How To Sell All Of Your Stuff – Part 2

In Part 1 of How To Sell All Of Your Stuff we gave our top tips for getting started. Now in Part 2 we share our favourite selling methods.

METHODS FOR SELLING YOUR STUFF

Set Up A Stuff Blog

This is my biggest tip for selling your stuff – utilise your networks. After selling things for months on ebay, I advertised some of the bulky items to my friends. I decided the easiest way was to set up a blog. We used a subdomain of Simon’s website but it is very easy to set up a free blog on Blogger or WordPress . It doesn’t need to look fancy, just list each item you want to sell with a detailed description, photo and price (include the original price too to show them how much they are saving). I then emailed the link to the website along with a list of the things for sale to my friends and colleagues, and encouraged them to forward it on to their networks. We also posted it on facebook.

It worked amazingly well! We sold almost everything we listed, and it was so much easier than ebay – we didn’t have to post items or pay fees. It helped that we kept prices low (usually no more than half the purchase price), and that our friends forwarded the email to their contacts so we reached a much wider network. We even managed to find great tenants for our house this way. A few months later we did the same thing again, adding new items and reducing prices of things that hadn’t sold (in our ‘January Sale’). This worked just as well and our Stuff Website became our most profitable selling tool.

I would recommend that you start selling your belongings with this method. Focus on big items that you can’t post and high value things such as electronics, although it also works well for heavy but low value items that you need to get rid of (such as books). Anything that doesn’t sell you can then try on ebay and the other methods we’ll discuss in Part 3.

We aren’t the only ones using this technique. Leo from Zen Habits is moving from Guam to San Francisco this year and has set up a Yardsale site selling everything they own.

Fees: Free!

Best for: everything and everyone, especially those with large friendship and work networks.

Ebay

Ebay is the classic method for selling things online and the one I used most, although if I were to do it again I would start with the Stuff Blog. You can sell anything here but I found electronics, photography equipment, CDs (if new or unusual), art supplies and anything signed, rare or limited edition sold well. It’s an auction format where it can be difficult to tell what will sell so give everything a go. Sometimes things go for annoyingly little (like 99p for Helly Hansen snowboard trousers) but you can get some surprises – we were amazed to sell a limited edition Doors in the 21st Century CD for over £50!

Here are my top tips for selling on ebay.

• List your items on Sunday afternoon or evening for a 7 day listing to reach the maximum viewers. Most of the bids take place near the end of the auction, so choose a time when people will be online. Thursday is also a good day to list.
• Search for completed listings in the advanced search to find out what price you are likely to get.
• Start your item at 99p with no reserve if you can risk it. You avoid ebay listings fees and the final bid is likely to be higher. The market tends to set a fair price.
• Batch your tasks to save time. Listing on ebay is time consuming, especially when you first start. You can save time by being organised. Choose what you are going to sell, take the photos, resize and crop them if necessary (a photoshop action saved me lots of time), then calculate the postage costs. You’ll then be ready to start listing.
• Copy and paste item descriptions from manufacturers websites .
• Make your listing descriptions as detailed as possible, be honest about the condition, and include great photos.
• Include extra photos for free (ebay charges for more than one) by uploading them to Photobucket and copying and pasting the html into your listing.
• Save up packaging materials to reduce your costs. I used newspaper and cheap white printer paper for books, CDs, DVDs etc.
• Dispatch your sold items quickly and leave feedback for the buyer.

For more ebay selling tips, check out Money Saving Expert. Thanks to Amy, our friend who recently moved to Australia for her ebay advice.

Fees: Ebay charge a listing fee if the starting price is more than 99p and if it sells they’ll take a 10% cut. You’ll also pay Paypal fees of 3.4%, but this is the easiest and quickest way to be paid.

Best for: anything you can’t sell to your networks especially electronics, rare and branded items.

In the third and final part of How To Sell All Of Your Stuff we’ll share more methods for selling and let you know how much we earned.

Detailed Guide to Selling Everything You Own

Blogger Adam Baker from Man Vs Debt has written an incredibly detailed guide to selling everything you own called Sell Your Crap.

It’s based on his family’s experience of doing just that and features four separate eBooks: the main guide covers the whys and hows of selling your stuff, and there are three extra books with step by step instructions and special selling techniques for eBay, Craigslist and Amazon.

If that’s not enough there are 10 video interviews with other bloggers and authors who have got rid of their clutter.

I wish we’d had this guide when we were selling our possessions! Our posts are a great introduction but if you are really serious about selling everything you own check out the Sell Your Crap guide here.