Best Practices (Inside and Outside of JW) for selling used gear?

[keith mcmanus]

 I'm finally dusting some old pieces of equipment that are no longer making me money. Each time I do this (every 3 or 4 years), I feel like everything in the seller's market has changed, and I'm sure others have experienced this too. I thought it might make a good thread to share experiences and views.



I think this site is still the best venue to list items on as it's peer-to-peer, people have been vetted, and there aren't fees or management on top of the sale. 



In recent years,  Facebook was a better venue because it has no fees and a much wider reach, although the vetting isn't really there. Now it seems they want 10% off every sale, and currently, they won't let me have a shipping option for anything over $600. I think it has to do with the lack of volume of sales I've made, but I don't know if it limits my views to my local region, and it appears as if I am not willing to ship.



Ebay just seems like Twitter now. It's the wild west. You don't know what's real and what isn't. From what I've read on Reddit, the company favors the buyer, which causes huge seller problems with chargebacks and scams.



Is Venmo better than Paypal for avoiding fees?


Has anyone else had problems when someone says they paid Paypal with "family and friends" but they actually did not? I think that option is hard to find. 

 

At one point, Ebay had a logistics operation that handled international sales. I used it once maybe 10 years ago and it worked well. I know many people do CONUS as I do as well. Are there ways to mitigate the risk of selling internationally anyone has found?
 

Also- I sold a mixer a few years back, and the buyer didn't want to pay for it until he received it first...Has anyone ever run into that? What is the standard practice?

 

[Derek H]

This is a good topic. I know FB is the way many people are buying and selling these days but I can’t stand it and anyway I deleted my account so I can’t use it anyway. I tried making a FB account just for using marketplace but somehow it knew it was me and the only option it would allow would be to reinstate my old account. No thanks! 
 

I’ve been using eBay more and more lately. If you know what you’re looking for and look out for red flags I think it’s just as good as anything else. I often find good deals there especially on stuff like Comteks where the sellers don’t seem to really know what they’re selling and just want to move it. With Comteks specifically you have to really look closely because often all the details will not be in the description. Such as PR216s that are actually TV5/6 versions or units with corrosion on the battery terminals. But I’ve also found some great deals on units that were listed as “for parts” only because the seller did not have time or the gear to test them and just wanted to sell it as-is. 
 

There are fees of course when you sell on eBay but the advantage is you have many more people looking for items there vs here which is reliable but subject to the luck of the draw if you’ll find someone who wants to buy what you want to sell in any reasonable amount of time. 

[keith mcmanus]

I've been debating deleting my FB account, too. I don't think much good will come from social media in the near future, but there are other ways to sell gear.

 

I'm glad to hear you have had a good experience with eBay. I think this Reddit thread I read over the summer freaked me out, and it maybe it was unjustified.

[Derek H]

Yeah it’s been pretty solid for me. I’ve had a few weird situations like for example I bought 4 Comtek PR75a receivers in one auction for like $150 for the whole lot sold as is. None of them worked when they arrived. I figured even with repair fees for a trip to comtek it was still a deal. Turns out they were all functional but they had been a custom order and were all permanently tuned to 82 something MHz… they were happy to turn them all back to stock units for a reasonable fee. 
 

Another weird deal was I bought a folding cart on eBay for a pretty good deal that was advertised as b-stock. It arrived with no packaging and had just been shrink wrapped and was all banged up and missing a wheel. Took some irritating back and forth with the seller but I did get a full refund. 
 

The international thing still trips me up. Like right now I have a large package of Sennheiser IEM gear for sale with 10 receivers and multiple transmitters and accessories… a guy in Portugal here on JW wanted to buy it all but we couldn’t figure out how to deal with shipping and customs and all that so he bailed. I did a deep dive on how to get it done but at the end of the day couldn’t really garauntee what the import duties were going to look like for him. I don’t blame him.  One good option I found was to use Gotham sound as a middle man and have them handle the sale. They have a lot of experience with international sales. Of course they take a chunk so you either have to split that cost with the buyer or eat it. 

[Paul F]

Ebay has been good for me both as buyer and seller. But I have little trust of doing international deals on ebay. So when a person from Europe wanted some equipment I had listed on ebay, I said I won't do it. He said he would pay me cash in advance and trust that I send it to him. So I got the lead on ebay and then dropped the listing and we did the deal for cash. There were no customs issues. I just shipped it to him after I received his payment.

[Derek H]

Yeah in my case with the guy in Portugal it was not an issue of trust, he seemed to be a legitimate sound mixer, it was more so the lack of clarity on how much the import tariffs might cost. 

[Philip Perkins]

I'm in a long process of selling off old gear this year, and this is where I'm at now.  For stuff that could be considered at all "current", like working pro soundies use it,  JW is the best method.  The personal interaction and the likelihood that the person you are dealing with is honest are just much higher here, and the listing is really very film-sound targeted without a lot of irrelevant stuff in the way .  For anything that might be music-recording related the GearSpace Classifieds can work fine, but your gear easily gets lost among all the non-film sound stuff, and the board is heavily targeted by people using listing-bots so that gear that no one responds about keeps popping up at the top of the listings, sometimes for years.  This pushes your new listing down very fast.  Selling through Reverb works fine too, but they take a decent size bite of your sale $.  Again, better for music gear.  I sold a lot of gear thru Trew's consignment service back when their fee was lower and lower still if you "banked" it with them to use to buy new gear from them.  In my current work I don't need much that Trew sells, so this doesn't work very well for me any more.  I don't live in a production-centric area like LA, so local Craig'sList is rarely helpful.  That leaves EBay.  It works pretty well these days, but forces you to have whatever you are selling fully ready to ship before you list (re: packaging and shipping details).  The reach of Ebay, and how fast you can move things that are not going to ever sell on JW, has got to be 10 times that of the other platforms.  There is a lot to not like about Ebay, how it works and how scam-ridden it is, but for a lot of older gear it is actually the only way you'll ever sell it for any price.

[Cvetko]

I can only speak from the buyer's point of view.

 

For intra-European sales, country specific classifieds sites can get you a bargain occasionally. The German Kleinanzeigen.de site has a moderate volume of film-related ads with very responsive, communicative and fair seller community. The site has an internal payments system connectd to a shipping platform, but most of the sellers opted for PayPal. Gebrauchte-Veranstaltungstechnik.de lists lavaliers, IEM and wireless systems among other live osund orineted ads. Most sellers are EU reugstered businesses which gets you legal/tax invoices and wire transfer (SEPA) payment options.

 

As a rule of thumb, I calculate <1,3 times the selling price for non-EU->EU imports. VAT is a per-country constant paid on top of the sales price + shipping + insurance + handling fees. Customs officeand postal offices (if the yrepresent you) will charge an administrative fee. Import duties depend on the product type, are calculated on top of the item price, TARIC can help.  

 

On 11/10/2024 at 5:10 PM, keith mcmanus said:

Also- I sold a mixer a few years back, and the buyer didn't want to pay for it until he received it first...Has anyone ever run into that? What is the standard practice?

 

As a buyer, a split (before/after delivery) payment seems reasonable instead of handling refunds later if the item arrives damaged/not as advertised. I've seen this being done in some other indsutries (beverage production/sales).
While I've never tried it, BBList has an escrow system that secures that the buyer has funds and releases them after sale. 

[keith mcmanus]

Thanks Cvetko.

The fees you described for non-EU imports were about as complicated as I expected. I think the BBList is a great option but you have affirmed my belief that selling outside the US is just too much work.