Online Yard Sale Tips and Tricks
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Yard sales have always been a great way to sell things you no longer need or want. I even remember the times when everyone in the neighborhood would all plan to have a garage sale the same weekend to maximize traffic. But even better than a traditional garage sale is an online yard sale!
So far with our online yard sale Joel and I have made around $1,900! What would you do with almost 2 grand extra in your pocket?!
Selling a bunch of our things has helped us get ready for RV living. That extra money has been super helpful for getting some RV essentials we needed before hitting the road full time.
Having an online garage sale has been a great decision for us. There are several reasons that selling items with an online yard sale is far superior to a traditional yard sale.
This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my full disclosure policy for details.
Why Have an Online Yard Sale Rather than a Traditional Yard Sale
First of all, an online garage sale will save you TONS of time. In order to prepare for a traditional garage sale, you have to organize everything, put individual price tags on each item, set it up, and take everything down. And so help me if it rains the weekend you planned to host your yard sale!
With an online yard sale, you don’t have to do any setup, take down, or placing individual prices on each item. Just decide what you want to sell, how much you want to sell it for, list your ad online, and wait for someone to be interested. (To find the best places to sell your online yard sale items, be sure to read the next section).
Another reason an online yard sale is better than an in-person sale is because you have more than just one weekend to sell things. You can leave your items listed for sale for as long as it takes to sell them. This means the possibility of more money in your pocket.
Keep in mind you may want to re-list posts every so often. Relisting will increase your chances of making a sale.
Best Places to Host Your Online Yard Sale
So you have seen the light and are ready to host your first online garage sale! Now you are probably wondering about where to list your sale items.
I have had the most success selling items in local Facebook for sale groups and on Facebook Marketplace. We have used these to sell larger things like furniture, appliances, video game consoles, other electronics, etc.
Facebook has made it a million times easier to have an online yard sale. You can find groups to sell in by searching for things like “your town” + “online yard sale”, “online garage sale”, “classifieds” etc.
For example, in my hometown, there is the “Lakeville Online Garage Sale” group. Where we currently live it is the “Evanston, Wyoming Classifieds”.
Try a few of these combinations to see if you can find an online yard sale group local to your area. That way you are selling to people who live nearby. This means you don’t have to deal with the hassle of shipping items.
On a side note, you’ll want to make sure you have notifications for the group turned off. If you don’t you will get blown up with notifications every time someone posts in the group. Don’t worry, you will still get notifications for the items you post for sale.
How to Price Items for an Online Garage Sale
A good way to find out how much to sell something for is by looking back through other posts. You can then see what similar items have sold for. This is another reason selling items online can be beneficial. Online sales make it easy to get a better idea of a good price to sell items for.
If you go to the online garage sale site for your town/community, you can search on the left side for a particular item. Say a table. Type “table” into the search bar and it will pull up all the postings containing that word. You can then see what people asked for and whether or not it is actually marked as “sold”.
You don’t want to price them so high that you don’t sell them. But, you also don’t want to price them below what you could be making and leave money on the table. Keep in mind though, people will almost always ask for a lower price than what you list.
So you may want to set the sale price a little higher than what you want to make for the item. That way, you have a bit of wiggle room. For the items we have sold in our online yard sale, about half of the people have asked for a lower price. The other half have just paid what we were asking.
Then you always get a few yahoos asking for ridiculous amounts less and to them you say, no, sorry. Don’t be afraid to wait it out for a better deal. Especially if you aren’t in a time crunch. Usually, someone else will come around who will actually be willing to pay a fair price.
Best Items to Sell in an Online Yard Sale
During my online garage sale days, I have found that some items sell better than others. This could depend on the area of the country too. I don’t know for sure.
Things that have sold super quickly for Joel and I include video game consoles, televisions, and small appliances like microwaves, etc.
Larger items like furniture have taken a bit longer to sell. But, our house currently has a mattress and two coffee tables with no other furniture. So, as you can see, couches, tables, bed frames, etc. do indeed sell!
We started listing those larger items a couple months in advance of our move date, because we knew they would take longer to move. We figured if they sold quickly we could live without them. (Our camp table and chairs in the living room has worked quite nicely for dinners). But, if they didn’t move quickly, we gave ourselves a bit of a time buffer by starting to try to sell them further in advance.
Other items have been a really tough sell. For example, clothes, DVDs, and specialty items like some of Joel’s RC cars, baseball cards, etc. haven’t sold on Facbeook. But, there are some other places to sell these items that can still net you a decent amount of cash!
How to Sell Things that Didn’t Sell in the Online Yard Sale
Here are some of my favorite sites for selling unwanted items that you just couldn’t seem to find a buyer for with your online garage sale.
Decluttr
This is a super cool app that I just discovered when we were looking to get rid of some of our electronics and DVDs and not having much luck with Facebook!
Decluttr will buy things like DVDs, electronics, and video games. They also buy books, but I think you’d probably get more money going through Bookscouter (see below for details).
For most items you sell on Decluttr, you can just use the app to scan the barcode. It then instantly gives you a price they will pay. For our DVDs prices ranged from 25 cents to 5 dollars.
So depending on how much you have, it could add up pretty quickly. While you won’t become rich from selling to Decluttr, money is money, and this app makes it so much easier than waiting around for someone to be interested in your items.
When you scan your items or look them up, they are added to your cart. You can see the total you will be paid for everything right then and there. Then they will send you a free pre-paid label to print out, and all you have to do is ship your items and get paid!
Ebay
We have also had a lot of luck selling more unique items such as ski bindings, RC cars, and parts, etc. on Ebay.
By selling with Ebay, you have a lot more potential buyers than if you limit yourself to your immediate geographic area. You may even get more than you expect by setting up an auction for your items.
Just keep in mind you’ll want to account for shipping costs and/or add that cost on for the buyer so you don’t end up losing out on that money.
Bookscouter
Book Scouter is the absolute best way to get the most money for your old books especially textbooks. You just enter the ISBN number, and it automatically searches for the buyback price from 42 different vendors to guarantee you get the most money.
When Joel and I sold our old college textbooks, we got close to $300 between the two of us (aka, the amount of one new textbook…ugh. But hey, money is money, so I’ll take it for something that was just gathering dust.)
Getting the Most Out of Your Online Yard Sale
So remember, to get the most out of your online yard sale without the hassle, price your items well by researching what similar items have sold for. You can easily do this if you are selling in a local Facebook group.
Selling larger items and quick sell items (see above) via Facebook and more specialty items through Decluttr, Bookscouter, or on Ebay will help you get the most money for your unwanted items.
If you are just de-cluttering your house you shouldn’t have too much trouble selling things if you are willing to wait for a bit. If you are needing to downsize for a move, you may want to start trying to sell things further in advance to get the best deals.
As with anytime you are interacting with people online, remember to be safe when selling at an online yard sale.
Happy selling! Let me know how much cash you come out with by dropping a comment below!
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