We’ve done some nice home upgrades these past few months. Newly painted walls. New wallpaper. New vacuum. New decorations in our front room. Cleaning out our utility closet. Many of these left us with some perfectly functional but used old household items and arrangements. Even more so than making money, I feel wasteful throwing away something perfectly good and reasonably nice. The biggest hassle here has been cash transactions and more trips to ATMs.
Cue Facebook Marketplace
I’ve had what I consider remarkable success leveraging this built-in functionality to take a few photos of an item, relatively quickly find a buyer, and coordinate pickup. Even once I have had a successful shipping experience (think eBay), although that was by my own negligence of setting the sale up wrong. Everything from cars to cords of wood is fair game. And beyond the questionable responsiveness of prospective buyers and sellers, it’s been a helpful tool for avoiding some landfill and/or Goodwill donations.
There are some drawbacks and pain points
You’ve probably seen the billboards about meeting up in neutral places, not letting folks into your home, etc. The internet is full of sketchy people, and so being deliberate on how to engage and transact is important. I’m becoming increasingly cautious, but my general approach is outside transactions only, address for pickup only after confirming via text message. I’ve never had any fraud (counterfeit money, pickup but not paid, rescinded transactions, etc.), but that’s not to say that doesn’t exist. The biggest consideration candidly is the flake rate of prospective buyers. Ghosting is real, and my experience this is ~30% of “confirmed, I’m ready to pickup” commitments. Quite annoying, but the built in “ratings” through marketplace helps to screen these folks out.
Ultimately, it’s been worth it
Over the past six months I’ve sold $1,595 worth of goods across 6 transactions. This is for “I would throw it away but feel wasteful” things like an LL Bean floormat for $10. This is for my old Triathlon bike, where a guy drove 150 miles to get a good deal on a well loved (and once or twice crashed) racing bike for $950. Remarkably, I’ve never had something I wanted to sell and couldn’t within a few weeks.
And of course, post-ending gif.
