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For those of you who already have had experience selling stuff on ebay, I got a couple questions:

1) How do you know what the shipping costs will be to the countries you wish to sell to? Like if you made an ebay listing with worldwide shipping, and someone from Indonesia or NZ buys your stuff, the shipping costs will be high. How do you let them know beforehand what the costs will be? Does ebay have an internal shipping calculator? And how well does this match with your local lost office's actual shipping cost to that part of the world? I want to avoid having to pay more to send a parcel than the potential purchaser paid me for shipping.


2) Lets say you put up a listing, but nobody buys it - do you still have to pay ebay for the time period it was up for sale? If so, how high is this cost? How many times can you afford to relist something without making a real profit loss?

In my experience the eBay Global Shipping programme is awesome when it comes to shipping internationally, you literally just list the postal cost for shipping from your home to a location within your country and ebay works out what it will cost the buyer to then have it shipped from the 3rd party to them, additionally you are covered aslong as your parcel arrives at the in-country 3rd party in a timely and safe manner, saving you from the headache of potential cons from international buyers claiming they never recieved your product (happened to me recently, ebay rejected their claim).

You are on the line for the cost of listing regardless of if your item sells or not, if it sells you are then accountable for total value fee (10% of sale price including postage)

The eBay Global Shipping programme may be awesome for the seller, but for the international buyer it's complete rubbish unless you're buying something worth a lot. The shipping costs are extremely high, even within Europe. Bear in mind that you will likely get a lot more bids (and a higher winning bid) if you avoid using the programme and set a more reasonable shipping cost based on your local shipping service.

The shipping is 2-3 times more expensive with the GPS comparing to (to use the UK as example) Royal Mail international shipping. Sure, the cheapest option is not signed-for, but if you really read the details you will see that signed-for only adds a higher insurance value (the normal international covers £20, and signed-for covers £50, while the GPS covers even higher).

Also, the one time I bought something through the GPS, the packaging was completely inadequate, it was a box of DE Reavers, where the box had been partly squashed in shipping (no extra padding, just the GW cardboard box was used). I couldn't even blame the seller for this, because he didn't pack the item. I will never buy something through GPS again.

So how to set a correct shipping price. Well, I think you can easily state that you will ship internationally, but that you want to be contacted first. Then you can check the shipping price once you get contacted.