How I Made Money Selling My Junk on EBay

You may have thousands of dollars just sitting around your house, we sure did. When we were packing our house of twenty years before moving from Tucson to Los Angeles last year, we planned to have a garage sale. Our son visited and when we began to clean things out, he suggested we try eBay and list many of the items for sale there.

I went to eBay and signed up for an account and began to list our items. Some we put up for auction, but eBay also allows you to list things for a fixed price, so it's like having you own little store. eBay reaches a global audience, and the auction listings allow the market to set the price. One great example, we had a set of Keith Haring dominoes, he's a famous artist, but these were something a friend gave us as junk when he was moving. We put those up in the auction format, they sold for $100 to someone in Austria. They were something we would have put out for $5 at a garage sale.

We sold old clothes but they didn't make a lot of money, compared to the work it takes to sell them and ship them. We also sold old records and CDs as well as a lot of glassware and pottery on eBay and made a lot more money than if we had a garage sale. The records and CDs especially made a lot of money, and were very easy to list and to ship out after the sale.Some of our CDs fetched $20 each and more as they were limited, out of print titles. We never would have known this, and might have had them for $0.50 each in a garage sale.

Listing things was easy, I found many items, like CDs, books, DVDs are already in the eBay system. By entering the title or the UPC number, eBay will automatically post both a description and a photo of the cover. This makes listing easy, I didn't need to write a description or even take a photo of the item. To further help you, eBay will show you what identical or similar items sold for, right while you are making up the listing.

Here are some basic tips I would suggest to get started selling on eBay:

Sign up for eBay and sign up for Paypal
Go to the site and sign-up, it's easy. Paypal is the payment system eBay owns and mainly uses. It allows people to pay you by sending money from their own Paypal account or by using a credit card or check. One tip, Paypal requires you to link the account with a checking account. I suggest using a separate checking account from your main account or opening a specific account just for eBay, just to prevent any chance of identity theft or other problems.

Feedback is very important
Be clear and upfront in your listings, communicate with buyers and ship quickly, to build your feedback. Having positive and strong feedback makes me trustworthy to potential buyers and now also helps in my search result ranking. Poor feedback means eBay will move your listings lower, which will hurt your sales.

Watch your fees and shipping
eBay may charge an upfront fee for listing an item, plus a final value fee when you sell it. Paypal will also take a fee from the money you are paid for items. I made sure to price these fees into what I was charging for items. Also be careful with shipping costs, be sure you are charging the customer enough to cover them. I use stamps.com to print out and calculate postage. They service costs $7.99 a month, but I can print the postage and then just drop the item off at the post office, making it easy for me. You also save a little bit from the walk-up prices at the post office.

Watch your eBay up-sells
Try basic listings first. eBay will offer you a dazzling array of options to enhance your listing, and charge you higher fees. These tools can be effective, but only in the right situations. I stuck to the basic listings and just spent my time writing good descriptions and making sure I also had good images.

Use the eBay help and learning systems
eBay is a whole world and they offer many tools to train and teach sellers. I used the help section and tutorials on the site to learn more and improve my listings and sales.

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