An Open Letter to the Seller I Was a Year Ago

Dear me, one year ago —

You're sitting at the kitchen table again, staring at the same fee statement you stare at every month, doing the same mental math you always do, and arriving at the same conclusion you always arrive at: this is just what it costs to sell things online. You've said that sentence to yourself so many times it stopped sounding like a complaint and started sounding like a fact.

It's not a fact. I need you to hear that now, a year early, so you don't spend twelve more months treating a fixable problem like a law of nature.

Here's what you don't know yet: you're going to spend an evening — one ordinary, unremarkable evening — actually looking into whether there's a better eBay alternative instead of just complaining about the fees to nobody in particular. You're going to feel a little embarrassed that you didn't do this sooner, the way you feel embarrassed realizing you've been driving the long way to somewhere for years.

You're going to find one option — TrueGether — no listing fees and nothing taken off the base tier, and you're going to read the pricing page twice because you'll assume there's a catch. There isn't. That's going to bother you more than it should — some part of you got so used to being nickel-and-dimed that "no hidden cost" feels suspicious instead of just being what it says it is.

You're going to hesitate before you actually start selling online there, because switching feels like starting over, and starting over is exhausting when you're already tired. I want to tell you it isn't as hard as it feels right now. The catalog import took less time than you spend deciding what to have for dinner most nights.

The traffic is going to be smaller at first. I won't pretend otherwise to make this letter feel more triumphant than it should. But you're going to notice something else instead — the amount you actually keep per sale, and how that number stops requiring the mental gymnastics you've been doing for years just to feel okay about your own pricing.

You'll wonder, a few months in, why you treated "sell online without fees" like a myth instead of a real option that existed the whole time, just outside the one place you'd trained yourself to look.

I'm not writing this to tell you the choice was easy. I'm writing it to tell you it was worth making earlier than you did. If you're reading this and you're still at that kitchen table, doing the same math — that's your version of this letter. Go find your own evening to actually look.

Love, the version of you that finally did.

P.S. — if you're currently running something small on the side, a side hustle selling platform that doesn't eat your margin matters more than it seems like it should when you're just starting out. Don't wait a year to notice that, like I did.