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Comment by axxl | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, however I just don't think the issue with selling most items is the box. The post office has plenty of free boxes you can take, and if it's a bit too big you can usually pad it with newspaper. They specifically say they're only supporting small objects so that ruins any argument about something big. When the author says "As someone who hardly ever sells anything online in part because I never have the right box", I just don't feel like this solves some of the issues that seem to be bigger in selling.

Now the other aspect of the service, which is where they will post the item for you and set up the description, price etc and handle dealing with the customer, that's where the value seems to be. Most people don't sell items online because they have to set up an account, figure out pricing, make sure they have good ratings so people will still buy for them and deal with chargebacks.

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Gotta say that I disagree (yes, yes, it's all anecdotal). I find a great deal of the hassle in selling stuff online is the shipping aspect: how much does it cost? Will I have to travel to the Post Office? How long will I have to be there? Do I have the packing material? Should I insure the box?

Going to the Post Office is a huge hassle. Even when I don't have to go to them, but say, FedEx Kinkos, I have to deal with them instead (I literally had a FedEx Kinkos employee punch the top of my box repeatedly to prove that it wasn't taped up well enough for their transportation, to which one can only think "It's not my bloody fault that you don't treat packages with any respect.")

I think a great deal of the anxiety in selling is not collecting money (eBay and Amazon both make this trivial) but the worry about holding up your end of the deal, and whether the lost opportunity cost of the hassle outweighs the value of doing the deal.

I know I just put everything in a giant box to Amazon's trade-in system because I only have to worry about shipping once, even though I'd probably get far more if I sold it all piecemeal.

As someone who has bought bikes off of ebay and have had to deal with shipping damage nearly every time, I have to agree. I'd never want to deal with that kind of stuff as a seller.

(broken right brifter, badly bent rear triangle / rear dropouts, etc)

Hmm, valid points. I guess I'm not trying to say that the box isn't useful, it is easier undoubtedly (if you have an item that fits), I just feel like the rest of the service seems like it could be the better aspect. And actually after watching their promo video they seem to emphasize the service a lot more than the box, which the article seems more focused on.

> how much does it cost? Will I have to travel to the Post Office? How long will I have to be there? Do I have the packing material? Should I insure the box?

Simple solution: use flat rate USPS priority boxes. Order a few of each size for free and stick them in your closet with a roll of packing tape.

You know exactly what it will cost, you can get a free next-day pickup from your house, and you can use newspaper for packing material.

Only works if you ship small-ish stuff, but it's brilliantly easy if you sink 10-15 minutes into the prep.

This. They deliver the flat packed boxes to you for free.

Plus you can buy USPS priority shipping online (at a discount) when needed, and drop anything that will fit in a USPS mailbox (the 15-ounce rule is for mail bearing only stamps). Or hand it to your (or any) mail carrier out on their rounds if you prefer.

For me, the biggest hurdle to selling my personal items online is flaky and/or malicious buyers.

On Craigslist, buyers tend to be extremely flaky. Every time I've sold something there, I've wasted substantial time with people who arrange meeting times and don't show up. This happens many times per item. It's also overrun with scammers, although those are easy to spot if you know the signs. (Bad grammar, being unrealistically enthusiastic to the point of offering more than the asking price, mentions of out-of-state or overseas transactions, etc..)

On eBay, you have the ever-present risk of fraud. A typical scam goes something like this: Someone buys your item, you ship it, the buyer files a dispute, and eBay/PayPal take back the money. The scammer was planning to file a dispute all along, even if you did everything right. There's very little you can do to combat this, in part because eBay tends to favor buyers over sellers.

If Sold takes on all the hassle and risk of consumer-to-consumer selling, then I'll definitely consider using it.

For me, the worst part about using ebay is the stench.

Ebay has done so much to build ill-will with sellers over the years, and with the recent fee increases it was almost too much for me to continue. I decide to hold my nose and list a couple of items anyway this past week, but the listing page is now broken in both Firefox and Chrome on linux!

Enough is enough.

It is a shame, though. The users generally seem to be pretty good, and I almost always enjoy dealing with them.

Yeah, I haven't sold anything on eBay in a while. The fees I could maybe deal with. But the fraud was what really drove me away.

The stench of ebay becomes unbearable as soon as you start trying to close your damn account with them.

A few months ago they emailed me saying that they were going to close my account in 30 days because I had done nothing with it in about 5 years. I thought this was fantastically nice of them to do for me, so I did nothing. Then 29 days later I get an email saying that they locked my account because it was compromised (After 5 years of obscurity? well okay, I suppose that is possible.) I logged in, verified that I did not have any personal information in the account that could have been stolen, set a long random password, and told ebay to remove the account. After filling out their survey about why I wanted to do that (which forced me to choose an option that was not my real reason...), they tell me that they need 150 more days to close my account. It was 30 days, but now they need 150 days to ensure all of my (five year old...) transactions are finalized? What bullshit.

That was several months ago. A few weeks ago I got another email from them saying that my account was again compromised. I am now convinced that they lie about that as a way of tricking you back onto the site to regain you as a customer. Or maybe they are incompetent and an account being closed trips their fraud system...

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say as well, that seems to be the biggest advantage. It would take the hassle out of setting up and selling. Now if they just pass along those disputes to you, you're not really that much better off :\. I don't know their policy however.

You might want to check out Bondsy, a way to trade with friends :) You shouldn't have to worry about fraud if you trust your friends. https://www.bondsy.com

(disclosure: i'm the lead mobile dev at Bondsy)

The message appears to be "buyers suck", which should not be surprising if you've ever worked retail!

Perhaps for small-ticket items, the rule should be that if there's any dispute, the money goes to a charity that was agreed on before the transaction. :-)

What would be nice is a package escrow service for one-off purchases here or there that are not time critical. You sell your item on eBay (or wherever) as normal, but the buyer pays the escrow service. Then when they confirm payment, you ship your item to the escrow service who then unpacks the item, verifies the contents are as described and functional, and then repacks it and ships it on to the buyer. Then they release the payment to you.

If the buyer tries to scam them by saying the item was not as described, the escrow service (presumably insured some way) would deal with them and you're out of the picture.

It would add a few days of delay to purchases, but for casual items already being sent UPS or Fedex Ground that aren't time critical it seems like it could add considerable piece of mind to small time sellers and buyers.

Wouldn't these guys be acting as an escrow service anyways? If they bother with the minimal process of photoing and tracking packages, it seems it would be much harder to claim fraud against them.

I can relate to the pain involved of not having a box. Unless I just got something from Amazon, I won't have a usable box. And while the post office may have free boxes, the trip to the post office in and of itself is pain enough to cause breakage [1].

[1] I think I'd rather have my fingers run over by the car than make a trip to the US Post Office. Right up there with the DMV.

I agree. When I was selling online more frequently, I had a collection of Priority Mail boxes to use, and this still didn't cover all of the sizes I needed. As dumb as it sounds, shipping me the properly sized box would be amazing.

I'm curious if they provide packing material too - that was the other big issue for me. I typically used newspaper or peanuts from a box I had sitting around, but I still ran into trouble a fair amount of the time.

This is exactly the business we are starting.

Check out http://shyp.co

We fit the contents into the perfect size box so even though we charge a little more than going directly to USPS, we can more than make up for it in our efficiencies. Plus real-time comparison to UPS, Fedex and Ontrac is in the works.

USPS will ship you free boxes, for free.

https://store.usps.com/store/browse/subcategory.jsp?category...

For those who don't know, in CA, you can do a lot of the DMV stuff that you can't do online at a AAA office. Cash/check and membership required are the only caveats.

I may have read it differently, but I don't think the big pain point was literally the box, but that it was just a stand in for all of the uncertainty that comes with selling something. As someone who doesn't sell stuff online, I'd definitely love to have a service where I knew the effort, time, cost, etc was bounded at ~10 minutes total.

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