Amazon: your ongoing garage sale

We love a good garage sale.  You get up early on a Saturday morning, brew a pot of coffee, and out in the driveway you set up those folding tables you borrowed from church.  Then you start hauling up tons of junk from your basement, out from underneath the couch, from the shelves of that one closet — heck, maybe there’s stuff in the bathroom you can sell, so you bring that outside, too.  You then get the pleasure of arranging those items on said tables, figuring out the most that anyone would spend on them, and then writing that amount on those stickers that you would never buy unless you were having a garage sale.

You then plunk yourself down in one of those camp chairs that sport the moniker of your favorite sports team or the bank that gave it to you when you opened a checking account with them (it was either that or the cooler).  Folks come around throughout the day, and you get the opportunity to haggle over that favorite piece of Tupperware or the Amy Grant CD you bought in 1992 (no, wait, it was actually a cassette tape).  At the end of it all, you have to do everything that we talked about in the first paragraph (backwards this time), and really, what for?  A couple of hundred bucks (maybe) and the sense that the Saturday you lost will never, ever be returned to you.

We’ve never had a garage sale.

Okay, now that we’ve removed our tongue from our cheek, we should really be straight with you: we have nothing against garage sales.  It just seems like a whole lot of work for what you actually end up with.  And when it’s time for us to unload some old books or musical favorites like Blues Traveler and Blind Melon, we think we’ve got a better plan: Amazon.

Isn’t Amazon always the answer?

We’ve had a ton of success selling items on Amazon, and here’s how you do it:

• Log in to Amazon.com, and click on “Your Account” (it’s in the upper right hand corner).
• Now, on the right hand side of the page, click on “Sell Your Stuff.”
• Here’s where it gets kind of cool — Amazon takes advantage of the fact that it sells almost everything and lets you search for the item you are trying to sell.  If you can find it (you will), you’re done.  Whenever anyone searches for that item on Amazon, they’ll be able to get to your listing under the “new” and “used” sections listed with that item.
• When your stuff sells, it sells.  You can see what similar items are selling for, and price them accordingly.
• All you then have to do is ship the item, and Amazon provides you a credit for the shipping costs.

It might just be us, but we like this plan compared to what we described earlier in this lengthy narrative.  There are other options for selling your stuff online, but we’ve found this to be one of our favorites.  So, the next time you call the church or VFW to borrow those tables, you might give Amazon a try — oh, and you won’t have to buy those stickers, either.