Thread: Advice for Selling Straights on Ebay?

I've heard similar stories on a knife forum. Attempting to detail all the corrosion/wear can be counterproductive with a finicky buyer (or one with buyer's remorse). These are the types of things I'm going to try and avoid.

I never searched through completed auctions on ebay. I'll try that.

Thanks for the advice so far gentleman. It's good to see everything in one place. Even if it was something you've heard before, it is good to have reminders in one place.

Got my Straight Razor listed today. Thanks guys.

Be honest, don't expect to get rich, expect to refund and lose $ at some point, put customer first, and track packages to protect yourself. do this and you will have fun.

Ebay takes 10% and PayPal takes another 3% (I think) = where else can you sell on a platform that will reach so many potential customers with so little over head?

We periodically go through house and donate to local places and sell rest on eBay.

Is it too late to say no distracting artsy-fartsy props or backgrounds? No decoys, knives, golf clubs, cigars - all like that.

Originally Posted by MisterMoo

Is it too late to say no distracting artsy-fartsy props or backgrounds? No decoys, knives, golf clubs, cigars - all like that.

I took the picture outside (while it was really sunny to show everything) on a gray gun cleaning mat.
Nothing else in the picture.

As an aside and without bearing on your post or plan I muddled through a couple of hundred ebay listings last night and... OMG - what a cesspool. It seems like anything rusted is automatically "vintage"; anything with half the blade chipped off is "rare"; and by and large except for the usual suspects most descriptions are woefully lacking, dimensions are pointless ("full length of blade and handle" seems popular) and photos are so often blurry, distant or "artfully" angled as to be useless. And initial bid prices or "buy it now" offers from the genre-uninformed are mostly too nuts to consider. I understand you have to mine a few tons of ore to get a gram of gold but, for crying out loud, my search string for straight razors, even with lots of limiters, brings up very little wheat in 6500-8000 pieces of chaff.

With bearing to your post, it's nice that someone wants to develop a listing that leaps away from absurdly wasted space.

I put vintage in my description, because I thought being 100+ years qualified it.
The pictures of my razor are VERY unflattering. I actually took closeups where the scales have some peeling/bubbling where the yellow horn has aged. I didn't put horn in the description though since I wasn't 100% sure. As I mentioned, I took the pictures outside on a sunny day so EVERYTHING is visible.
I probably could have cleaned it up some and increased its' sale value, but I'm trying to get some money to put into my other razors. I'm going to fix up a few to sell, and put the money into fixing up and honing my "keepers". That and I still need a good strop.