Wk5: Crosslister – Launched

November 8, 2026

Of course it was a VHS tape

The first thing I successfully cross-listed with Crosslister was a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles VHS tape. I’d gone digging through old inventory for something Amazon would still let me sell. A lot of the books I’d sold there before were now gated. The Ninja Turtles, apparently, were fine.

I had pretty much given up on Amazon as a selling channel. I still think it’s a good place to sell certain things. Used books used to be among them. Does the world really need another brand-new copy of StrengthsFinder?

Anyway, back to the turtles. I checked Seller Central and couldn’t find my offer.

Back into Crosslister, add the offer details, try again.

There it was. I’d forgotten how satisfying it is to make a computer do something useful after spending most of the day trying to get permissions to even try.

I’m connected, now what?!

On eBay, I finally got to the production keys only to find out they were disabled until I set up an account-deletion endpoint. Whatever that is. I was trying to put things on eBay.

Amazon sent me looking for a merchant token. I found it, connected the account, and queued the import. Fingers crossed. Toes too. I have long toes.

The import threw errors anyway. Of course.

Once we got past that, I tried creating a new Amazon catalog entry for a role-playing module. “Tabletop games” was probably too broad a category, which was my part in this. But some of the required attributes had so little to do with the thing in my hand that I couldn’t tell what a truthful answer would even look like. A dropdown at least told me what answers Amazon thought were possible. A blank text box just gave me more room to be wrong.

The way thwe got it working was to send Amazon the basics, read the rejection, and turn whatever it asked for into fields I could fill in. Thit and I had effectively made an error message into a form.

I used to work at Amazon. I know people on that team. I’d love to sit with somebody who works on that API and hand them the module. Create the ASIN from scratch using the API. I’ll bring coffee.

And yes, some of this mess is ours. If we want people who aren’t named Rob or Sherry to use Crosslister, Connect should get them to a sign-in, a permission screen, and then their inventory. If they have to go find something, take them to the right page and tell them what it’s called. I had enough trouble finding it, and I’m the guy who asked for the button.

The previous weeks didn’t stay put

Thwe got distracted by More Than Ingredients and Sixward, too. People were using both and giving me feedback. Then I tried uploading a picture of dinner from my iPhone and hit a hidden 20-megapixel limit. I had already made dinner. I was willing to crop the picture. Resizing it myself felt like doing dishes twice, so we worked on making the browser handle it.

On Sixward, I played an unranked game, got a personal best, and opened My High Scores. There was my new score, all by itself. I knew I’d played other games. I wanted the scores together, with a little marker for the ranked ones. So thwe spent part of Week 5 working on Weeks 3 and 4. I suppose I could ask people to stop using things on Sundays.

Only live listings go downstairs

I pulled an Erasure Hits! The Videos two-DVD set out of the basement to see how far I could get with something I’d bought but never listed. I scanned the barcode, checked what other copies were going for, took the photos, and filled out the eBay listing. I hit publish. eBay wanted the weight and dimensions of the package.

Fair enough. But, why hadn’t thwe asked me for those?

There’s a lot of stuff downstairs that got as far as “I’ll list that later.” Some needs photos. Some needs a little more work. Is that used puzzle complete? There’s only one way to know, which explains why it’s still downstairs.

So I have a new rule. Only things with live listings go down to the basement. When I get home from thrifting, I want to get the cost off the receipt and take the pictures while the stuff is still in front of me. I’ve given Future Rob plenty of chances to take it from there. You should see his basement. So orderly…

I want to see whether I can get enough of the right inventory onto Amazon to make it worth selling there again. I also want to get Poshmark and some newer marketplaces connected for both of us. Sherry has plenty of listings to try this on. Can she reprice or relist the stuff that’s been sitting, and get some of it onto eBay without spending an afternoon copying listings?

This project is going to take more iterations from use before I would feel comfortable sharing.

I think I’ll go thrifting in my own basement first. I hear the owner is motivated to move some merchandise!