail (as well as more expensive services) are OK.

First-class mail has a weight limit of 13 ounces.  The minimum charge for Parcel Post is $4.55.  Priority Mail has a flat-rate envelope available for $4.75 if I pay for the postage online, but these envelopes are not big, and if the magazine cannot fit in the envelope and it weighs 1 pound, 1 ounce or more, I’m over the $5.00 limit and have to take a loss on the shipping.

So, where does this leave me?  Well, I don’t really have much choice except to transfer the cost to the price of the item.  I’m not on eBay to lose money on every sale.  Nonetheless, raising my prices makes me less competitive.

It makes me really uncompetitive, though, with PowerSellers that ship by Media Mail all the time.  I won’t be a jerk and link to them here, but some of the top eBay sellers in the Magazine Back Issues category ship by Media Mail.  (Packages can be inspected at any time, and I’ve heard of some post offices charging the recipient Express Mail prices for items shipped by an improper method.)

So does eBay just not get it?  I think it’s a tough problem to solve, and they probably do a pretty good job at determining reasonable shipping charges for most items.  Magazines are a strange product to ship, as I’ve outlined above.  It’s more expensive than most people think to follow the rules in shipping magazines.  Several of the biggest sellers don’t ship by the rules, and besides, people are used to having their magazine subscriptions just show up.  It’s not free to mail magazine subscriptions, of course, but it appears free to the customers.  Basically, shipping magazines need special consideration for allowable shipping charges because there are restrictions on how they can be sent.

Oh well, I suppose I can make cheap Priority Mail shipping a feature of purchasing from my store instead.  Turn lemons into lemonade and all that.

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I bought a programming book off of eBay.  I checked the auction description and it looked like the book and edition I wanted.  I bid a little bit less than what I could get it for on Amazon.com.  I won the auction, and received the book.

I was not happy at all when I opened up the package to find a softcover Indian-subcontinent-only knockoff of what I thought I had ordered.  The seller did take a picture of the book and had I read the top part of the front cover in the auction picture it does say "Low price edition."  However, nowhere in the auction did it specify this.  In fact, it stated three times that the book was hardcover!

I emailed the seller expressing my displeasure with this.  He e-mailed back promptly to apologize and said that he would allow me to return the book.  He also admitted that he didn’t check the information that appeared on the auction when he inserted the pre-filled information for the book.

EBay makes it very easy to create a detailed description for a number of types of items.  Books are one of them.  If I’m using Turbo Lister, all I need to do is enter the ISBN, the author, or the title, and select the correct book from the search results.  Piece of cake.  What I suspect this guy did is that he found the book by searching under author or title but not ISBN (since the number is different on my book), and figured he was done.  The description in his auction had the incorrect ISBN, and the incorrect type of book (hardcover).  Not good.

Anyway, I ended up e-mailing him back, told him it wasn’t really worth my time to return it, and said that I wouldn’t leave a negative.  I chalked it up to me not looking at the picture carefully enough and taking my lumps.  But I also warned him that other buyers might not be as understanding, since it’s now much, much easier for buyers to leave negative feedback without any fear of retaliation.

I also strongly suggested that he check the descriptions to see that they’re accurate.  It’s still the seller’s responsibility to ensure that the description is an accurate representation of the item.

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Since sellers can no longer leave neutral or negative feedback for buyers, my job is a bit easier, I suppose.  But those thoughtful folks at eBay really have made it a no-brainer.  Now there’s an option to store up to ten feedbacks, and randomly apply the stored feedbacks to each buyer! 

I laughed at this.  Not that I pored over my thesaurus for hours to find exactly the right eighty characters to leave for each of my beloved buyers, but the integration of a random feedback generator into my admin panel is pretty funny.  I mean, I may as well have fun with it and put in phrases like this.  Or make up some good ones:

• May the chicken of despair never darken your doorstep, o wond’rous buyer.
• Bought at last, bought at last, thank God Almighty, you bought at last!!
• A million billion trillion thank-yous would nary be enough, your highness.

Does anyone actually read the positive feedback comments, anyway?  If I’m checking out a seller, I’m looking for the negatives, not the positives.  I want to see what bad might happen.  I pay absolutely no attention to the positive comments.

And as a seller leaving feedback, and not being able to say anything if it’s not nice, is there really anything else that I need to say beyond the customer sending me my money?

Further, does a prospective buyer look at the feedbacks left by sellers to see if they repeat themselves?  I don’t, but will potential buyers think less of me if they see that I repeat myself?

Basically, what purpose do sellers’ comments serve anymore?  Why shouldn’t I just leave random positive feedback for buyers?

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