Online Garage Sale

Your significant other says “What are you going to do with all that junk” and you reply “I’m going to sell it on eBay”. Tick … Tock … 6 months later … “We should have a garage sale!” … shudder at the thought of actually trying to sell stuff without technology! If you wanted to do that, call Clean House or be satisfied with having the world’s filthiest apartment. We’ll maybe not, but the point is that you have lots of stuff that other people want and will pay cash. In this post I will get your creative and motivational juices flowing by offering you some easy options to turn your junk into cash. You can follow any of these tips to get the wheels in motion today from the comfort of your home and computer. I personally recently transformed some junk into this.

Using Auction Services

If you don’t mind feeling like this guy put your stuff up for auction. In general the steps are:

1. Select the junk (um, I mean undervalued treasure) that you wish to sell
2. Clean it up and try to find all associated manuals, parts and packaging
3. Take a nice photo, perhaps from multiple angles if that would help the item sell
4. Select your preferred auction service
5. Research the going rate for similar items, you may also be able to “borrow” other peoples title’s and descriptions if its the same item
6. Put your item up for sale
7. Light a candle and wait (the candle part is optional)

Following are some auction web sites to use for step 4:

• eBay
• Amazon Auctions
• UBid
• Overstock Auctions

Using Classifieds

If you already know how much you want to sell your item for, you might find it easier to simply post the item on a classifieds site. I suggest you still follow the steps outlined above, but replace step 4 with one of the following sites:

• Kijiji
• CraigsList
• Recycler
• PennySaver

Do it Yourself Solutions

I recommend that you maintain a simple eCommerce store for all of the items you want to sell. Then while you are trying to sell items individually via the methods described above (via a promotion), you can include a link to your virtual garage sale store.

Here are a few methods to build your own eCommerce store:

• Magento with SiteGround – If you have some web development experience, you may want to have control at the code level. This solution is a good mix of simplicity vs. control. Magento is open source and SiteGround will install it for you as part of their hosting package.

For those who just want to “plug and play”, you will appreciate the offerings by eBay and Amazon:

• eBay Stores
• Amazon WebStore

Be sure to drop a link here to the stuff your selling, hey … maybe I’ll buy it, or at least agree with your significant other that it’s junk.