Lately I’ve been getting heaps of good deals (selling-wise) on Trade Me – a New Zealand edition of eBay. But the problem is, I feel guilty for selling things as such astronomical prices, when I know that they aren’t even valued anything near that.

Photo credit: antonhart

For example, I sold a broken graphics card for $72 a few years ago after seeing a similar broken item selling for $30. It was far beyond my expectations. More recently, I sold this power adapter for $50, again far above $30, what it truly should have been valued at… when new.

Every time I send these packages off, I get this gut feeling that they’re going to figure they got ripped off and give me an after-trade negative feedback. But is it my fault? Probably not, they have the choice. Likewise, petrol stations sell things with a tremendously higher mark-up than super markets do, yet they seem to still thrive with customers.

There’s a price for convenience, or is that just the price you pay for being lazy?

A new site, a shiny-new Wordpress platform, a new web domain and new content to come (none of those cruddy ‘I hate life’ blog posts). Above all, this site will be much more informative, interesting and coolsome to browse through.

Indeed, this was a crazy hiatus - many things happened while I was hibernating: two sets of exams, my birthday, public holidays; including: labour day and Christmas, and soon enough, we’re going to hit the new year. Being away for such a long time is some-what justified - I’ve been developing this site of course! However, the viewer-base has dwindled since I didn’t post anything so basically I have to regain my audience (which I plan to do by spamming these linky site things).

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Dear Ben,

We notice that you have been listing your contact details in your member profile on Trade Me.

As stated in our terms and conditions members are not allowed to list their contact details on the site - including in your profile.

We’ve removed your profile so you can create a new one that complies with our rules. If you list your contact details again your profile will be permanently removed and your membership may be disabled.

Regards,

Trade Me Support
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Trade Me How smart Kiwis buy and sell
www.trademe.co.nz
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I laugh at NZ Herald’s feeble attempt the copy Trademe’s navigation bar thing. Looks shoddy, and you can no-doubtly tell it is an attempt to mimic - they even used Wises as a link to a map site as an alternative to Trademe’s recently released Smaps site.

I also found an error in Trademe’s bar. The last listing option mouse-overs to an orange colour, but the other ones don’t. I emailed them - I hope I get credit for being such a good spotter-er, like money credited to my Trademe account.

I would like to share the good news that the Trademe auctions were highly successful and the [Ben].Clan received a huge boost to their funds. The graphics card sold for $74 and the motherboard sold for $40.

After the auction finished, I discovered that people started to mimic my auctions and they did not succeed. Here’s one here - just as well it only sold for $5.50 as the whole auction was nearly a replica of mine; he even copied my catch phrase.

Today, I saw my graphics card I sold relisted: here. The exact same one. Hope he doesn’t get as good-a-price as I got.