5 Lessons Learned from Shipping and Selling an item on eBay.

Hello! I just feel angry, financially exploited, and a little upset because I spent $19 sending a 40z ipod through the UPS store and checked the same price and it would have been $4.00 with just general post office. It sold for $21.00 and I recieved $29.99 from the buyer for the entire exchange (including s&h). So despite my reaction to the shipping part, I definitely felt stoked to earn ANY kind of profit ($10 profit is great. > than nothing!) So I AM surprisingly rewarded about that, but have learned some lessons from this happenstance. So, I'm going to present the 5 lessons learned and would appreciate if someone could educate me on how to send things (packages etc) via post office. UPS/fedex etc are all SCAMS omg!! Huge ripoff!!

I have sold a few other things in ebay before, but this time proved to be a valuable learning experience.

1. Always Do it yourself. It's always less expensive and in many ways more rewarding. If If would've printed off the tracking labels myself it would've cost much less.
2. Make sure the profit that you make is worth/commensurate/proportional to the value of amount of time put into earning that profit. I spend 5-6 hours and a good bit of energy selling the ipod item on ebay, communicating with the buyer, posting photos, creating a sell item, sending it, preparing the item for sale. Make sure the profit you will earn is with the effort and time put into making that profit! From a purely economic point of view. The value of the time put into (effort, time, energy, other things you could be doing with your time + the value of the item or service sold) should = (profit!).
3. I will be never using the UPS store again; Post Office shipping is MUCH less expensive!
4. The U.S. is too brash for me, I prefer the European sophisticated experience and ambiance (I've even heard americans remark are French are "nicer" and I asked if that met more kind and they said yes).
5. The different between the post office and UPS is that the post office is MUCH less expensive (I didn't know that)!