Should you use eBay's Valet service to sell items?
When eBay started out I was a regular on the auction site selling items that I no longer needed and buying others that I liked. This changed quite a bit in recent time with eBay's focus on turning the auction site into a marketplace.
While you still find private auctions on the site, the vast majority of items sold on eBay seem to come from businesses.
That does not mean that you cannot be successful selling items on the site, but since competition is fierce, you may need to spend time making sure your items are presented in a favorable way.
There are businesses out there that sell your items for you for a fee. Up until now you had to communicate with them directly, for instance by dropping of your items during business hours.
The advantage of this approach is that experts are creating the auctions for you on eBay and that you save time in the process as you do not have to do so or communicate with interested users on the platform.
Ebay Valet provides access to select services on eBay's website directly. The service is currently only available in the United States and works in the following way:
- You find items that you want to sell on eBay. The list of items that you cannot sell this way is large. Requirements are for instance that you cannot sell items valued less than $40, heavier than 25lbps, fragile, or in poor conditions. The complete list of what is allowed and what is not is available here.
- Once you have a list of items you can either drop it off at a nearby location if available, or use a postage-paid shipping label to ship the items to one instead. To find out if a valet is located near you use the zip code search form on the website.
- Once the items arrive they will be processed and then added to eBay. Processing includes appraising, taking photos and writing the auction text.
- If items get sold, shipping is handled by the Valets and you will receive 70% of the item's sale price.
- If items are not sold, you may either have them recycled or send back to you for a fee.
The ebay Valet iOS application can be used to get estimates for items that you consider selling. You simply take a photo of the item and according to eBay, you will get an evaluation of the item.
What you need to consider
The appeal of the valet service is that you will save time selling items and depending on the service, have experts appraise and create the sales pages for you.
One issue is that you have no control over pricing, photos or descriptions. You cannot set a starting price nor add a reserve price for some items. Some users had a bad experience using the Valet service especially for that reason claiming that the valet service used inaccurate descriptions, lumped items together and used low starting prices.
If you are an expert when it comes to these items, say designer handbags and the Valet service is not, you may have been better suited to write the item's description as you can provide potential buyers with information that the Valet service may not be able to provide.
Last but not least, you are also receiving only 70% of the sales price. While that can be acceptable to some as you save time in the process, you may be better of selling the items directly.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.