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Selling without fees
Archpriest
Fmr timfijiHalfway2AnywhereRegistered User regular
Fmr timfijiHalfway2AnywhereRegistered User regular
Hi PA!
I was recently diagnosed with cancer and while I am fortunate to still work and have good health insurance while I go through treatment, I've been organizing all my extra board games and video games to clear clutter and make some extra money to pay bills. Does anyone know of any sort of way I can put these up for sale like ebay but not pay an exorbitant amount in fees? I try to avoid in-person stuff like facebook market or craigslist. While I am able to pay my bills, this is just so I don't have to tap into savings and still maintain some disable income for my wife and me. Thanks for any ideas!
I was recently diagnosed with cancer and while I am fortunate to still work and have good health insurance while I go through treatment, I've been organizing all my extra board games and video games to clear clutter and make some extra money to pay bills. Does anyone know of any sort of way I can put these up for sale like ebay but not pay an exorbitant amount in fees? I try to avoid in-person stuff like facebook market or craigslist. While I am able to pay my bills, this is just so I don't have to tap into savings and still maintain some disable income for my wife and me. Thanks for any ideas!
Switch: SW-2322-2047-3148 Steam: Archpriest -- Selling Board Games for Medical Bills- Ask if interested!
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Maybe contact a local game store and try to offload them in bulk? I feel like selling it in one lot may be easier and then you won't have to deal with fees (but they may sell for more individually)
Do you have a friend or family member that you trust that could take the items you want to sell, deal with the in-person transactions, and then pass you the money afterward? Craigslist is the ever popular face to face sale facilitator, but you might also want to see if your area has a buy/sell/trade subreddit/facebook group/discord server for boardgames/videogames where you could do a cash transaction without any shipping or added overhead.
my local store will sell it but only for store credit.
Ah that's a shame. So here's what I'd say. Maybe lookup each game online and earmark the more expensive ones that you'll know will sell relatively fast. I'd say anything that sells for under a certain cutoff point, might just be donated (if you donate enough I believe you can get some cash back on your taxes). The more expensive ones I'd check around the various sites and see which has the least offensive fees. For a while I used Mercari but last year they increased fees to be more in line with ebay's.
eBay also has the "buy now" option so you can set the price higher to offset the fees, should you think it might sell accordingly. Me personally, I'd look to offload in bulk for simplicity sake but going by price, selling the big ticket items and donating the rest is a good way to do things too
PSN:Furlion
Yeah I'd ask a mod or an admin of course but I don't see the harm in a sig link
I've mentioned what I was selling in the board game forum before and people bought them. I wasn't looking for a bid war, just wanted them to have a new home. I'd prefer selling here, so maybe I could check with a mod. Not exactly normal circumstances nor am I just trying to be a slimy salesperson.
Do I just PM them ? I PM'd the mods of GT and CF but haven't heard anything in about a week. Would I be overboard if I @ them?
It looks like they ask for a 3% of sale price fee. I'm not completely clear though on how they collect it, since the transaction does not go through BGG.
Basically, you'd set up a Geeklist with each game (or set if selling expansions etc. along with a base game) as a Geeklist item, and then the bidding will take place in the comments for that item up until your specified time, which I believe you can state as being something nebulous (e.g. "Ends Sunday evening PDT") in order to discourage last second bid sniping. See here for a current example: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3052765/everything-must-go-us-auction-bot-factory-rebuildi
So yeah, I'd just basically take that list as a template for auction rules, and make one post advertising the auction in the flea market forum as that seller did.
You'll still have to finalize the purchase through an essentially private listing on the game's Market page, just include a message to the effect that "This is a private auction listing, please do not purchase if you are not the high bidder".
Still not no-fee, but BGG's 3% cut isn't that bad.