There are a lot of different platforms out there that can help you to sell what you no longer want or need. Whether it has lost its usefulness to you or you can’t afford to keep it anymore, you are going to want a reliable service to sell it on. Gumtree is one of these services and has a massive reach for you to find a new home for your items.
However, to get the best experience out of selling with Gumtree, you need to understand how it works and how you can give your buyer what they have paid for. This is not as hard as it might sound, provided you follow a few simple rules.
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1. Know the mechanics involved
Every selling platform is different. eBay has a lot of different ways to sell and buy, and so does Gumtree. When selling on Gumtree, you should first know about the rules. You can sell a huge amount of things there, but you cannot sell illegal substances, adult content, surveillance equipment, and a small handful of other things, which you can see by a quick perusal of their small print.
You should also know how to make an ad and look into their ad type system, which essentially means whether you are willing to pay to have your item listed or not.
2. Research
The next step is researching your product. This can help you put your item up for the right price. If you are lucky, the value of your item might have increased, which means that you can sell it for more than you paid for it.
If you have chosen to pay for the ad, you might also want to include this price in your listing and whatever the shipping prices there might be. This can help you to make sure that your item is priced correctly for both you and the buyer, but you should always leave a little wiggle room in your expectations as people might want to negotiate a cheaper price.
3. The history of your object
If your object has a great history or story attached to it, you might want to include it in your ad. This can be a great way to spike intrigue. You might also feel that it is beneficial to list anything that might be wrong, missing, or broken with the object, and that can be a good way to help people justify the price.
4. Listing your item
As already discussed, you have the option to pay for your ads or listings for an item. You have an option of four: Free, Plus, Featured, and Premium. If you want to market for free with a Free ad, Gumtree will give you unlimited edits and include up to ten photos of your object.
If you want a Plus ad, you can increase the views of your item, add color, and link to a website, on top of everything for a Free ad. If you instead opt for a Featured ad, you can add up to twenty photos, have your ad placed at the top of page listings, you get a bigger photo to catch more people’s eye, and you can add a link to the website, including everything for a Plus ad.
Finally, suppose you want a Premium ad, the most expensive of the batch. In that case, you can get everything the other options give you, along with a homepage gallery to market what else you might be selling, you get three images in search results and a link to your website. This is great if you are a business owner, or you are going to be selling a lot of stuff, and you want it to go quickly.
5. Communicating with potential buyers
This can be important to making a sale. You need to make sure that you are replying quickly to people who are inquiring about your items and making sure that you are giving them clear and concise answers. Of course, there will be some people who want to haggle and try to get you to lower your prices, but you might decide that the price you are asking for is already too low. You will need to be quite firm with people, especially if they don’t take no for an answer.
6. Shipping your item
Once you have made a successful sale, you are going to need to think about shipping your item. This can be a little bit tricky, especially if you haven’t done this before. Gumtree does not come with a shipping service, you need to ship yourself.
By looking into gumtree delivery services, such as Shiply, you will be able to get your item from A to B on time and in one piece, as well as knowing that your item is in good hands with a professional courier.
You will find that this takes a lot of stress out of the shipping process, and gets your item directly to the buyer without worrying about it going missing or mishandled in the post.
7. Packing your item
Every item needs to be packed differently. You will find that by making sure that you are following guides and useful tips on how to pack certain items for transport, you will be able to make sure that your items don’t get damaged.
It might be a good idea to send the item in the packaging that it came in to help reduce the risk of damage and make sure that everything is sealed in tight. This can be beneficial to your stress levels, and making sure everything gets to your buyer in one piece.
To conclude
There are a lot of ways to sell things you no longer want or need, and if you are thinking about using Gumtree as a selling platform, you need to know how it works to get the best selling experience out of it.
You should also know how to ship your items correctly, use a reputable shipping company to help you get the best service possible for the money and ensure that you are communicating with inquiries as and when they come up.