How to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use Amazon as cheap storage | Hacker News Reader

How to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use Amazon as cheap storage

benguild.com

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I wish I could ship everything in my attic to Amazon and they would photograph, catalog and store the stuff privately.

Then for some kind of low annual fee I could ship things in and out as needed.

This service would include pre-scheduled shipments of holiday decoration.

The problem I have is that I forget what is in my attic. On a few occasions I've purchased something only to find out I already own one. It was just buried in the attic and I forgot about it. If I try to buy something on Amazon, this service would remind me that I already own it and ship it to me.

Besides the attic stuff, I also have small random, rarely-used things that I know I'll need in the future, but don't know where to store them so I'll find them in the future.

Someone once suggested that I just keep a running list of items near the attic door. I tried it, but didn't keep up with it.

It would be nice to set some kind of expiration of my stuff as well. If I don't request an item from Amazon Attic in 18 months, it can be sold. Maybe that's a way to offset my fees.

Another idea... This could have a social aspect (what doesn't these days!?). I could give select friends access to my personal Amazon Attic catalog and they can borrow something, again for a low shipping fee. Amazon will send them a friendly email to return it and then charge them eventually if they don't.

(YC, here I come.)

If you're buying stuff you already own, you may want to reassess some priorities.

It's stuff that 8ig8 doesn't know is already on hand. Keeping certain track of it takes more time than the repurchase is worth, for occasional use. A related situation is why lots of people have several identical pairs of scissors, can openers, and other things that they don't use every day: eventually, as you buy more of them, the time it takes to find one costs less than buying a new one. But 8ig8 has this problem with things that are hidden in the attic; just figuring out whether it is in there at all is painful.

Ironically, this is exacerbated right after you move, too: I have things which I know I own (diagonal cutters, magnetized screwdrivers, etc), but which I _cannot_ find anywhere. It's in some box somewhere in my garage, but not in my "tools" chest, so it's more time effective to buy a replacement.

How many pens do you have?

Buy fewer things!

I think that exists. May have even been a YC company; definitely a fairly new startup. Can't recall its name though; something with "box" in it perhaps. Anyone have a better memory than mysef?

No, that service that you're thinking of is nothing like it. I know because I want the exact same service 8ig8 is talking about and was hopeful that it was, but it's not even close.

(I also can't remember the name.)

This one? "Why 3 MIT Grads Want to Send You an Empty Box" http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/one-click-selling/

Definitely not what 8ig8 described, but the first thing that I associate with "box".

Yes, that one. And exactly, it's profoundly disappointing.

That's the one I was thinking of; thanks for finding.

Wait a minute.

I hired you to be movers years ago. I just now realized what your HN handle was. Incredible.

Boxbee and MakeSpace are both new companies going for something like that.

From http://yclist.com/ - Swapbox? BufferBox?

I use wire storage racks and cheap $10 transparent plastic drawers to store and organize my stuff, not counting clothing where i use dressers and closets and just plain plastic boxes for bedding . It's fairly affordable and effective. everything being transparent that isn't clothing is fairly essential for finding things.

Sounds like you want MakeSpace: https://www.makespace.com/.

(Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6453732)

There are services where you can drop off eligible items, and they will research them, photograph them, post them to eBay, and ship them. This wouldn't handle the temporary-storage model, but they do handle everything related to selling.

They are nice in that you can just drop stuff off, never see it again, and sometimes get a check in th email. But the downside is that after fees and percentages, you see about 50-60% of what the item sells for. So it's good for boxes of old stuff that have some value, but that you know you'll never break down and sell individually.

This sounds like a potentially very useful service. The one downside is that objects with a value below a certain threshold will not be worth their time, and would likely just be moved to a landfill.

Out of personal interest (as a potential user): can you name some of these businesses?

The one I know of, in the Chicagoland area, is "iSold It on eBay." I believe it is a franchise with a bunch of locations.

They have certain categories of things they will try to sell, and things they won't bother with. If it sells, they can mail you a check. If not, you can pick it up, or they can donate it to charity.

They may accept things to sell by mail, but then of course you're taking a further hit on shipping.

I've walked into one of these in Chicago - not sure if it's that exact one. I recall the fee being something like 40% of the item...

Considering they do pretty much all the work for you, that doesn't sound too bad.

Those popped up in 2009 and then disappeared when nobody used them...

I suspect the total cost of your warehouse space would exceed what you're willing to pay for this service. I mean, self-storage companies charge a lot, and they don't even catalogue your crap for you. Plus shipping costs, labour, etc.

It's completely impractical, sadly.

I want it too.

I used to manage a storgae, actually two. They were all huge rip offs. I only met a handful of people who used them correctly; move in and move out within a month. 99.9% of people move their crap(sorry, but unless it silver, or gold bullion) in and leave it their forever. The owners know this and exploit the psychological phenomenon. Plus, they actually love late fees. There was a difference between what men and women horder. If you are close to homeless, and still have a car a small storage unit does made sense though. Get the smallest unit available--closet size--and use it to store clothes and food, and personal effects. Make sure to keep your automobile--preferably a inconspicuous van--like a VW newer bus, or anything that dosen't stand out as looking like you sleep in it. One very ingenious young an converted a small moving truck into an apartment. He parked in the commercial areas and lived that way for years. He never told anyone though. People can be really petty--and beyond mean. God bless anyone who is contemplating using a Storage Facility.

1. I was living abroad for a year. It cost significantly less to store everything than re-buy it.

2. In the bay area, people often have a small living area. Storage is significantly cheaper than a larger apartment. Can you learn to live minimally? Sure. Is it always the preferable choice? If I hadn't found the place I did, I may have rented a 5x5 semi-permanently.

I've definitely considered living out of a truck. How did the guy shower?

cheapest gym membership in your area.

Storage is good for someone who is between apartments for whatever reason. I used it for when I moved across the country, and didn't have a permanent residence for several months, I was staying with friends and family.

Also good for college kids who go abroad, home for summer, co-op, etc...

Self storage often has to be in prime real estate locations(commercial next to an intersection). Amazon can put a warehouse in Iowa and save a ton on physical infrastructure. That said, there are those pods things, but something tells me those are a rip-off.

PODS are expensive to drop off, pick up, and keep on the street (roughly $75 pick up/drop off and $50/day in Los Angeles). After that it's the same as storage places or slightly cheaper. I looked into it a year ago and decided against it.

Self-storage facilities have to be located in places where people can get to them though. If you're shipping stuff there, it could be further away/on cheaper land.

Sounds similar to BoxBee[1], although they don't photograph & inventory, they just catalog & store individual boxes and make them available on demand.

https://boxbee.com/

Boxit does something similar: http://www.boxitnow.ca/

So it sounds like the problem isn't actually storage, but cataloguing and retrieval? This might make more sense as an in-house service somehow, rather than something that involves shipping and the associated costs.

It sounds like the problem is owning too much stuff.

Well, sure, that's the problem, but breaking it down into separate steps that need to be solved should be part of the solution.

I own too much stuff. I would love for there to be a solution more effective and less wasteful than simply throwing it out. I appreciate this post because it's suggesting at least part of a solution...

...although I don't think it would work for me because it requires even more stuff. A working printer (which will inevitably turn into a non-working printer). Label paper. Packing tape. Many boxes of appropriate sizes.

I assume this guy already ships stuff from his house for other reasons, or else all that stuff would be clutter too.

Someday we'll have robots that can keep track of it all and how much its currently worth online. Imagine being able to find things with a simple query.

And if most people did this and shared their data, you might be able to find something a hundred feet away much more quickly.

If you haven't seen it, a link I think worthy of a listen, George Carlin Talks About "Stuff":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

Regarding your idea about the „personal Amazon attic“ which you show to your friends, I wanted to let you know that we are currently working on something very similar.

ShelfFlip (www.shelfFlip.com) makes it very easy to create a list of all your products (by analyzing your received order confirmations or your amazon purchase history) and then lets you put selected products on your personal sales page (your “shelf” - which you can then send to your friends).

I am very curious what you think about it.

That is kind of what Lauritz.com does.

There are some guys in Singapore that are working on something similar:

www.vaultdragon.com

This has potential, have you ever seriously thought of the logistics?

> I also have small random, rarely-used things that I know I'll need in the future, but don't know where to store them so I'll find them in the future.

As a guy who personally sleeps on the floor, owns one pair of pants, rents a family car and a family bedroom, and has no photographs or books, I'm genuinely curious - what are some of things that need to be stored?

A jacket would be an example. Depending on where you live, it's something completely unnecessary in the summer and totally necessary in the winter.

On the flip side, swimming trucks for the opposite seasons.

I've used storage for skis, kayaks and other outdoor kit before.

Something my daughter taught me which was really really cool was to take digital pictures of storage areas. Basically open up the drawer, make nearly everything visible, take a picture then add it to Evernote (or some git repo, or some well known folder). Then when you are wondering what you have/where it is you can scan through the pictures. It is remarkably effective.

Smart daughter!

Simple, but clever idea. I keep telling my wife our house is for people to live in, not a warehouse for her books, memorabilia and kids toys. I'll try anything to keep our house livable.

not a warehouse for her books, memorabilia and kids toys

Isn't that what "living" means?

Some people hoard these things to a degree which is completely out of hand.

Acquiring material possessions and forming emotional attachments to them? No, that is not what living means.

Move to an apartment in the city, toss what you can't bring. Worked wonders for me.

Random startup idea, just for fun: have mechanical turk (or a game) to tag the items in the photo.

Upload your photos: shed-shelf1.png shed-shelf2.png shed-main.png

After a few hours (or days) they are tagged with hammer, wheelbarrow, drill, gas can, etc.

Now you can grep for things in the real world :).

(This is likely overkill, but I like the idea of photos taking advantage of our massively-parallel object-finding & recognition abilities. With a few textual tags, even at the entire-photo level, you could search dozens of rooms efficiently.)

Why not automated fully, by using some AI/image classification system, which I am sure by the current state of advances, can do some wonders in recognizing objects in a photograph. Maybe not all, but having maybe 80% classified, is still an advance. Maybe as an Android app?

Or you could just tag everything with RFID.

Like the searchable storage in Makers.

I really, really want this to exist. And then on top of that, I could train a spam filter to recognize stuff I will never use again.

Funny, that was how my insurance agent told me to catalog what I had, video was best. Considering how many CDs I still have, first day adopter, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and even boxed games, it was easier to get it in picture form than inventory it any other means. Great way to keep serial numbers. Now all I need is something that scan photos for serial and model numbers and file them.

Same went for the china and other high ticket items, oh get pics of both sides of china and similar items.

For the scanning of photos and serial numbers, you could use mechanical turk.

I have a whole bunch of car parts sitting around that I wish I had the time to properly photograph, sell and ship. I would totally be for splitting the costs if I can just get them out of my garage.

This is a scenario where I know the parts are worth $$$ but I'm time constrained to get it sold. Plus car parts cost $$ to ship.

Craigslist?

Meh. Takes too long. Plus the parts are to a fairly rare car so the market is not large.

Interesting idea. I looked up Amazon's storage fees [1]: $0.45 per cubic foot per month from January to September; $0.60 per cubic foot per month from October to December.

If you are using this as a long-term storage solution you have to be careful because Amazon charges, "A semi-annual Long-Term Storage Fee of $22.50 per cubic foot will be applied to any Units that have been stored in an Amazon fulfillment center for one year or longer...Each seller may maintain a single Unit of each ASIN in its inventory, which will be exempted from the semi-annual Long-Term Storage Fee."

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

For comparison's sake, I recently rented a 10x10x10 ft. storage unit for $90/mo. or $0.09 per cubic foot per month.

Of course, you get access to a much larger group of potential buyers than a storage unit. ;)

You don't count the guys of Storage Wars as potential buyers?

>When rent is not paid on a storage locker for three months in California, the contents can be sold by an auctioneer as a single lot of items in the form of a cash-only auction[0]

No, as you will gain nothing from it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Wars

You get three months of rent. The trick is to have nothing of value in the locker, I suppose.

Can you get access to it after 2.9 months?

Here's are key differences: 1) Amazon's offering scales. There's no way I'd ever be paying $90/mo in storage costs without good reason. If I just send in a few things, it'll probably be a dollar or two.

2) Amazon has an inventory control system. You can request certain quantities of items be sent back to you at any point, for cheap.

3) Amazon allows you to use their marketplace as a way to get rid of the stuff, so your average storage costs decrease over time and end up being much less as long as your stuff sells.

Unless you're actually using every cubic foot of your storage unit (which would be a remarkable feat), that $0.09 figure is a bit off. Amazon only charges you for space you actually use, whereas a storage unit charges you for the empty space too.

Even if you're only filling the floor 1` high, that's still an order of magnitude difference between the cost of a traditional unit and Amazon space. Not that Amazon doesn't offer some other advantages, but worth noting.

How's that? If you're filling the floor 1' high that's 1x10x10 or 100 cubic ft at $90, for double Amazon's price. Parity is 2' high. When I had a storage unit I think I was using about 30% of its capacity, which is cheaper than Amazon but also less convenient. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

Apologies; That's only for long-term storage, where the $.90/month per cubic foot is significantly less than the $4.24 ($22.5/half-year, ~$.49 per month) that Amazon charges past the first year.

Ok, so each box I store gets a unique ASIN (no long term fee) and I return my items to Amazon in sellable condition (full refund & I get back Amazon's referral fee). Totally trying this with old baby gear.

Just remember guys: useful for small footprint, high value line items that are mass-produced. (Conversely, not so useful for old items with low resale like clothes, or craft one-off items, or big things like furniture.)

When your object of question hits a low-enough dollar value that your opportunity cost for making a buck off it exceeds your time value, why not donate it to a Goodwill instead. :)

Donating it is often a great idea. Don't forget the tax writeoff, which depending on your bracket is kind of like gaining 25% of the "retail value" of the item!

It takes a lot for itemizing to work out. You either have to give more than ten percent to charity, or have other sources of itemizable expenses.

> other sources of itemizable expenses

The interest payments in the first half of most mortgages get you close to the standard deduction. Only works for owners, but it's still a relatively common one.

And your choice of state income tax or state sales tax. (for most people state income tax is far higher, and f easier to determine/prove.)

Yes, if you pay a mortgage and property tax, you should probably itemize. And/or if you have a lot of medical expenses.

Or, if one has a corporation (for freelancing, a SAAS, whatever), maybe the corporation could donate the stuff instead? I'm not sure how charitable donations work for corps, but might be worth exploring.

I've recently started testing something along those lines in order to fund patients on watsi.org. It's like Goodwill and Gazelle.com having a baby - you send us your used electronics and get a tax write off, we sell them and give the money to the nonprofit of your choosing.

If anyone is interested, http://blog.give3.org has a few of the items I've sold so far.

Yeah, at one point I did a modest eBay selling campaign of stuff I owned that wasn't exactly high value but was easy to photograph and describe and had some value. I doubt I made minimum wage. I keep selling on eBay as an option for the odd item here and there but it's hard for me to see it being worth my effort for the general case. I suppose I could investigate a local eBay packager (or whatever the term is) but, as you say, for most stuff I just give it to a local charity and take a few bucks off my taxes.

I typically use craigslist for that sort of thing. Compared to the cut eBay takes, I can get the same money while offering a smoking price, which motivates the buyer to do all the legwork. I get a phonecall Thursday afternoon, they show up at my door twenty minutes later, and they are gone in five minutes.

Only works for certain items though.

What type of items have you had success doing this with?

Usually electronics. It doesn't work for super niche appeal items like a special textbook or replacement parts.

I've had a similar experience with eBay half the hassle with eBay for me is putting up the listings because their listing tool is so darn complicated.

Try using their mobile app - it is significantly easier than sitting with your laptop and messing around with uploading photos. I found the Android app easier - photograph items with your mobile/tablet and upload from there. You might want a bluetooth keyboard though because I found writing my lengthy descriptions tedious on a mobile. (Or you could just do whatever everyone else does, and write practically nothing, kissing sales goodbye)

Unfortunately Amazon flagged my account as fraudulent, I can only assume because a previous tenant in my apartment evidently ripped people off. We received their mail for some time and most if it seemed shady. It's been a year but I cannot sell. There is no appeal, and no recourse. I've had an account with Amazon for more than half my life (something like 12 years) but no dice.

Too bad, because this sounds handy. Kind of wish they had even a halfway decent competitor, though.

Keep in mind that addresses get normalized and also it's ultimately down to the mail carrier to deliver something. So you might be able to alter the mailing address to have it recognized as something different to Amazon but still practically the same for carriers. Or maybe ask your landlord to re-number your unit or let you use the leasing office as your address.

I would be very suprised if Amazon didn't have a very sophisticated address normalisation process (in Australia, there are several pieces of software that can process generic user provided addresses, and return a specific delivery ID ["DPID"] that ties to an explicit delivery location).

I've tried that, as well as different addresses, but now it appears I am tainted for life in Amazon's eyes, as is my gf. Honestly it's really annoying.

Yet they're fine with letting me buy stuff from them...

I never actually tried their warehouse fulfillment service but I swear by Amazon for selling used gadgets. Amazon gets a lot of traffic from consumers making it a great way to sell something quickly. I remember listing an used Android phone that was maybe two year old technology at that point. I went to list it and within a few hours someone snagged it at like $90. The only other route I've ever tried is Craigslist, which has worked out pretty well too. Asking for the same price you can usually have someone pick up the item locally and get every cent you are asking for if you're reasonable. I always price things about 20% more than I think I will sell through CL.

One thing that should be emphasized for anyone who has not use FBA before: The cost of shipping something to an amazon warehouse is REALLY cheap if you use their provided shipping service. I would say it's about 1/3 of the actual cost of shipping it yourself.

Makes one wonder if you could ship things to other people cheaply by selling them to yourself through FBA with the other person's address as the shipping destination.

If you try this out, please share how it works out. I remember interning there I had access to very cheap shipping (~30% FedEx/UPS rates). This seems like a neat way to get access to the same benefit.

Is it legal using this method to ship to other places as mentioned above?

Mostly joking, so someone else will need to try it out. :) My guess is that if it worked well enough for people to start abusing it, they'd close the loophole. As another poster points out, you still need to pay their transaction fee, so the shipping savings has to more than offset that in order for the trick to even be worthwhile.

I'm sure you could but you would have to pay the commission to Amazon for selling it through their marketplace and accessing their corporate account rates for FedEx/UPS. When I worked for Newegg, they were a major UPS client so the rates were significantly lower since with accounts this large they had to lower their rates to win the account.

How do books work? Can you just bung a bunch of old textbooks in a box and ship it to them? Do you have to package them separately at all, or put stickers on them, or do you literally just stick them in a box?

Are there any mobile apps for scanning barcodes on books and automatically building your Amazon catalog?

If the books have a barcode/ISBN, you don't even need to label them. Obvious items can just be sent through, but the labeling is an extra charge.

If you have duplicate items or nondescript items (like various wires), you should label them.

I tried to do it and, in France at least, you have to package stuff yourself. Which is THE hassle in selling things online. Having to package stuff is precisely why i just throw it away, I mean why bother losing 1h of my time buying a package and sending it for some menial money value.

You're better off selling them for pretty much nothing to a local bookstore with a Used section, i think. Quicker, less hassle, and well it can help the bookstore too...

Amazon will give you barcodes to put on them. Print them, sticker them. Doesn't take long. Costs more if you make Amazon do it. The barcodes uniquely identify the item as yours, and not someone else's or Amazon's.

Best thing is to not let things sit around after you stop using them. The chances that someone else can use them just keeps dropping.

And you can't use the space it takes up, which is probably the most expensive thing about old stuff. If you pay $2000 a month for 1000 square feet, every square foot costs you $24 bucks a year. An old PC taking up 3 square feet for 5 years costs you $360.

And, sure, it probably was going to be empty space. But we do need empty space, just as we need white space. All the clutter has a psychic cost.

An article that is short on details and has no fewer that 8(eight) affiliate links to Amazon.

I am lost for words.

The whole article sounds like an advert. TGTBT

This article got one thing wrong; "eBay's fees can be kind of a rip off" should be "eBay's fees ARE a huge rip off". That combined with the removal of negative feedback for buyers is why you should try Amazon rather than sell as an individual on eBay.

But only if you're in the US right? I'm sick of eBay too, but they bought the "Australian" Gumtree trading site as well so there's really no alternatives.

True, somehow sellers in China can get by selling items to the US for less than a buck on eBay, shipping included. I never understood how this worked. Just mailing the same little item within the US would be like 2 bucks, plus eBay fees.

The postage thing was explained a while ago somewhere, possibly HN: there's no "settlement" between international postage services in the normal sense, and there's a HK postal service that will ship to the US for pennies. Once it arrives in the US postal service, it's their cost to deliver it.

Ahh, that explains it. Thanks.

The OP suggested that it's a bad option for phones. But Amazon offers something else for higher-end items that worked great for me,"Amazon Trade-in" (http://www.amazon.com/Trade-In/).

You start by finding your product in the store, and they give you prices for different condition levels. You pick a level, checkout, ship your items for free, and await receipt and review. If accepted as the condition you picked, you get an Amazon gift card for the amount. They might even upgrade your items to a higher condition.

If not accepted, your items are returned, free of charge. The only risk is the waste of time.

A month ago, I traded in two nearly-3-year-old iPhone 4's. I listed them as "Good". Both were accepted and one was upgraded to "Like New" for $20 more. I got $380 total, which I was extremely happy with.

As I wrote on my blog's comments:

"True, but I've found that Amazon trade-in's prices are usually very conservative. For such an old handset I'd have sent it to Amazon's warehouse myself. For newer stuff that's falling in value, even though eBay's fees amount to about 12% in the end for electronics (last time I checked)... you can usually get the most for it there if you need it to sell by a given date for the maximum return.

Also, I do want to point out that Amazon is essentially just doing what you'd be doing here ... offering it for sale as a used item. You can do that yourself and make more of a profit if you're setup this way."

One thing mentioned about the cables: Do you have to create entries online under your FBA account for every item you ship, or can they figure that out for you? I have tons of cables and other things I'd like to sell that is in good condition, but me spending hours upon hours looking up every model of cable / cheap item I have isn't worth my time.

I haven't done it personally, but I did intern under FBA and so I saw a lot of the procedures and code that implements it.

I'm fairly sure you need to figure out the ASIN for each item you want to sell, and label the product accordingly.

Yup I thought so. I think that might be too much work for me to make it worthwhile... :]

It's fairly easy if you can find that product in amazon db, or have a barcode

The items I have that barcodes I'm not worried about, it is the rats nest of cables that I have really no idea what type they are that I'd like to offload and make .50c just to get them out of my hair and not feel bad about throwing them away.

Find a local hackerspace. They'll probably take them and re-use them or dispose/sell them for you.

My company has sold a large amount of recovered cables (including terminated and non terminated cat-3/5/6) to an e-waste company for scrap. If you have more than a pound of cables, this might be an attractive option.

So technically, I could buy items cheaply on ebay or similar sites, ship them to amazon warehouse and sell it there for profit and also have them handle pretty much everything from selling to customer support?

Or am I missing something and this wouldn't work?

Technically, yes. You just have to know what to buy and how to price what you are selling. ("Oh, is that all?" says the broker who makes a living doing this. :) )

I had a friend who made decent money going to physical auctions and taking the items he bought and putting them on ebay (this was about a decade ago).

Arbitrage is here to stay.

Costco membership + sales-tax free states + anything on sale. People do this. Takes a lot of time I suspect, but there's money in arbitrage.

Just remember: the longer it's on the shelf, the more fees you pay. So yes, you may have found a great deal on something, but do you really expect to sell 500 in one year?

Here is the link to Amazon Fufillment without the referral tags:

http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht...

This is hilarious to me because I sold three things today on Amazon and thought on the drive back from UPS, this should be getting more press how easy this is.

I sold a laptop though which is the only item I'm worried about being returned. Luckily I listed it as not having a battery and not having a hdd so it's already listed as not in working condition.

Thanks to benguild for the blog article. I had seen used books in Amazon price lists as shipped by Amazon and qualifying for free supersaver shipping, but I'd never gotten around to finding out how this "fulfillment by Amazon" worked.

I looked at the info on Amazon's website and I still have a couple questions.

(1) Amazon charges a fee of something like $0.42 per pound when shipping. Is this just for supersaver shipments? Or does it also apply when Amazon collects from the customer for standard or expedited shipping?

(2) I see Amazon charges fees for storage and shipping, but I don't see where they take any percentage of the sale. Am I missing something?

The seller fees are separate from the fulfillment fees and are typically another ~15% of price + shipping.

Do they have heated garages for my car? :-)

From experience, if you want to sell something that is used and is in poor condition, don't sell it on amazon... when people buy things used through Amazon they expect it to be Like New, even if thats not what the description says.

My simple tips for selling online: New/Like New -> Amazon Used/poor/missing things -> Ebay

Reposting on Facebook. This is great. I've always wanted to do this on Amazon but found I had this great inertia in finding out just how to go about doing it. It seemed like a big hassle, but it really isn't. This article simplified it.

The top comment is someone wishing this was a totally different service which ends up in people either mentioning other startups which do something like that but not quite the same, or what it is like to store things in SF.

I love the idea and sentiment. The pale font of the page's text, less so.

Coding is dead.

When the top news on HN is how to make $5 selling used computer cables on Amazon, you know coding is dead.

Pretty sure coding is alive and well - maybe HN just isn't the place to talk about it anymore.

Interesting. They do need to advertise this better because I had no idea this service existed.

Amazon needs to open new fullfillment facility to handle stuff in my basement + garage :)

Is there something like this for Canadians? I dont think we can use this service.

Amazon S3: Simple Stuff Storage

Bookmarked.

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