Retiring my Etsy shop

Back when we were living in Atlanta, I opened an Etsy shop. I had inherited some vintage dresses and figured Etsy would be the simplest way to sell them. I added a few other items over time, like vintage costume jewelry, some Depression glass, and postcards. I began collecting post cards in high school and kept it up for over 20 years so have hundreds from all over the world, although most of them wound up being from East Germany and Sweden. 

For the first couple of years things sold fairly steadily. Nothing dramatic, but steady. There'd be maybe a sale a month. Not exactly enough to fund a posh retirement but enough to make it worth the minor effort involved. Then things slacked off. A lot. It struck me recently that it had been at least a year since the last time I found myself counting out a stack of post cards to send to a buyer. The dust has gotten pretty thick on the Sterlite tote that holds the Etsy inventory. 

At the same time the physical inventory is gathering dust, the online one keeps getting charged listing renewal fees. It's not a dramatic amount per item, but multiply it by a dozen or so items and then multiply that by close to a full year with no sales. . . the inevitable question, the only rational question, is why the heck am I doing this? 

So, goodbye Etsy. Now the only question is what to do with the contents of the tote. Maybe I'll give Ebay another shot to try getting rid of postcards. I tried EBay back  before they started letting sellers set prices. Tried auctioning a couple things and ran into some bizarre scammers so gave up on EBay pretty quickly. Since then I've revisited EBay on behalf of the museum. The museum sells items that don't fit into the museum's mission or are duplicates of things it already has. EBay has the distinct advantage of not collecting any fees until an item sells, which means no constant (if small) bleeding away of the bank account. The worst that happens with EBay is occasionally someone will make an insulting low-ball offer, which is easily ignored. The museum sells a lot of vintage postcards.  

I do know that if I shift some stuff over to EBay I need to think long and hard about the combination of pricing and shipping fees. Postage continues to creep up, as I learned the hard way after selling a pint of buttons a year or two ago. Cheapest way to send them turned out to be in a small flat rate priority box but even then my profit margin dropped to effectively zero. The only positive thing about that transaction was the faint satisfaction of knowing the buttons went to someone who was probably much craftier than I am and so would put them to good use. 

It has occurred to me that one solution to the pricing/shipping question is to simply make the prices on everything high enough that I could say "free shipping" as an enticement. People love illusory bargains.