I want to share with you something that happened to me this week on eBay. For the past 18 or so years I’ve been selling, in addition to stamps, feathers from our pet scarlet macaw. This included small red “body” feathers, deep blue wing feathers, multi-color “under wing” feathers, and those long (18-25”) tail feathers. No problems. Until this week. It had been a while since I had listed any feathers and decided to sell six of those long tail feathers that had been accumulating.
Built my listing as I normally do and launched it to eBay. Within a couple hours I got several bids, with the highest being about $65. The next morning I went to check how much the auction was up to and found out that eBay had removed it. Seems that one is no longer permitted to sell macaw feathers on eBay. Some government web site lists macaws as a threatened species. Evidentally eBay doesn’t want to do the two-step with the government on where the source of a seller’s feathers come from so they took the chicken way out and simply stopped any seller from listing them. Thanks a lot eBay bozos.
So….. I opened an account on the web site ETSY.COM and listed my feathers there. They have no problem with macaw feathers being sold on their site. Please note that this is NOT an auction site - it is a fixed price, no bid selling arena. I put those six tail feathers there at a price of $75 with free shippping. They sold within two hours. That was the good news. The bad news is that in addition to having to pay $5 for a large mailing tube, the shipping came to over $10.
I’ve since put six more, slightly longer tail feathere up on Etsy, but increased the price to $85. This is still a very good price for a half dozen feathers that are about 22” in length and ship Priority Mail for free.
One of the other things I do in my spare time besides eBay stamp sales is woodworking. I make a variety of fairly small articles - mostly boxes and recently decorative bowls turned on my large wood lathe. The bowls are what is known as “segmented bowls”. One starts with strips of wood, cut into small segments at a specific angle, arranged into rings, the rings are stacked together, and then turned on the lathe into a bowl. Lots of work but the end result is quite spectacular. Over the upcoming weeks (or months) I hope to offer some of these items on ETSY. Stay tuned - I’ll announce when this starts. :-)
You can see what I have there by clicking here: filamsellers.etsy.com