Touting

These accursed exams that I’m sitting have forced me to make a number of sacrifices.

Foremost amongst these, probably, is that I’ve had to give up the chance to see Belle & Sebastian play at the Triptych Festival in Glasgow on Sunday. A whole day of aesthetic delights, culminating in a peformance by my favourite band: I was sorry to have to miss it. But having an exam at 9:30 the next morning, and that exam being the hideous Computational Chemistry, I had to forgo indie nirvana.

What, then, to do with the tickets? Even though the gig was sold out, I was unable to dispose of my spare pair through any of the usual channels. I would have to enlist the help of a stranger.

Now, as an aside, every time I queue up outside a sold-out gig, I ponder how much money I could make by selling my ticket there and then. Occasionally, I’d probably have gotten more pleasure out of the money and an early bath (damn you, Kaiser Chiefs). But I couldn’t possibly exploit a fellow B&S fan. I therefore set out to sell the tickets at face value, and herewith are my experiences in the modern-day equivalent of classified advertising.

My first call was to Gumtree Edinburgh, which is a classified site with versions for just about every city in the UK. It’s free to make a listing, and you don’t even have to register. You provide either your e-mail address (which is kept private) or your phone number, and wait for people to contact you. The listing lasts some ridiculous amount of time, like 120 days.

Secondly, I signed up with eBay UK, and listed the tickets on there. I saw that other people were selling tickets for the same gig, and getting a decent price, so I was more hopeful. It cost £1.50 to list them, but it was free to set up an account with eBay and Paypal. For some reason, it wouldn’t let me set a reserve below £50, and it wouldn’t let me accept a Buy-it-now price (which I would just have set at face value, for a quick sale).
Then I waited.

By Friday, my eBay auction was up at a grand total of £5. My first Gumtree e-mail came in, and I contacted the potential buyer. He seemed enthusiastic to come and collect them that night, but I was going out, so I proffered Saturday instead. I sat in all day Saturday in extreme anticipation of a phone call. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go to the bathroom, in case the phone call finally came. Anything that prevents me from going to the bathroom (aeroplane travel, visiting the Third World, &c.) is to be discouraged. Finally, he phoned late on, and said that he would come on Sunday instead. I grumbled, but what could I do? It’s a buyer’s market, it seems.

There was no phone call on Sunday, but another Gumtree e-mail came in. eBay was standing at around £20, less than half of the reserve, so hope was fading. By 3 a.m. on Monday morning, there was no going back with eBay, so I had to see it to completion, and so if my original buyer got in touch, I couldn’t sell him the ticket. I spent most of Monday morning hitting Refresh on the auction, to see if any bids had come in, but it didn’t move. An hour or so before the auction closed, I went out for lunch, and came back after it had finished. In the last minute of bidding, the current bid had shot up to £52.79, and the tickets sold.

It was trivial to upgrade my Paypal account to take credit cards, and to send an invoice to the winning bidder. The only downside was that a 3.4% (plus 20p) surcharge was taken from the final bid price, but that still left me breaking even. The winning bidder wanted to collect the tickets in person, and I was more than happy to oblige, since it saved me a trip to the post office, and an envelope. The money was in my account less than two hours after the auction ended.
The next day, at almost exactly the appointed time, the doorbell went, and it was the bidder, come to pick up the tickets. At this point, I was unsure of the appropriate etiquette: do I invite them in for tea? No, it turns out, as I handed over the tickets, and they left immediately. You don’t even have to make small talk.

eBay prevailed over Gumtree, then, and I was impressed with the efficiency of its various mechanisms for selling. I wouldn’t write off Gumtree, however: I did get at least two serious offers, and I think they would have sold if eBay hadn’t come through.

Now, if only it were as easy to dispatch Computational Chemistry….

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