Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

As I mentioned a while ago, I decided to was time to get rid of stuff we don’t use and, in some cases, forgot we even owned. Last summer, I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay for about $650 after shipping, listing fees, and other incidentals. This summer I decided to use Amazon Marketplace. The key differences from eBay for me are:

• Easy to list stuff - just find it on Amazon’s site and enter the quantity, condition, and asking price. With eBay you have take a picture, upload it, write a description, and click through 2 screens of up-sell features you don’t want.
• No auction - just put the price you want to sell for and, if people want, they will buy it. Since I’m mostly trying to get rid of stuff, I just list my items for 10% less than the next guy. Amazon provides a nice view to see if people have undercut you, so I can adjust as necessary. And if it doesn’t sell, I can lower the price until it does. Yay for free markets!
• Simple status - Basically once it’s sold and the payment clears, you get an email to ship the item. With eBay when the auction was complete, you would need to send an invoice, wait for the payment to clear, and then ship the item.

Since it’s so easy to list things, I’ve been doing pretty good so far. I’m at almost $600 net and that’s without really worrying about getting the cheapest packing supplies and cheapest shipping. I could have probably saved $50 more, but it wasn’t worth the hassle.

The best part of this isn’t the money. There’s something very therapeutic about getting rid of stuff you’re not using. I really love the feeling of walking into the post office with my arms full of packages. It’s nice to know that the things that have been sitting around collecting dust will get a chance to be used and enjoyed.

A few people asked, “What are you selling exactly?” So far, it’s been video and computer games, various electronics (old cameras, mice, memory cards, cables), and lots of books. I had a number of programming books that aren’t useful to me anymore, but apparently useful to lots of other folks.

Another benefit of selling the books is that it frees up some much needed space on the shelves in my “library”. My next step with the library is to sell the books that I haven’t touched in the past few years, since that’s a good indication that I don’t want them anymore. If I can sell a few more, I won’t have any more books stacked on the floor. :-)

The next wave of stuff I need to sell will be more lucrative; lots of reasonable quality computer parts. The gating factor is that I need to figure out what exactly some of the parts are so I can list them for sale. I wish manufacturers would consistently put the part number on video cards. Really, how hard would that be?