Great FREE Service for eBay Sellers - Garage Sale Finder

Yay, it's garage sale time again! Only eBay nerds will understand the excitement of this time of year. Those critical few hours on Friday and Saturday are golden - make sure you are making the most of your time and hitting the biggest sales that have the stuff you want. 

Garage sale apps have come and go over the last few years, so we have to adapt and keep up with the changes. I am using Garage Sale Finder. I do my recon work at home before I go and download the stops to my GPD. It is a free site, and does the following:

1. Identifies sales within a specified radius of your home address. You decide what the radius is.

2. Color codes different types of sales. 

3. Click on the sales that interest you to read description, dates and times, and directions.

4. View photos if the seller has uploaded them. (Not all sales have photos.)

5. Pick your favorites and plan your route. You can download your stops to your GPS device, or print a list to take with you.

6. The site serves these major cities:

7. Be a super planner and get notifications in your inbox. Just set the criteria for your favorite kinds of sales and you will be notified when one hits the site.

Again, this is a free site.  Visit Garage Sale Finder here and give it a try!

Make sure to check out my 30 day YouTube Challenge. There are new playlists and a daily lesson on what to sell, keywords, and FAQs. You can set the play list to play uninterrupted and listen to a whole string of videos while you work.



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How to Find the Price an eBay Item Sold on Best Offer

eBay has changed things on us again. We used to be able to click the little "print" button on a completed listing and see the best offer price. Unfortunately, that button isn't there anymore.

There are a couple of ways you can still see what a Best Offer Price is.

First, go to Watchcount.com.

Look up the item number.

Next, you will see the eBay listing of the item and the asking price.

Then go to the actual eBay listing to see the "sold for" price.

You can also go to a completed listing sold on Best Offer and right click:

Then choose "page info" and you will get a screen like this:

Where the selling price is displayed.


Best Offer is a great way to increase sales and be able to negotiate with buyers. Here are some more tips about using Best Offer on eBay.

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The Great Egg Carton Debate

A few days ago, I was shipping a breakable ceramic urn and used some Styrofoam egg cartons as packaging instead of packing peanuts. I took a photo and posted it in my Facebook group sharing the  creative packing technique with the statement, "Save egg cartons - great for packing breakables and less messy than Styrofoam peanuts." The intent here was to show others that egg cartons are a free, effective, and handy alternative to packing peanuts. Most everybody uses eggs, so this is a great way to recycle something in a useful way as well as save money on shipping supplies.

Now, this technique is a far cry from using soiled pizza boxes or flimsy cereal boxes for packaging. In the past I have cringed at some photos of recycled packaging that could have been bacteria-laden or just too flimsy to use as a shipping box. (Like in this article.)

I should have been more specific and stated that the egg cartons were clean and I assumed people understood the cartons were empty. But, as on many Facebook discussions, things took an interesting turn.

The photo received 511 likes and 90% of the comments were in favor of this packing technique.

There were 2 camps on this discussion:

Recyclers / green enthusiasts who thought the technique was a clever use of available in-home packaging.

The allergy advocates who claimed that putting egg cartons in a package could cause a person with egg allergies to have a severe reaction - that "egg allergies can be so severe that even residue of the shell can cause anaphalactic shock." (I have not verified this statement.)

The issue is, " If sensitivities are that extreme, and such great caution must be taken to exist in the world in general, I can't imagine someone buying items off the Internet from at-home sellers not knowing what the item has come in contact with. Any number of things could have been near the product and could result in a negative reaction."

So the burning question is, should eBay sellers use egg cartons as packaging?

Read the discussion here.

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