Bonus - eBay Secretly Tested a 5% Minimum on Promoted Listings | Pure Hustle Reseller Rants Ep. 1

And let me give you a personal one that affected me this last week.

Uh, I was...

You know, I, and we all know this is going on at estate sales and, and going on at auction houses.

But when you see it happen and you can kind of pretty much get the suspicion that they are, they're kind of picking and choosing what they're gonna list and taking the best stuff ahead of time, it becomes really, really frustrating.

Especially when it's an auction house that's online where you don't get to go and see all of the stuff in person.

Now, a lot of these auction houses do offer a day where you can go and review the material, uh, but if you're a part-time seller, it may be during the week when you can't get over there, and so you're kind of relying on what they're posting online.

And I think sometimes even the pictures that they're posting, they're, they're potentially hiding information, hoping that some people are bidding without actually going and seeing the stuff.

So there was this one auction that was nearby my house, and when I say nearby, it's about an hour drive, so it wouldn't have been convenient to go and, and look at all of this stuff ahead of time.

So I'm kind of relying on the pictures, and there was a lot of well over 100 leather bound collector's books and it...

I mean, they're really, really nice.

I did all my research, and potentially I'm looking at these books and seeing this is likely going to be about $1,000 plus sell that I could do on eBay, uh, if I lot them all together.

Even if I part them out, might potentially make a little bit more, but you got slow sellers when you're dealing with that.

So I'm super excited because as it's getting closer to the hammer time for this bid, it's still pretty low.

Like I was getting, you know, some bids in under $100.

Uh, but then I'm doing some more research and I realize that within this collection there's only a handful of books, about five of them, that are worth all of the money.

Most of them sell for about three to five dollars apiece, so if you're looking at 100 of them selling at $5 apiece, well, that's not very much, right? You're looking at $500 total for this instead of $1,000.

It's the four or five books that make this listing go north of $1,000.

But the pictures that they showed didn't really list exactly every book.

They kind of took some pictures where they pulled the books out and showed the spines, but it's really hard to read.

So what I ended up doing is taking all of those pictures, throwing them into Claude, uh, AI and having it research the exact titles and put them in alphabetical order.

And sure enough, uh, this listing for the books, the total set should have been, if it was complete, about 120 books.

This one was just over 110, and those five books, they weren't there.

They're not in the listing, right? But the average person just looking at this is gonna assume, hey, they've got most of the books.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

If these are rare books, it's a chance that the collector didn't have those five expensive books to start with, which is possible, but this, this auction, I mean, this person had some very expensive things.