vendredi 4 octobre 2013

Selling your stuff on eBay

As I was telling you in my last post, my boyfriend and I are currently going through hard financial times as he just lost his job and I've just spent two months in a row not working. Fortunately enough, we aren't to the point that we can't afford food, or anything like that, but it definitely isn't easy as we need to buy a car in about two weeks.

So I had to make some decisions to find money and the hardest for me was to sell my stuff. I started with my collection of CDs. I know it probably sounds childish, but this was a very hard decision to make because the collection was dear to me. So this is how I sold my 300 CDs to MusicMagpie and I am now carrying on selling stuff on eBay.

I had never sold anything before on eBay, so this was completely new for me. I can't explain how happy I was when I realised the process was very easy. It has a lot of advantages, but I did find some bad points to it.

Bad points : 
  • Fees. Although that sounds pretty fair to pay fees to be able to sell your stuff on their website, it's already annoying to know you're selling it for peanuts, but it is even more when a part of the money is going to eBay and Paypal.
  • Buyers who take ages to pay. Although most buyers are serious and pay almost straight away, some others are really not bothered about paying. And obviously, that freezes the whole process since you can dispatch the item until it's paid. 
  • You can't always sell internationally. For me, as a French person living in the UK, I found it pretty annoying that I couldn't sell my stuff in the UK because my eBay account was set in France. You need to have a minimum of sales within your country to be able to start selling abroad. Which I found very inconvenient as a lot of my stuff is French and would interest French buyers only (DVDs for example).


Good points :
  • Easy. As I said, it's very easy to use and it's extremely convenient. You just fill in your advert, which you can do from any device (laptop, iPad, iPhone, anything that has internet basically) and you publish. Done! Altogether, it takes you about 5 minutes to post your ad, which is amazing.
  • Once your item is sold, it's very quick and easy to post. When the buyer has paid you, you get a notification telling you it's done, and you have access to the buyer's address. All you need to do is dispatch the item and confirm it's done.
  • Feedbacks. I love feedbacks, I like the fact that someone can tell whether you're a good seller or not. I personally base myself a lot on feedbacks when I buy something online. So that's why I find it important to be able to give and receive feedbacks. eBay let me do this, as a buyer and a seller, which is great as you can feedback someone who has never paid you or on the contrary, has been a great buyer.
  • Sort your stuff. Although it is a bit heartbreaking for some items, at the end of the day it allows you to sort your stuff out. I had some many things which I was never using and were just standing in a corner gathering dust, so it's quite nice to get rid of them. I got to sell some clothes for example, which made space in my wardrobe.

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire