As promised, here are all of the buyer and seller tips including collector's note and e-commerce notes for sellers collected from past issues of Random Issues and blacked out for non-subscribers.

This page gives subscribers a chance to go back to past tips, whether they need to because they forgot something or feel that they missed something relevant that could help their buying and selling experiences.

All of the tips appear below just as they originally appeared in Random Issues. Many will hold up over time, some will become dated, but all are based on my own online buying and selling experiences and were tips that I thought would be extremely helpful at the time of publication.

Tips are published below with the most recent appearing first. Each tip is linked back to the original issue of Random Issues in which it first appeared. Please note that other links to e-commerce sources may or may not still work or be relevant. Any sales offers mentioned below are no longer valid.

That said, enjoy!

We've discussed the alternatives in previous issues and still none of them can measure up whether it be due to lack of performance, lack of track history, or not enough stress on collectibles. I've always heard that Yahoo Auctions are good for some items, terrible for others, I'm intrigued by blujay, and really wish Wagglepop hadn't had that start and stop experience. What I really want is an auction site similar to the storefront malls like TIAS, Ruby Lane or GoAntiques, where vintage is a requirement, but there is an auction format.

It'd be nice if a site such as Playle's, which consists of multiple sellers and concentrates on postcards, could develop a following. It's a two-way street though as buyer experience is limited by seller experience and vice-versa. Some of the collectibles sites I see look to have great potential, but when I go back in a couple of months I'm seeing the same old stock and nothing new. Well, if the business isn't there neither is the incentive to expand. And if there is no expansion, there is no repeat business.

Wow, that was depressing, but not to fear, I'm not rushing out to reclaim a nine-to-five job just yet and I am optimistic over the future of collectibles on the web. Those items I didn't relist in my eBay store have been listed in the (coming soon!) old-magazines-for-sale.com store. No sense in opening until I'm somewhat stocked. I'm really almost set to open now, look and feel is set, over 400 items have been transferred into stock, and the SSL is correctly in place so the site is secure. I'd like to get another couple hundred items up, run a better test on the payment modules, and implement a search engine optimization mod that I've fallen in love with and hope to purchase this week. I'm hoping by next issue I'll be giving tips on uploading items to Google Base, which is actually where I feel the brightest potential for online collectibles lies right now.

FUN TOY FOR WEBMASTERS: While I'm far from being an expert at blogging (in fact I really need to learn how to do it properly), I do have one attached to each of my sites. A cool tool, which is available for free in its limited form is Feed Digest, which can compile your blogs/RSS feeds into one neat and tidy digest. I've created a couple on the new storefront that you can't see yet, but also put one at the bottom of the home page on my movie site which spits back the latest postings made to that site's blog. The couple on the new store I think I've put to better use, one that I consider Local News, combining the postings from the collecting-old-magazines.com blog and the movie site's, and another which I consider "World News" that I've incorporated feeds from outside sources into such as Auctionbytes and Skip McGrath's blog. When you go to the Feed Digest home page it says that new sign-ups are disabled, but I clicked around the site a little and found a place to sign-up near the bottom of one of the pages. Another alternative which I almost went with is Feedo Style, which basically does the same thing.

DEALER TIPS: Okay, the eBay Stores fee hikes are firmly in effect. Have you done anything different? In my case, not yet, but again ... coming soon! Here's my plan, maybe it will work for you as well. New items begin at auction, as I always have done. 7-days with the lowest minimum bids I can handle. Anything unsold after 7-days then gets shifted to my eBay Store at a slightly higher (more retail than wholesale) price -- I used to use the "Good Til Cancelled" duration, now it's 30-days. Since I'm in the process of opening my own store the plan is the keep relisting in the 30-day format until I'm ready to open, but once opened up eBay Store listings will next be moved to my own store after the first 30 days. Now we know we have three groups of customers: eBay-only; no-eBay; both. Once the listings leave eBay they will have ideally spent 37 days on the site giving buyers the opportunity to buy before moving to the off-eBay Store. What I'm hoping will be a benefit to this method is stale items (don't we all have those items we love that sat in your eBay Store a year or two without selling?) become fresh again first in your off-eBay Store, and then after 3-4, maybe even 6 months, they'll be fresh to the eBay crowd again! Sellers, this fee change could turn out to be a very good thing for us if the long-run plays out anything like that.

So where to set up shop? I provided a link last issue to rankings of some of the most popular solutions, here it is again. This covers storefronts that you buy, customize, own ... no more listing fees. These take a little more work, and often a little more expense in the form of a designer. What if you just want to set up a shop through someone where you pay a monthly fee? These can be pretty simple, in many cases if you can import your eBay listings shop can be set up from within a few hours to a couple of days. But you will be paying monthly or annual fees plus in some cases a commission on completed sales. If you want to be part of a community of sellers, a couple of spots I've set-up shop on in the past were Ruby Lane and the site I left it for, and preferred, on TIAS. I similar solution I had never tried as a seller, but have bought on is Go Antiques. More recent players that I see mentioned a lot, but haven't tried, and that are even less expensive are blujay and Wagglepop, which has apparently returned. Before I finally decided upon X-Cart, I had gotten myself down to two choices that fit in this monthly fee/commission structure category, those being Yahoo Stores, which has a great track record, and eBay's own Prostores, which doesn't, but man does it intrigue me. I just received an e-mail about their latest version, ProStores 7.1, so maybe the feedback will get better. Almost forgot, it's just under $100 a month, and I haven't tried it, but if that's your price range I've only heard positive things about Monster Commerce which looks like it may offer more than the rest of the bunch, but was honestly around double what I'd like to spend on a monthly basis.

As I've been mentioning in this space, I have finally found a program that I am comfortable with to set up an off-eBay store that will be tightly tied together with collecting-old-magazines.com, so I am somewhat prepared for the coming changes. But eBay's changes do force me to speed up my schedule and in the meantime they'll get to take more money from me in exchange for, well, in exchange for nothing at best and more realistically less in terms of service.

Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, in his message of July 19 made it clear that eBay Stores listings were dragging down the overall quality of the eBay site and that the fee changes were being implemented in order to better serve the core, which are apparently eBay auction style and fixed priced listings -- though I don't really understand how fixed price listings are part of the core since the only difference between them and store listings are higher fees and greater exposure, but okay. In fact, if memory serves correct, the Stores debuted prior to fixed price listings. In my opinion, if you want to refer to core listings then you are speaking about auction-style listings only. Somehow eBay Express listings will also get precedence over remaining eBay Stores listings as well.

To me, the bottom line of Cobb's message was this: "And, when you compare our operations costs for an average Store Inventory listing and an average core listing – factoring in the duration of each – our cost to host a Store Inventory listing is more than 50% higher than for a core listing. In fact, current Store Inventory insertion fees don't cover eBay's costs for hosting them."

While that may be, from my perspective I see recent eBay projects such as the very flawed ProStores and the even newer eBay Express as pretty good reasons for the step away from eBay Stores. In brief, ProStores is an off-eBay version of an eBay Store, which could stand to gain sellers who are no longer willing to run an eBay Store. eBay Express is a gathering of listings from sellers with strong feedback which can be purchased through a common shopping cart. I dislike Express because I feel it further removes seller's personalities and independence in favor of the eBay banner. I opted out.

In the end, if you collect magazines, buy or sell them, I think these changes are bad for you. It's no coincidence that one of the conditions of selling on Express is that your item must include "Item Specifics" which are included on, for example, electronics but for few collectible items. New or Used? That doesn't really relate to collectibles, does it? How about Vintage or Repro as an option? The hike in store fees means sellers such as myself are not going to want to stock 500 issues of a title that sells slow, but at the same time sell best when there is a larger choice given to the buyer. I think in the end this move this move will rob the eBay shopper of a good deal of variety. Just my opinion.

QUICK RELATED NOTE: Sellers, if you are looking to make the move away from eBay and are interested in running your own store with your own shopping cart software I came across this very helpful chart of the top Shopping Cart Software in one of the forums I frequent (I'd credit the forum too, but I honestly can't remember which one it was!). Each of the 22 carts that they have ranked on the left side of the page are reviewed in detail if you click on them. Remember, these are just individuals opinions, but they may give you a little head start if you are shopping for a cart.

The main reason that I'm going out my way to stress this is that the information just wasn't there for me. I searched everywhere I could, I Googled the cart, I searched the eBay Community Boards, I searched the Auctionbytes forums, OTWA forums, the E-Commerce-Guide.com site, and anywhere else I could think of and found absolutely zero information about the Quick Shopping Cart. Well, there were year-old news stories about them joining with another company to offer an extra service, but what I mean is that were no meaningful reviews or even any sort of praise or complaints from users anywhere.

Why is it so lousy? Okay, first, and I must admit this is my fault as I must have overlooked this on the long list of enticing features, it is not set-up to conduct international sales. I wouldn't have even bothered with the cart if I had managed to read this. Okay, I had my money in before I discovered this though, I figured I'd play with it some. You can import your products -- okay, great, I downloaded my stock from eBay through their File Exchange and then discovered that you had to use GoDaddy's own Excel Spreadsheet to upload your listings. Fine, I'll just cut & paste the required info. Well, there's no space for image URL's. Bummer, especially since my images are all hosted at another site of mine, run through GoDaddy! I have them all stored on my computer though, so I uploaded a couple and found this to be a very tedious two-step process. I was pretty frustrated by this point.

You can have Categories and Sub-categories with your GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart, but I never did find out when/if/how the page divided. Let me explain. I began by uploading issues of Sports Illustrated, of which I have a few hundred in stock. I stopped at 11 issues, but at this point all issues appeared on a single page. What I wonder is, would all 200+ issues have appeared on that single page? I kind of wish I played a little more to find that out, but honestly by this point I knew that this wasn't for me. That's because I previewed my "store" after uploading approximately 1,2, 4, 8, and 11 items, just to take a look at what was happening, and twice my browser informed me that my Quick cart was too slow to load and that I'd lost my connection (ahem, I have a cable connection!).

I had my Quick Shopping Cart for eight hours before canceling -- that's pretty bad, considering I had signed on for a month-long commitment. I figured it was well-worth the $40+ (I had a coupon) to give the service a try, as there is no free trial, however in the end that lack of a trial made me feel as though they took advantage of me. I wrote GoDaddy telling them how I had tried their cart because I had been a customer for years (domain names, they are the best at that as far as I know) and figured with their well-known presence it would be a superior product. As I said, they did refund me, and did so quickly, but before you try this I do want to point out that the Quick Shopping Cart does stipulate itself as non-refundable all over the place. I'm happy in the end because I really did not expect to get back a dime.

If you read through my earlier blog posting about the quick cart, you'll know that I left off by mentioning I was going to take a look at a Yahoo Store. Didn't happen.

What I really wanted was my own store -- no more fees. I started by looking at osCommerce and then remembered how much it had confused me when I looked at it a couple of years ago. You can't beat the price (free!), but you do need to know html (which I'm okay with), php and mySQL (both of which I know nothing about). Next I looked at a couple of solutions that were more user ready versions of osCommerce, Zen Cart and CRE loaded, both very popular. Still, looked a little out of my reach. Finally, I have settled on X-Cart, which I will be purchasing and using to open my own store very soon. Their site includes a demo store which you can try out both as a customer and administrator. I had no problems. It only costs $199, and that's it -- you own it, no more fees (other than hosting), ever! Plus, I found somebody licensed to sell X-Cart at an even cheaper price, which is a-okay by me. I'm waiting to hear back from them now to complete my purchase, so cross your fingers for me that this all goes well. If you're interested in something similar yourself send me along an e-mail and I'll let you know where to go to get X-cart cheaper than $199.

(Hint: most of the time when you shop with me you'll pay cheaper prices at auction, store prices are usually raised to better reflect the actual value of an item and take into account that the single item may sit in my store for several months without selling. Bidding can be competitive, but when it's not you generally get a steal!)

SPECIAL NOTE FOR SUBSCRIBERS: I'm toying around with some special "members-only" areas of the site. These pages would be free to subscribers of Random Issues (like you) but would require you to log-in in order to view them. The leading candidate for the members-only material would be the collection of contents listings that I've been compiling as I put my sales listings together. This is information that I just have sitting in my files that may be helpful to some and may act as an incentive in gathering new subscribers. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to put this together and if it goes as easy as I think it will it will be something included here next issue. Again, I don't know how useful this will be, but it would at least be something a little special for the eyes of Random Issues subscribers only!

I haven't tried actually buying anything on the eBay Express site, but I did play around a little and wound up taking a look to see if any of my items were there. Since I'm mostly vintage magazines, and since there is no such category, I figured there would be nothing, but I did come across one of my vintage movie cards for sale on the site. That's all I found, one stinking $4.50 card. Tell you what, I don't think I want that card there. I took a look on eBay tonight to see if there was any way to opt out of eBay Express as a seller, but I didn't see any (maybe I missed it, it's possible, but it should be easier to find if that's the case).

Why do I lean towards opting out? Well, if a buyer purchases multiple items from multiple sellers, what happens if they don't like one or more of the items? Now I have two negative feedbacks in my six-plus years selling on eBay and the first one was a real heart-breaker where someone had purchased two of the same cards from me and another dealer and ended up negging me ... when I was the guy who delivered. He apologized, but I still have that negative more than five years later. This entire eBay Express set-up looks like something that puts the seller at risk, especially since eBay is marketing it in a way that's attempting to capture non-eBay shoppers.

CRYSTAL BALL: The future of eBay Express -- if something like the buyer confusion I mentioned above occurs in large quantities, well, it could damage businesses, it could lead to a little mutiny. I like to think it will go well, but eBay has a reputation for jumping the gun on their releases (er, ProStores) and then trying to work things out once they're up and operating. What I see down the line is either an extinct or extremely scaled-back eBay Express but eBay putting the shopping cart technology to work in eBay Stores. Which probably would have been the smarter move and made more sellers happy rather than a speculative move to try and compete with Amazon.

GoAntiques UPDATE: If you've followed these newsletters and especially my blog you know I was experimenting with shopping on GoAntiques.com and having a pretty good time doing it, even though I did get stiffed with one package of damaged goods. I had saved a couple of my searches and signed up to have the e-mails sent to me. I believe I mentioned here that I had saved pretty general searches such as 'magazines' but peppered it with negative keywords such as '-quilting' and '-rack' in order to weed out items unrelated to what I wanted. It went well for a couple of weeks, I'd get pretty detailed and targeted e-mails alerting me to my searches and even allowing me to jump on a couple of good deals from a buyer I had bought from before.

The past couple of weeks though the volume of e-mail had dropped and those I received contained junk that I really didn't have any interest in at all. So this past weekend I logged in again and found that my search with negative qualifiers had been made obsolete. I thought perhaps the saved search had become corrupted, so I went to the main search page and typed in the term 'magazines' and then tacked on a couple of my negative qualifiers. Nothing. That method of search appears to be disabled. I'm mentioning this because if you followed my lead and had signed up over there, then you may want to go make sure that everything is still functioning as you had left it. There were a couple of items that I had missed, that I wouldn't have previously missed, so I was a little ticked off. Again, this is something that's not good for buyers, and what's not good for buyers is really terrible for sellers.

COLLECTING TIP: This is a good one, but I must warn you I haven't used it myself -- do not try this out for the first time with anything of great value -- So many of our vintage magazines have been rescued from basements and look beautiful but have that familiar musty odor. This was suggested to me one time by a customer, and I have seen it backed up in other columns on the net: kitty litter. Put the kitty litter in a plastic bag, put your musty magazines in the same bag, tie it up and let it sit for 24 hours or longer. There is some reported success with this cure. I probably wouldn't use anything that it actually scented, as it may leave your pubs clinging to a new and unusual scent. I was told this works for items that smell smoky as well. I don't have a cat, but if anyone wants to give this method a whirl with some of their issues that would otherwise be discards feel free to drop me an e-mail with the results and I'll gladly publish them. Remember, this is for nice mags that smell musty, not for water-damaged issues -- those are junk, best thrown out.

A more recent title published this year is Tax Loopholes for eBay Sellers by Diane Kennedy, CPA and Janelle Elms. I've only skimmed so far, but have enjoyed what I've read enough to sit down and give it a full read this week. The Amazon.com listing for this title does not include a look inside the book, so I'll give you the chapter headings here in case you're interested but wanted a little more detail:

Part I: Taxes and Business Structures
Chapter 1: Why eBay Makes a Good Business

Chapter 2: Designing Your eBay Business
Chapter 3: The Taxman and eBay

Part 2: Easy Accounting for eBay Sellers
Chapter 4: Basic Recordkeeping
Chapter 5: Financial Statements Made Easy
Chapter 6: Step-By-Step Accounting Requirements: Part 1: Getting Started
Chapter 7: Step-By-Step Accounting Requirements: Part 2: Basic Bookkeeping Techniques

Part 3: Lowering Your Taxes through Loopholes, Deductions, and Income Recharacterization
Chapter 8: Finding Your Hidden Business Deductions

Chapter 9: Business Loopholes for Homeowners
Chapter 10: Tax Benefits for the Family eBay Business

Part 4: For Advanced eBay Sellers
Chapter 11: What Happens When You've Sold Everything in Your Garage
Chapter 12: Advanced Tax Loopholes and Business Strategies
Chapter 13: The Future of eBay Tax Issues

Conclusion: Creating Your Own eBay Strategy

Part 5: Appendixes
Appendix A: The IRS Nine Steps to Business Quiz

Appendix B: Asset Valuation Worksheet
Appendix C: Resolution for Transfer of Assets, Second Promissory Note to Document Loan
Appendix D: Sales Tax Resources
Appendix E: List of Department of Labor and Employment-Related Web Sites
Appendix F: Jenny's State and Federal Tax Forms for Treasure Trove, Inc.
Appendix G: Discover Your Own Loopholes
Appendix H: Glossary of Accounting Terms

I hope that helps a little more than the available info on this title. It's on sale for just under $16 right now, and as I said, while I haven't given it a good read so far, it looks like it will be helpful enough to at least save me the price of the book! And this title is obviously geared towards online sales.

You can get a free account with Hammersnipe, but if you bid regularly and/or if you plan to make numerous bids in a short period of time, you'll want to pay them for a subscription and be able to place unlimited bids. You can have Hammersnipe take their fee (a monthly subscription is $8.95) automatically through PayPal if you wish -- they take it the same day each month, and I've personally never had any kind of problem.

As a seller I love snipers, nothing better than seeing your item take a huge jump in price as time ticks down. As a buyer, I love it even more, as I can plug in my last second bids in advance and not have to worry about them -- as long as you know what you want to pay on an item. In fact, the only time that I'll actually enter a direct bid on eBay is if I'm curious about a reserve price and trying to make sure that I meet it. Otherwise I just use Buy it Now and plug in my snipes through Hammersnipe. Even if you're not a fan of sniping, you may want to consider this service. After all, you can try it out and have limited use for free!

eBay GRIPE: I always try and split my personality when approaching any changes on eBay -- what hurts me as a buyer may help me as a seller, and vice versa. But I have to say neither buyer-Cliff nor seller-Cliff likes the new search results.

When you make a search on eBay now, all store items are returned as results. All auction items are listed first, then there's a line to differentiate the search, and then all store items. I've got to say, I preferred the old way, which would only bring back up to 50 store listings, but, and this is an important difference, allow you to choose to search all Store items separately from the auction listings. What's the problem? Well, as a buyer, I have my regular searches, and I perform them at least once daily. Some of my searches are pretty general and return quite a few results. So now, if there are 15 pages of auction listings and 100 pages of store listings and I've sorted the listings to show the newest listings first, I've got to go through about 14 pages of auctions that I'm already aware of to reach the new Store listings. Maybe it won't be so bad, because I've already begun to memorize an estimate of which page the store listings will begin on for many of my searches, but at the same time I have a lot of regular searches that I perform.

This buyer frustration translates right over to seller frustration, because as tenacious as I am with my searches, if I give up then surely many others are as well. And then, of course, they're not finding some of my stuff. eBay could fix this simply by adding a fourth tab for "store listings only" to the top of search results pages. It's kind of funny, because for years sellers have griped about there not being an option for combined search. Well, eBay combined it, but now I'm having a hard time separating it!