Flog it! Confessions of a Rookie Ebay Seller

“Here you are, John. A nice little challenge for you; we’ve cleared out this stuff from the craft storeroom and we’ve put it all to one side. We’re sure you could make us some money by selling it for us. Use the charity’s Ebay account…”

As a volunteer at a local community centre, I’d been moaning for ages about said storeroom which only the very bravest of souls dared to enter. Now you could actually set foot inside without tripping over bags on the floor. It only took one of my weekly visits to tidy it up – well, to a reasonable extent…

It took another week to establish that we couldn’t use the charity’s account, something about requiring us to have a debit card, which the account hasn’t got. So we decided I personally would flog the stuff (how do I do that?) and donate the proceeds back to the centre. It took another week to navigate what was involved in making my first sale. I was helped by my daughter Helen, who spent 4-5 hours photographing, cataloguing and trawling the internet to price up about 50 vinyl LP’s from the rock ‘n roll era. We’d been advised that some could fetch as much as £35, and licked our lips as we totted up the potential £ 000’s that could benefit our community.

And £ 000 was precisely what we got. Nobody showed any interest in our LP’s, singly or as a package. Only one viewer. Somebody told me his neighbour could sell them on his market stall. But the guy kindly returned them with a recommendation that I give them away. It only took a single entry on Freecycle, and I felt quite sentimental when somebody said he wanted them…

It took 2 hours to unpack, arrange, photograph and repack two large bags of fabric weighing 25 kg altogether. I couldn’t believe it when, 3 weeks after listing it, I received a message saying the job lot had sold! Even better, the buyer could collect in person! Off the mark…

My next success was a set of Disney crochet kits, which I’d to send by post. With Helen’s help I worked out how to package it up with enough protective material, taking care to keep the weight down. This was followed by a set of beautifully coloured Sandipal craft rolls which – mercifully – a lady collected for her son who ran a nursery.

Somehow-or-other, the centre had acquired 20 packs of glossy cardboard which they asked me to sell. Employing my limited marketing skills I succeeded in attracting a single buyer who wanted just one of them. It narrowly fitted inside the largest bag the Post Office sold. I had to cut a piece of hardboard to size to hold it rigid. Off it went, another sale. I hope nobody else wants one. 

Then there were the powder paints, all 10 tubs of them. These weighed just under 10 kg each. After 5 weeks of listing the best two, somebody put in an £8 bid for one; someone else paid the £12 ‘buy now’ price! It took about 4 months before they all went. Oh my, they posed me some challenges to package. I bought several big posting bags, and exhausted my endless supply of foam, bubble wrap and other materials we kept in our loft.

There’s an art in photographing the materials. You’ve got to take pictures from different angles so the buyer knows precisely what to expect. For example, this reel of yarn, end and side view. [Yes, I ‘sold’ it, but the buyer never paid up so I had to cancel the sale.]

Isn’t anybody interested in this attractive little selection of craft materials that I’m selling? At £25, going for a song? You could bid for £17…

-o-O-o-

When I finally donated my profits, they amounted to £80, equivalent to earnings of about £1 per hour spent on the project. The hours I’ve spent searching for padding, retrieving ‘lost’ postage labels on the system, photographing and listing… Sometimes there has been the exhilaration of a race against time to meet Ebay’s posting deadline.

But hey ho, I’ve learnt a great deal about the art of selling online, and we’d freed up lots of room in the back store…

…only to find that a load of old chairs now need to be accommodated there. Aagh!!