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Monday, June 11, 2012

Clearing Out the Old


My husband and I have our house up for sale.  Whenever it sells, we will have 17-years of accumulated “stuff” to move.

So, we decided to get rid of some things.  For years we’ve been collecting “tshatshkes(trinket, toy, bauble; knick-knack; ornament), and they are just sitting in a closet.  Some are antiques and/or vintage items.

My husband and I thought we should try to sell them online.  Over the years, we have purchased a thing or two and sold a couple things on eBay, but we are far from experienced sellers.

We photographed all the things we wanted to sell, loaded the pix into my computer and began to place our ads.

What a production it turned out to be! We were posting 15 items.  First determining the category was a bit of a challenge.  Some items fit into more than one category, and other things didn’t seem to fit into any of the categories offered.

When we went to upload the photos for each item, some wouldn’t load for some reason (wrong number of pixels?).  We had to retake and reload pictures repeatedly.

The next obstacle we faced was determining the price.  We had looked up most of the items on eBay and other sites to see what they sold for, but the prices varied dramatically.  Since we really want to sell these items, we decided to go lower than most of the others, and we put them under the “buy now” category.  In the Buy Now area, we had to select the lowest offer we would accept.  We wanted to make a little money at least on these items.

Our next step was to think up a title for each ad.  We had to try to think up titles that would grab buyers’ attention.  I’m not sure how successful we were, but I think I would have stopped to look closer if I was buying instead of selling.

Then we had to think of a description for them.  Six of the items were beautiful vintage perfume bottles.  I inherited them from my mother.  They are all glass, some with “jewels,” some with raised designs.  We had to come up with descriptions that were different for each one.  I didn’t even know what to call a couple of the items.  They were tshatshkes.

After posting about six of our 15 items, I realized I had skipped the “location exclusion” section.  I do not want to have to send them outside of the United States.  I had to go back to the original six I had already posted and correct that section. 

All in all, this process took us – wait for it – nearly four hours!  After all that work, I certainly hope these items sell. 

Our Sunday was a new and interesting experience.

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