Less is More

It's been about a month now that I've been on a slightly heightened minimalism binge. Since I bought a house about 4 years ago, there's been no need for me to get rid of anything. My wife would disagree. But really, I don't buy that much stuff, and combined with the fact that I don't break stuff that often, I tend to end up with lots of old, slightly worn out things that I just don't use any more.

So now I'm selling it on eBay.

Most of the reason that I never sold anything on eBay before is just that it is such a hassle. PayPal makes the payment part easy, but then there's the delivery. Packing stuff up in a box and taking it to the post office to find out how much it will cost to ship, unpacking it to take pictures because you forgot to do that first, then doing the listing, then repackaging, then going back to the post office to actually send it, whew! Too much effort.

So I have my brother do it for me.

The company he works for will let him use the shipping department. They ship UPS, which seems to do a pretty good job. My brother is also a skilled estimator. He can usually guess about how much the shipping will be. I just have to find stuff, then write up some description of it. He usually uses my description to find a finished item on eBay, and then cribs together a description from that.

Why does he do it? He gets a commission.

Not just any commission, a sliding twenty down to zero percent commission. Why would he work for a zero percent commision? Well, in reallity he would not, but we capped his part to $45. So, in the limit case an infinitely expensive item would still only get him $45, which would divide out to a zero percent.

At first we had a set of rules (which I don't quite remember). For up to $75 we had one percentage, then it dropped to a lower percentage up to $150, where it dropped again. The problem with it was that he made more commission on a $74 sale than he did on a $76 one. This is part of why the IRS rules for tax bracket are more complicated than I think they should be. We decided that there had to be a simpler way. And really, it is obvious.

commission(price) = $45e^-price/165

Easy, right?