Shoestring Theory

Learn more about this project I mentioned Scratch earlier today. Here’s my first project: a simple eBay Final Value Fee calculator. You can use your keyboard’s number pad or the calculator to enter a sale price of an eBay item. Choose a Final Value Fee option and see the current FVF for an item versus […]

Got a couple of glitch reports. I seem to only be getting about 70 percent of the messages sent from or through eBay properly forwarded to my email account lately. This includes questions and messages from buyers. I’ve got a report from one other seller that his messages also aren’t coming through correctly. This isn’t […]

While surfing for something completely different, I ran across MIT’s Scratch program yesterday. Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st […]

KCTV5: If it ain’t sensational, it ain’t news. Kansas City police and the FBI raided multiple Kansas City locations to bust up a multi-million dollar stolen property ring Monday, according to KCTV5 in Kansas City. The story was surprisingly solid for a KC television story, right up until the reporter, Shaun Broyls, felt the need […]

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! See the epic battle of carrot versus stick! One time only! You’ll pay for the entire seat, but only need the edge! (Bat and Carrot from OCAL) Okay, eventually we’re going to finish slogging through all the changes. Today we’ll tackle the new PowerSeller reward system. There are basically two components to […]

Screen capture of Feb. 5, 2008 video stream from cnn.com. So I’m in full political junkie mode, watching the live stream from CNN while surfing the web looking for more SupTu (that’s how the cool kids say it) info. The colors on CNN’s Republican Super Tuesday map floored me: McCain: Republican Red, the color of […]

I still don’t know who I support the most, but no doubt Kansas Dems love Barack. Lord, that’s an obnoxious headline. Someone stop me. The alternate headline for this was, “Slinging mud in Kansas politics.” Weather forecast: wet, white and disgusting. Quite a few people had problems getting out of the fairgrounds after the caucus. […]

Editor’s note: For Sale will be a regular feature highlighting what the auction traffic is like on eBay in relation to particular events. Every Super Tuesday, pundits and politicians stick their heads out of their holes to predict whether we’ll have four more years of partisan bickering or….four more years of partisan bickering. Always a […]

I was just working on the next bit of analysis of eBay’s changes and ran across something odd. Under the banner of “Safer Payments,” PayPal may begin holding payments for some items until one of several criteria are met. I’ll deal with this in-depth in another post, but I want to highlight one of the […]

Reader Andrew over at the AuctionBytes blog sent them an awesome calculator to show the difference between the old and new fee structure on eBay. It’s set up to do individual items and the monthly impact provided you know your average item cost and sell through rate. I (and I imagine many others) built a […]