[asterisk-biz] Tellabs 4-Port Echo Cancel Turnkey Complete System

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 17:30 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:

> Another recommendation was the ten day auction and have your auction
> end on a weekend, as much as mid-day as possible since that is when
> people aren't at work and more apt to be on Ebay, watching or looking
> for stuff, consider time zones too.
> 

Ahh yes forgot about that one, when I was doing stuff 44M people visited
on weekends, and if you start and end on a weekend you get the special
listing "recently listed" and "going going gone" when there is more
traffic.  I have no idea what the current visitor numbers are, but it
was critical to me to have it listed for weekends (where I was selling
to, largely the UK) to get those extra few sales without the extra
fees.  

A friend in scotland recently commented on the exchange rate dropping,
she was upset a bit because electronics cost the same number GBP/USD but
with the exchange rate at about 2:1 it meant that she would get stuff
half price from the US.  As a result she would actually look for stuff
there first.  So monitoring exchange rates can be helpful as well if you
are doing this more as a profession than just to clear out a closet of
stuff you no longer use.  

Course slightly shady people will mark items as a gift and declare the
value at $50 or less (whatever the max gift value can be in teh
destination country) to avoid the 3% duty and 17-21% VAT (UK 17%, NL 19%
IE 21%, most are somewhere around there if selling to europe).  I have
bought ps3 games from canada and they knew that game and did that (even
when I got $500 worth of games in a single shipment), and have seen MANY
MANY people on ebay brazenly admit they are doing exactly that, so if
you are going to be competitive you may have to do that.  VAT/Duty will
be charged to the receiver if you dont prepay, and if you use at least
UPS they will tack on a $25 service charge for collecting it and
remitting it to the govt for you, fedex is cheaper on fees but they do
the same, the law requires them to collect/remit.  So you can either get
a VAT number and pay it yourself adding a huge chunk to the item cost
making you uncompetitive against those that do this, or do what everyone
else is doing.  I do know that at least the UK govt was browsing ebay
looking for people doing this and seizing items to cover lost VAT
charges.  I think FR was as well, and its likely that more are given
that the countries need more money now than they used to.

This is deceptive, tax evasion (although I am unsure if its civil or
criminal), but then to a point splitting your VoIP service in the US to
avoid being an "interconnected voip provider" like stanaphone did to
avoid the USF tax is somewhat similar, the difference being one is
working within the law and the other is intentionally misrepresenting to
avoid it.


> Ebay has changed quite a bit, like no negative feedback, so some may
> not apply anymore.

yeah and that is wrong, my guess is that since most negative feedback
was converted to neutral after "arbitration" and many would give
positive to get positive (the old tip was as a seller never give
feedback until you have gotten it) the feedback system is not that
worthwhile since everyone was basically gaming the system.  I still
liked the fact that you could look at seller feedback, and if someone
had over 10k sales and > 99% positive all in the last 6 months generally
I would trust them more, so without this and possibly with some other
changes I may not like ebay anymore (I havent used ebay in a few years
so I cant say what they are like now).

> 
-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you!