There's nothing that has us high-fiving more these days than taking turns finding stuff we've been storing in the basement, grabbing our phone, starting up the eBay mobile app and turning that stuff into cash.
After moving so much the past several years, we never quite purged before picking up roots, in fact when the moving crew showed up at our Chicago house to pack the moving truck to New Jersey, they found 100 boxes in the basement, many of which we'd never even opened during our year and a half in that house. That's dozens of boxes that we've literally hauled from coast to coast that we're not using, but may have items that others may be searching for.
Around here, garage sales aren't that popular (or shall I say, productive?) and locally Craig's List and email groups aren't used as much as they were in the suburbs of Chicago. We'd looked into selling on eBay in the past years, but with fees and PayPal charges struggled with how could we make money on an item worth $20. (Now we know ;-))
Late this summer, a colleague of C2cDad's mentioned his success using eBay to sell things they no longer used or needed, and a lightbulb went off. He answered our questions and we were off and running, giddy with the excitement of having a place to unload some of our more valuable but unused/lightly used possessions.
We’ve listed a fair amount of items using the eBay website since September, and while I wouldn’t call ourselves experts, we’ve gotten fairly efficient in navigating the listing options for posting an item for sale. We'd been hesitant to try the eBay mobile app, but when the Splash Creative Media ladies shared an opportunity for people selling on eBay, I jumped for the perfect opportunity to give it a try!
From the get-go, selling items using the eBay mobile app was simple and FAST. Ultimately we were impressed with how easy it was to navigate. While it took a bit of getting use to where all of the menus and listing options were, it had most of what you would find on the website and all of the basics for managing the entire selling process from your phone - and in our case, directly from our couch.
If you’re selling items that have barcodes, like games or electronics, using the
mobile app was a no-brainer. We had
purchased a Wii Fit Balance Board several years ago that we hadn’t used, so
we decided to put it up for sale using the eBay mobile app.
Using my iPhone, we scanned the barcode on the box which pulled up all the description details of the Wii Fit, we set the price of the auction, took photos using our iPhone (which automatically uploaded the pics into the listing), and in a matter of minutes the Wii Fit was up for sale. In fact, no exaggeration, we received two offers within a couple of hours, and sold it by the end of the day. Clearly this isn’t a typical experience, but it certainly put our first experience using the eBay app down a good path!
(Photo taken with my phone.)
In a short time, we’ve become fans, with the single greatest
feature having to be the barcode scanner, which in itself saved a ton of time
in listing an item. For whatever reason, typing in the same number on the eBay
website can be tedious and doesn’t always produce an exact match, or the item
for whatever reason isn’t found.
However, while scanning the UPC instantaneously pre-populates the listings with information within the mobile app, when it comes to other items like clothes or items that don’t have barcodes, we found that typing all the listing information you need on a mobile phone is a little tedious and better suited for the eBay website on your computer.
On the website you can also do things like format text for your listing description, which wasn’t something that you could do on the mobile. It’s not a deal breaker for using the app, it just means that we’ll go to the eBay website to make sure that the listing is formatted the way we want it.
Overall, the eBay mobile app has definitely made posting faster and easier, and something that we'll be using to fund our holiday gifts this year!
