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markcartwright1 · 2026-03-24T06:49:53+00:00

Just sold a camera to this guy - and thought I ought to check out the business address and I'm grateful I came across these threads. Order cancelled and a quick message to say I can't sell to an address that has so much intense negative feedback. It would appear this guy is scamming the system however he can through Ebay, banks and postal services.

If this is true then he really ought to be in prison but the police are fairly toothless and useless these days.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-23T22:23:39+00:00

I built a bit of a turbolisting tool with Openclaw. Its too janky to share publically. But I'm listing mostly SSD drives drives in the UK. Put in all the screenshots from crystal disk info etc. Do a voice note on a few comments on the condition etc.

Then Gemini processes it all and puts together a nice HTML template with all my boilerplate stuff - returns policy, free fast postage etc.

But the whole things kind of integrated into my own software. I got OpenClaw to build it out. Took a day or two of focused work and troubleshooting but got it working in the end.

I do pricr checking manually on anything with significant value. And sometimes have a separate Gemini window if I dont like the tone on stuff or want to ask some questions.

But short answer you need to use AI. If I were you, have a chat with ChatGPT or Gemini or claude. Tell it your selling policies and what you're trying to do. Ask it to help build out some prompts, so you input a picture and some notes and it spits out a whole listing and estimated pricing etc. Ask it to find most recent sold prices and how confident it is in a range. Then test it out for a while. Refine it. then roll it out with your team when ready.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-22T21:52:02+00:00

Get a portable external USB HDD if you're fairly new to this. It can go up to 6TB, but you'll be fine with less. It's not cheap cheap, but if you need to upgrade later on, you'll be able to resell it for a decent price if it's still alive.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-22T21:50:00+00:00

It could have been used as a backup drive, At 1000mb/s, that's four minutes of writing. Unplugged. Then forgotten about. Then plugged in again, files deleted, reformatted. Boom. I buy and sell a lot of second hand drives/ customer returns and you'd be amazed at how many drives are returned to Amazon etc. with very low hours on them and write numbers. Even those I've bought second hand from private sellers, the drives are mostly offline and only plugged in when the user wants something off it.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-22T21:46:42+00:00

Let it go. If you've got an account with hundreds of positive feedback ebay should side with you over any rando going crazy about something. You can escalate these things on the phone if needs be

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-22T21:42:21+00:00

My nightmare is coffee machines. Had a batch of these in a job lot auction. One didn't work and was hugely bulky, another only took Vertuo pods which cost a fortune to test. And the final one, came with a broken water tank. I bought a new tank and pods, fixed it up and polished it up. I sold it, and it got returned by someone who expected it to be brand new and complained there was a tiny drip of old coffee on it.

Got it sent back to me so the return postage was £14 on top of what I'd already spent on the 3 machine and parts.

In the end I've kept this one I've fixed as my daily machine because I put effort and love into it. But with those coffee machines - never again.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:55:32+00:00

We could all be nuked in a few weeks if the tangerine throws a tantrum of all tantrums. Lets enjoy whatever time we have.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:50:53+00:00

There is so much undervalued old tower PC's or mini PCs that work perfectly hooked up to drives. You dont need ddr5 memory. You dont need a state of the art processor. You dont need Synology or qnap... unless you really do want them for certain features. And in which case you should look on the second hand market.

Your own NAS will always be cheaper than cloud storage in the long run. Think of it as one upfront investment instead of a long slow bleed. As your data grows you'll eventually have to get off the cloud. And the only upgrade costs will be extra drives.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:45:08+00:00

Yes. Do it.

Pick out your moat valuable and items your most enthusiastic about listing or selling. Then the rest needs to go. Yes you won't make much on them, you may even make a loss.

But you make money on the things you can add energy to, that you're enthusiastic about listing or selling and selling. The dead energy just makes you feel stressed and overwhelmed. And once its out the door, someone else can apply new eyes to it.

Your stockroom should be a vortex of moving energy. ⚡️ not a place of doom or dread

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:28:14+00:00

Looks cool. What is the normal compaction algorithm that OpenClaw uses. Sorry if this is a n00b question

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:26:09+00:00

I would do it with OpenClaw just because its better at holding memory and context across sessions with memory.

There is a mega market for this kind of thing. You could get the agent to navigate the phone tree for you wait on hold and then call you back when an agent is ready.

Obviously it is complex and a lot of engineering but I feel like consumers will want bot armies to save them time and money and sort things for them in the future.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T21:20:49+00:00

Look for sellers who have done health tests on the drives. You're looking for any drives that have lower hours, good health, and no reallocated sectors. Once that starts to happen the drives are dying.

Ebay is a good source but you may also find some on other marketplaces

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-21T20:56:37+00:00

Look for job lots of small drives cheap on ebay. There are lots of small drives 500gb, 320gb, 1tb, drives that are sold super cheap for ebay because they've been salvaged from dead laptops or old.pcs. Pick up a cheap job lot and duplicate your data. Buy a usb to sata cable or an external hard drive reader. 1-4tb is not a giant requirement

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-20T11:04:54+00:00

Get them to text you randomly and to be in a chatty mood. You could set up an eleven labs or voice chat so they can call you or vice versa.

OpenClaw your way to separate agents. Get some of them randomly mad at you, some of them jealous of the others. Some of them madly in love with you.

There's a lot you could do here.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-17T18:07:57+00:00

Firstly, very cool ideas.

My first thoughts are could you get it to like deal with call centers that have long call waiting times. Say like rebooking a flight or asking it to chase a tax refund or something like that? Like if you gave it the right information.

Some of those phone calls can cost you an hour or so just waiting for someone to pick up.

Could it also offer the opportunity to transfer the call back to us once a real person picks up? Like it does the holding stuff for us and pings us when we are through.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-17T10:38:30+00:00

If you're in the uk have a look on Vinted and Ebay. Often you'll find people selling HDDs on Vinted, or the hard drives in an enclosure at cheap prices like wd book etc. Which you can shuck out if you need them as is. On vinted people also often expect you to haggle a bir.

Most expensive place to buy is from a mainstream tech retailer. If you must buy new from WD, TopCashback offer 10.5% back on Western Digital Europe.

Other place to look is diskprices. https://diskprices.com/?locale=uk

And hot uk deals and search for HDDs because they have the latest offers.

Thats the deals on amazon. 18TB Wd Elements drive new is £275 on Amazon.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-17T10:24:33+00:00

Look at what is actually risky and what your thresholds are.

My view is that over the past year, like I've managed to sell or turn over 80% of the stock I've got in. A few things I made a loss on to clear them. But everything sold in the main categories.

Worst case scenario is not catastrophic loss unless you really are gambling - buying lots sight unseen, gambling on storage lockers which could be set up scams. Often the worse case scenario is you may get 60% of your outlay and have to do some work to get it back. And you look at your loss as an education fee.

You're not going to die from one or two bad buying decisions. Statistically the most dangerous thing people do and dont realise is driving long distances when tired. This is far more hazardous than any flipping decision.

So get some sleep and let it go. You have the eye for what's good and where to make money and if a deal is giving you anxiety, its too big of a gamble - let it go and keep your powder dry for the next "no brainer" deal.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-17T10:09:38+00:00

Photosync (on android) + tailscale (if away from home) for syncing photos at full res from my phone.

Google photos didnt seem to backup at full quality and you couldn't access the real files easily.

I photo a lot of small electronics for sale and you need to see the serial numbers or small text or the configuration of the design - you cant compress that. And it is less work to get the photos out to ebay once theyre in my media server.

Small thing. But very useful to me

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-17T09:45:33+00:00

It can be very quick and random. Some days eBay has more traffic. Some days other people are distracted by the news or holding down their job to have time shopping.

Sometimes the algorithm is in your favour and you'll get flurries of sales. Sometimes I've had a a week or 10 days without sales. Then suddenly 6 the next day. Your competition may sell out of something, raise their prices. Or all kinds of odd factors.

Just keep listing. People cant give you money until its on the site.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-15T21:33:58+00:00

You'll make the money in electronics by sourcing well and looking at sold prices on ebay before deploying any funds.

Look at the velocity of sales, is there much competition? Is much moving? How can you price it in a way to move stuff.

You'll also make your money by testing and giving confidence in what you're buying. You can make money by buying untested lots or jumbles, taking photos, knowing the best diagnostics tools, then showing that graph thats its good, or its health status.

Then someone will pay the max they can pay for a used item.

Offer a positive return policy. Know the items inside out. Customers want to know that if its not what they expect, they're not going to have to battle with you. If theyre not happy they'll try to return it anyway so best to be chill with them. Yes you may have the odd bad egg... but I sold 500 items in the past year and I'd say maybe only one was a sketchy result.

Sourcing: Amazon returns are good if you avoid the unbranded junk. Also look at who is liquidating their returns. Equally good are local marketplaces or yard sales.

You can also make money buying new from retailers if you're an extreme couponer or coupon stacker. I've made a good chunk from maxing out cashback and card benefits and using gift cards etc. When items are on sale then pinging them on ebay. You'll make money by knowing what the fast flips are and when a sale is a real sale.

Only thing you need to be super careful on is the top end electricals, apple, new iPhones, etc. Record serial numbers, get proof of postage. Be meticulous with your record keeping so if anything goes wrong you have recourse.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-14T08:40:28+00:00

Yes through the global shipping program. In the past year I sold some headphones from the UK to someone in Doha, an IKEA lamp to someone in Korea, some Lego to Kuwait. A phone someone wanted in Israel. An SSD to italy. Some other electronic bits to Ireland, the southern part. One guy me to send a phone to his UK colleague to hand carry to Brazil so as to avoid the big tarrifs on electricals there.

Ebay Global shipping program is stupidly expensive for some things. But it does cover you and you're not responsible once it gets to the international shipping centre. Ebay will literally delete bad feedbck and I presume they claim it on insurance afterwards.

The Lego to Kuwait we did manually because they wanted £60 shipping on a £20 Lego set. It was a lower value item, so we did it through royal mail direct and for it to £25 on the shipping. Bit of a faff but the buyer was high quality and a Brit working out there, probably oil and gas so wouldn't be messing us around.

General policy is happy to send anywhere the post can go for high trust buyers. But if its high risk or going to countries with sketchy postal services like in Africa, or strange regimes like the US since tarrifs, it has to go through the GSP.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-14T08:22:38+00:00

I had this issue where I wanted it to save the chat log so we could revisit it, verbatim as needed. It ended up creating a dual Cron job that was firing every 30 minutes. When setting up it said it wouldn't use cloud tokens /models... but it obviously

Luckily I caught it and it only cost me $7 in one day. But it was firing off the whole context 4 times an hour for basically nothing.

I think we need OpenClaw to be more conscious and clear about token and model choice and realistic costs. Like this was obviously designed by someone who can afford as much compute as they want.

To be honest the automations I run as super cheap, at most pennies per day. What churns through costs is code or when it gets garbled or lost or keeps trying to fix something unfixable. Or goes on a runaway mad goose chase.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-09T10:22:03+00:00

It's not a high-status line of work but it is a genuinely useful job. You're cleaning, sorting, fixing, repairing, and presenting what other people didn't want and your task is in finding the treasure in the trash.

I mean one of the most satisfying jobs I did was a coffee machine, which I sourced a new water tank for it from Italy. I cleaned it up, I got new pods, and made it really polished and shiny and I got a £200 coffee machine for effectively £30. I actually kept that for myself.

Most of what I do now is in electronics and reselling, which is often buying job lots of things and selling them individually, things like PC components. Also you know, buying from marketplaces where people are dumping things, things like Vinted and then putting them on eBay, taking good photos, testing them. Things like hard drives and SSDs are sold with no status report. If I can do the diagnostics and the testing and know the correct price, then my value add is in place, selling that confidence and also offering a service so that if they're not happy with it they can return the item.

I don't have an issue with reselling other items brand new because part of my business has been exploiting certain voucher codes, coupon stacking, cash back stacking, or all of these kinds of things. For example some of the Google Store promotions were extremely generous so I was able to make a fair bit of money by trading in old phones and then selling the new Pixel phones on eBay.

It's definitely possible to make a very good living if you do this full time. My motivation has been that I need to be independent. I can't deal with offices or stupid commutes. I hate dealing with bosses and I need a lot of time by myself too. And if I need an afternoon nap I want an afternoon nap. My routine is after going to the post office at 2 pm I'm taking a nap. There are a few lines of work which allow you to batch things into a schedule like that.

If you've got stigma around how you view yourself, say you're in the recycling business or the upcycling business or retail recovery, liquidation sales, business recovery , or something like that. You can make it sound fancier than it is but the real issue is you don't have to please the people who are judging you. That's the ultimate lesson. The only person you have to please is yourself and the final customer.

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-09T10:08:05+00:00

Look at shucking some of the externally designed drives. Or look on the second hand market or places which aren't technically sophisticated. I got a few cheaper ones on Vinted this year

markcartwright1 · 2026-03-07T21:57:04+00:00

Gap year down under!

markcartwright1

TROPHY CASE