About a year ago, I purchased a high definition television and began upgrading my in-home entertainment experience. I don’t regret it at all. When I purchased the TV, I moved my old 26-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) television to the bedroom.
The old TV is a monster. It remained on the floor in the corner of my bedroom because it was just too massive to lift to place on my dresser. It made viewing television from my bedroom uncomfortable, so I did not watch much from there, which is just as well.
Yesterday I decided to get rid of it. I looked into recycling the television but my options were limited. I could wait for an electronic recycling event hosted by Best Buy, for example. Office Depot also has a recycling program. If you bring televisions and computer monitors to the store, they will box it up and ship it to an appropriate recycling site for you.
I called ahead; apparently they did not have a box large enough for my television. Determined to get rid of it as quickly as possible, I decided to post an ad on Craigslist to see if I could get rid of the old television easily and quickly. I took a few snapshots and offered the television for free as long as the buyer would pick it up.
A response came within 20 minutes, and an hour later a student from the local university and her boyfriend were here to drag the television away. Next I’ll try to get rid of my old bed frame.
I recently sold a number of possessions in my year-long quest to vanquish my credit card debt as quickly as possible. Before this, I had very limited experience using online selling tools, and generally thought of them all as a hassle, so I thought I would try more than one and see how they stacked up. Your experiences may differ, along with your selling requirements, but here’s what I found:
Craigslist
I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a Craigslist presence (check to see if your hometown is on the list), and I had something that I really didn’t want to bother trying to ship: Guitar Hero III for the Nintento Wii. Craigslist, if you haven’t heard of it, is sort of like a city-wide distributed garage sale. You describe what you have using a free-form text entry field, pictures optional, prices optional, limited only by your imagination.
I said that I had Guitar Hero III for sale, found some Creative Commons photos on Flickr, asked for $50, and that was all there was to it. Within a couple of hours I had two offers. The first person haggled with me and asked if $40 would be okay. So I found a Starbucks that was easy for both of us to get to and met her that evening. If I’d waited a little longer, I could have gotten $50 for it from the second person. Lesson learned.
eBay
I had a number of DVD box sets of a favorite TV show that I wanted to unload (while keeping a soft copy of the better episodes on an external hard drive at home). It was easy enough to copy the details of each episode from a wiki to the “Sell item” page on eBay, and after a few repetitions I found it was even possible to find the vital stats with a database that eBay provided.
There are, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of options for how to sell an item on eBay. I sort of wish there was an “eBay lite” option, or better wizard that stepped me through the process. Also, it tended to break when I used the Safari browser at home. I had to remember to use Firefox.
But my biggest problem with eBay was not really eBay’s fault: they wanted me to estimate shipping costs. The thing is, I don’t own a scale, and I can’t hold something in my hand and say, “yep, that’s about six pounds.”
In general, it seemed to me that eBay is geared toward professional sellers.
Amazon Seller Account
One-click patent silliness notwithstanding, I like Amazon because it is easy. Even without 1-Click, it’s easy. And that ease of use has expanded to their options for selling things online, in my case it was a used video camera.
All I did was find the right model camera by acting as if I was looking to buy one and click a button labeled “Sell yours here”. Specify the condition (new, used, etc.), add comments, pick a price and that’s about it. You get to benefit automatically from any pictures, customer reviews, or any other information that Amazon is already storing about that product.
Amazon also did a good job of estimating the shipping cost for me. The drawback I experienced using Amazon was that I had to wait. This will vary from product to product, of course.
Conclusion
With both Amazon and eBay, there’s something of a process to setting up an account and getting paid. Craiglist is a lot more free-form in that respect. If I was in a real rush, I’d probably use Craigslist again, but for the most part, I prefer Amazon’s way of selling things. I hardly had to lift a finger.
Email this article
Print this article
