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One of the items that frequently shows up is decluttering and selling stuff. I created this article to share my experience decluttering and selling on eBay. I hope is it useful for you in some way. Let’s start with my total sales.
My Sales On eBay
I’ve been selling random stuff on eBay for many years. When I look at my profile it shows I joined back in 1999, and have$5,160.84 in total sales. Not bad for only doing this part-time. Since I joined, I’ve sold 292 items. Crazy right?
But here is the thing. Most of those sales are at a loss. See, I initially started selling my music CD collection in order to get a feel of the process. I paid at lest $10 per album many years ago.
Selling CD Albums
Once I started selling them on eBay I was only getting $.99 or maybe a few dollars more for a few of the more popular albums. So yes, I’ve had successfull eBay sales, but my focus was on decluttering and building an eBay reputation. In my case I wasn’t looking to get rich.
Selling Stein Collection
My second project was to sell a stein collection I had. Yes, when I was single and had a lot of disposable income, I collected beer steins.
The majority of my collection was from Anheuser-Busch. I was a charter members of their Collectors Club.
When I started traveling and having to move and store all these steins, it became a pain. So I started selling them on eBay. And yes, I sold all of these at a loss too.
Once again selling on eBay was two-fold, one to declutter and reduce the number of my possessions and second to continue building my eBay reputation.
Handling Returns
I knew from the start that I didn’t want to accept returns. My reasoning for this was simple. My goal was to get rid of stuff. So accepting returns contradicted the reason for selling my stuff in the first place.
In order to compensate for not accepting returns, I decided to over-deliver. By this I mean I spent more time on the descriptions and taking lots of pictures.
Excellent Descriptions
One example is, if a music CD I was selling had a small scratch, I would write in the description the CD was scratched and the CD was used.
I never tried to hide anything or misrepresented any of the items I sold in order to artificially pump up my products.
In this manner I’ve felt that I’ve been over-delivering on what I’m actually selling. If a customer purchased a CD and the description said it was scratched. When the item arrived and found out the CD only had a minor scuff, that would be an example of what I was attempting to achieve. If that makes any sense.
Another trick I’ve used it to ship the product as quickly as I possibly can. This is another way to impress customers. If I write in the description that my processing time is 3 days, and I can actually get the item out sooner, and the customer gets their item faster than expected. That would be another example of overdelivering.
Excellent Customer Service $ Feedback
I’m not actually trying to misrepresent anything here either, sometimes it does take me 3 days to get something out so, if it just happens that I’m able to get it out next day, that’s just a bonus and impresses the customer.
Remember, I’m only doing this part-time so life just gets in the way sometimes. Since this is just a side-hustle, I only have a few items listed at any given time.
I’ve become really good at my descriptions and customer service. During all these years I’ve managed to keep a 100% positive feedback, which continues today. Take a look at the images below.
What does this all mean for you?
I hope that by sharing eBay experience you learn a little about how to sell and how I’ve done it. It’s must easier to learn from other people.
I wrote this article at the end of 2017 and I anticipate that I’ll continue selling on eBay as I’m always looking to make a few extra bucks.
By all means if you have any other questions about selling, on eBay I’d be happy to share my experience with you. Please comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.
What to do Next?
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Thanks for following along,
Dave Gates
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