Ways to minimize expenses and manage the ebay seller fees?

Ok so I have already ran an ebay business before with a buddy selling used motorcycle parts on ebay. This eventually died out (do to an unsteady an unpredictable amount of bikes we could find for low enough prices). I found 2 Major problems while doing this that I would like to resolve before attempting a new business (I want to order some of those test / mystery packs).

1) Boxes are TOO EXPENSIVE. We bough some through Uline (BIG MISTAKE). We ended just trying to grab boxes from work or re-use boxes from stuff that we had personally ordered. WHAT IS A SOLUTION TO THIS???

2) We were not to sure how to take the eBay seller fees in to account for our budgeting. What I mean by this is we didnt know how to easily calculate how much profit we would actually be making after ebay takes our money. I know there are programs out there that do this for you but I am not looking to spend a few hundred for it unless people REALLY recommend it to be of good use. Any Help here?

Thanks for the help. Any other tips, tricks, or recommendations related or not would be much appreciated. -Matt

* Use USPS free priority mail boxes, which you can order (free) online.

* There are some free programs out there which calculate your eBay fees for you such as :

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blackthorne pro will calculate proft and loss for each item and total...free for a month 24 bucks after that

Definitely USPS has free boxes. You can have the buyers calculate their own shipping charges & just tack on $2-$3 as a handling fee & that should cover all your fees :)

Definitely don't use eBay picture hosting. Host your pictures elsewhere or use a free auction management tool like Auctiva.com which has a huge variety of great templates for your listings and allows you to store as many pictures as you like. It will also allow you to forward schedule your listings thereby saving on the charge eBay levies for doing this. Never pay for photos on your listings. This adds up very quickly and can be the difference between a small profit and just breaking even.

another thing with the photos.
You can use program like dreamweaver and list on ebay through HTML.. You can throw in as many pictures as you like in your listings by hosting them om places like photobucket and you wont pay anything for it! Its a great cost cutter.

I have done a lot of research and pondering on these issues myself...

ebcalc.com>>> very easy and free

auctiva.com >>> well worth the time to learn how to use it. After a couple of hours of use, I could never go back to the standard ebay listings. I just played around on the site for awhile and got the hang of it rather easily (I have ZERO patcience by the way).
Although, they do have an education tab to walk you through most features.

BOX ISSUE: While USPS will send you free boxes, you have to wait for them, and you have to use them for PRIORITY shipping which is not always the best way to go. CALL YOUR LOCAL GROCERY STORES, LIQUOR STORES, DOLLAR STORE... you get the point. Find out when they have their truck days, and tell them you are always in need of boxes. Make sure to ask the best TIME to pick them up. It may take a few calls but you will get FREE boxes and SAVE alot of MONEY!

Does anybody know of a tool like auction inspector that works on mac?
Thanks in advance.