Selling some stuff

After all of my decluttering it seems that I have a mountain of clothes and a few odds ends — not really as much stuff to sell as I thought. I’ll be dealing with the clothes in another post, but for now I am focusing on stuff and which platform is best to put your stuff on, and some handy hints to make it easier to sell.

The Furniture

The first thing that I needed to sell was an old bookcase. I loved this thing, despite having bought it second hand off a guy for $100 a couple of years ago. It was an Ikea book shelf, sturdy and solid and on wheels which made it great to move around. However it looked funny in the new house so it was time to purge. As a big furniture item I needed to move quickly I put it on Gumtree. I did some research first and found the Ikea model description and the current recommended retail price (RRP) which was just over $200. I started at $80 but was soon forced to drop it to $50 due to lack of interest.

A few tips:

• The thing that made the bookcase easier to sell was that it was from Ikea, and my buyer knew it could be taken apart.
• If you do have an item that you are selling from Ikea and you have misplaced screws or an allen key just got to the store and they will give you a new one.

The Tech

The second thing I had for sale was an old iPhone 5S in perfect working condition, as I just upgraded. I was keen to try out new platform Bountye. I listed for $350 but received no responses at all. After a few days I tried Gumtree and I got a huge response, who might I add all tried to bargain me down. I ended up relenting and selling to for $290 to a buyer from Gumtree.

A few tips:

• If you have an old iPhone that is newer than a 4, it will already be unlocked so all you need to do is erase all of the your data (Settings/ general / Erase all Content and Settings).

The Decorative Stuff

The Next item on my list is an hour glass-timer given to me by an awesome friend who was cleaning out her cupboards. I loved it but just couldn’t find somewhere to put it in the house that looked right. I thought I’d give a new platform Carousell a try, and listed the hour glass as well as a few other items. I got a bit of interest straight away, however things took an awkward turn when I realized that the app had listed my locatio

n as Melbourne (and there was no way to change it). Despite this I still connected with a buyer for the hour glass and we made arrangements for me to ship it. However on another item (a handheld blender) the shipping cost made the purchase price too high for my buyer.

A few tips:

• For selling a whole lot of items in one go on multiple sites, I created a spreadsheet that allowed me to list the title, description, price and RRP. It was just easier to have all of this information handy for each platform.
• I also set up a little stage for my items using the back of a cardboard box and a scarf.

Still to sell:

So I still have a few items to sell that I have listed on some different platforms. They include a few books that I have listed on Amazon (watch out as Amazon takes a nice cut):

The Screenwriters Bible

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B019NRF1A4

Friendly Enemies: A book about the actor director relationship (this is really good!)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0823079449

HTML 5 & CSS 3 coding

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0321719611

Anything that I don’t sell by this weekend I am going to look at the alternatives like ebay, or gumtree (sometimes sadly scale trumps beautiful design).

Next week I list my storage space, and look around my house for things to rent out. Til then — happy sharing!

To follow my journey head to The Wholesome Dollar