Having a garage sale or yard sale at your house is a very effective way to earn some dough for your items, but is it worth the trouble? The process can be tedious and time-consuming, as you have to obtain a city permit (in most areas), set up your front yard/garage, place stickers on all of the items, borrow tables from friends/neighbors for display areas, coordinate with neighbors to make room for parking, negotiate with penny-saving cheapskates, allow strangers to use your bathroom, tend to the front of the house during the entire day to help avoid theft, and manage a cash drawer. You then load everything back inside once the day is over. And, if you were not fortunate enough to sell a lot of your items, you get to unload all of those items again and repeat those same steps on the following day or weekend! Or . . . you can do what everybody else is doing nowadays . . . sell your stuff on Craigslist!
Utilizing Craigslist.org can save you an enormous amount of time. And due to the growing popularity of this site, you will likely earn more money, as you will have several more people viewing your items than you would if you held a garage sale. In order to maximize your selling success on Craigslist, here is a list of tips to follow:
–Photograph:
No matter how good you are at describing an item, it will have a terrible time selling if you don’t include a photograph with your Craigslist ad. It’s the similar to online dating. You can write for hours about how great you are and how you are the perfect mate, but chances are, the other person won’t make a decision on meeting you until he/she sees a picture of you!
–Measurements:
Always measure the size of your item-height, length and depth. Some people may shy away from one of your “bigger” items if they think they can’t fit it in their car. By indicating exact measurements of your item, this will decrease your chances of losing buyers due to having small vehicles!
–Delivery:
To follow-up on vehicles, if the buyer has no vehicle or doesn’t have a vehicle big enough to carry the item, then go ahead and offer to deliver it yourself, but only if they are willing to pay an extra $20 minimum. This, of course, will also depend how far away the buyer is. Use your best judgement. At the very least, you should charge enough to buy gas for your trip to their house.
–Phone Number:
Some ads on Craigslist list emails, but no phone numbers. This mistake will cost you dearly. We are a society that wants things NOW. If you only give out your email, many people will elect not to contact you . . . nobody wants to send an email and then wait for hours upon end to receive a reply. In some cases, when you finally do receive a reply from a seller, it’s just to tell you the item is already sold! Craigslist shoppers want immediate answers on an item’s availability, so it is vital that you display your phone number on your ad.
–Honesty:
Be as honest as possible when describing your item. If a buyer comes to your house and sees that the item is not nearly as nice as you described in your ad, then he/she will have no problem leaving your house and finding something else-good deals are not hard to come by on this site, so don’t expect to “take anybody for a ride.”
–Firm Pricing:
When mentioning the price in your ad, make sure to write something like “FIRM Price, No Negotiations. Will not go lower.” This immediately cancels out the schemers who come to your house only to try to negotiate the price much lower than what was listed on your ad. Sadly, most of these schemers succeed, as many buyers simply give in because they don’t want to store the item in their house anymore.
–Research:
Conduct a search on Google.com or Yahoo.com to find comparable items to what you are selling. If your price is significantly cheaper than what you find during your search, then make sure to mention it in your ad.
–Meeting Set-Up:
Once you come to agreement with a buyer (via email or phone), come up with an exact time to meet. Provide them with your address, but only when you are home. If you are at work, wait until you get home before you give them directions to your house. Providing directions to an empty house could garner temptations for thieves! If the buyers do not arrive at your house at the scheduled time, then call them. If they answer, they are probably lost and need your assistance. If they don’t answer, they are probably avoiding you because they decided to become “no-shows.” If you call them a second time and they still don’t answer (or call you back), then cross them off your list and search for a new buyer.
