Victory! Victory is MINE!
Aug. 26th, 2011 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgSo I've been ebaying quite a lot of late, to the tune of 12 purchases in the last 31 days. It's OK, I've reached my limit. I'll stop. For a while.
So what have I been acquiring with such unseemly haste? Pretty rocks, mostly, and some camera gear. A shark's tooth. Time was when I felt safe from online shopping because I found it necessary to bond with a rock before committing to purchase. Unfortunately the pretty rock photography project has had the unexpected side effect of letting me bond with pictures of rocks I haven't even met yet.
At first I was attracted mainly to specimens I'd been chasing to no avail for years, albeit with a recent suspension of activities. I searched for them by name and found a few. But then I found the right categories, the shops, the dealers, and learned the most dangerous art of all: I learned to Browse.
I started off by limiting my searches to items in Australia, working under the assumption that anything I'd want would probably be here, and I'd save on postage. Wrong. The best rocks are out there in the rest of the world, and most of them are in China. Where comparisons are available they work out much cheaper, even with shipping. If one is willing to wait, that is. One is.
The auction process is surprisingly subtle, and I feel I've learned a great deal. It's no accident that the most attractive rocks are sold by auction, but I've been lucky and picked up a few relatively common items with Buy-it-now, on sale, and with free shipping. Woo!
I lost a few auctions literally in the dying seconds but then![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaelajael put me on to an Auction broker site called Auction Snipe so I could wreak my revenge do the same myself. I then lost a few auctions because my maximum bids were too low, so I learned to study the market better. Now if there are other bids I eye off my competition; if the other bidders have hundreds or thousands of purchases to their names I imagine they're dealers after a bargain, which I find reassuring.
My latest (and hopefully last for a while) victory defeated a dealer's bid by $0.13 in the final seconds of the auction, so I'm pretty sure that I have indeed secured an attractive piece at a relatively bargain price. As long as it arrives eventually from Peru of course and makes it through the minefield of Australia Post's deadly Final Mile of delivery. Hmmm, a package from Peru might also take a little detour through Customs.
And now I can look forward to a shower of fun little packages over the next two months (but hopefully not much longer).
So what have I been acquiring with such unseemly haste? Pretty rocks, mostly, and some camera gear. A shark's tooth. Time was when I felt safe from online shopping because I found it necessary to bond with a rock before committing to purchase. Unfortunately the pretty rock photography project has had the unexpected side effect of letting me bond with pictures of rocks I haven't even met yet.
At first I was attracted mainly to specimens I'd been chasing to no avail for years, albeit with a recent suspension of activities. I searched for them by name and found a few. But then I found the right categories, the shops, the dealers, and learned the most dangerous art of all: I learned to Browse.
I started off by limiting my searches to items in Australia, working under the assumption that anything I'd want would probably be here, and I'd save on postage. Wrong. The best rocks are out there in the rest of the world, and most of them are in China. Where comparisons are available they work out much cheaper, even with shipping. If one is willing to wait, that is. One is.
The auction process is surprisingly subtle, and I feel I've learned a great deal. It's no accident that the most attractive rocks are sold by auction, but I've been lucky and picked up a few relatively common items with Buy-it-now, on sale, and with free shipping. Woo!
I lost a few auctions literally in the dying seconds but then
kaelajael put me on to an Auction broker site called Auction Snipe so I could My latest (and hopefully last for a while) victory defeated a dealer's bid by $0.13 in the final seconds of the auction, so I'm pretty sure that I have indeed secured an attractive piece at a relatively bargain price. As long as it arrives eventually from Peru of course and makes it through the minefield of Australia Post's deadly Final Mile of delivery. Hmmm, a package from Peru might also take a little detour through Customs.
And now I can look forward to a shower of fun little packages over the next two months (but hopefully not much longer).
