Scavenger Life Episode 228: Best Practices for Local Pickup on eBay

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After noticing the gorgeous pieces of furniture that could be cheaply purchased at auctions and yard sales, we started an ongoing experiment with selling furniture on eBay. I guess most buyers don’t want the hassle of hauling furniture home? It’s perfect for us since we’re always trying to find the items that no one wants but can be sold for huge profits. For example, we paid $80 for two pieces of furniture and recently sold them for almost $1000.

The issue with selling furniture on eBay is storage and shipping. We have plenty of storage so that’s not a problem. We use “Local Pickup” on our listings since we don’t want to deal with preparing pieces for freight. We also list shipping companies that will give buyers free shipping estimates. It’s better for us if the buyer directly works out their own shipping if they choose to not pick it up themselves.

For the most part, we’ve had good luck. Buyers are willing to drive up to 9 hours ONE WAY to pick up unique furniture. People are nice. We make them pay by Paypal before they come so there’s no fumbling or last minute negotiations. Then we “mark as shipped” on eBay. You read the about strange nightmares online about buyers picking up items and then telling eBay they never did. We only make money. 99.9999999999% of people are going to be normal and nice.

But these past two furniture pieces we sold only because we offered to deliver them ourselves. Why? Because we didn’t want to lose the sales. So we spent Saturday and Sunday driving all day to the South and then North of our state. Wouldn’t recommend this delivery service regularly, but we had fun scavenging along the way. It was just another adventure.

These are the links we discussed in this podcast:

We started a companion site called the Archive of All Knowledge. Anyone can find or add useful Scavenger info.
Not sure when this started, but I noticed that eBay is now doing “Live Auctions”. I guess it’s their way to get into the higher end auction market? I had fun watching one of these auctions take place.
As many people emailed, some guy was selling an piece of one of the original Bibles on eBay. What?
A caller complained that eBay was creating duplicate listings in her store. We’ve never heard of this problem. Here’s the tool that helps you find any duplicate listings in your store.