Let's face it, Craigslist is a menagerie of sketchy miscreants, flaky individuals, and the occasional honest and normal person just trying to sell or buy something. Not only that, but the posting for an area like Northern DC can be a dice roll. Oh hey, great deal on a dresser, but it's on the other side of the city. Forget it. I know you can search, but the amount of filters you need to apply just to find what you are looking for can be annoying. Not to mention you have to continually check back and apply all those filters each time.
Facebook has it's ups and downs, but the most recent useful thing I have found it can do is bring local people together to buy and sell things in an online yard sale group. There are a bunch of these all over the place for people to buy and sell in a town. The rules are usually that you need to be willing to meet in that location or be in an adjacent location. This kind of eliminates the searching of things for sale in my area. Not only that, it pops into my news feed AND 95% of the posts have pictures. To boot, you can often tell if an item is for sale or has interest from other people thanks to the handy comment feature. Sure there's a lot of crap I don't want, but given all the other junk in my news feed, I really don't mind. And if I wanted to, I could set it to not show in my feed and just browse it when I wanted to.
We are on a new kind of budget system and so catching deals from people that are selling what we are looking for is ideal. Some of the things I have been able to snag at really good prices (or free):
Two Target bags of sleepers for 2T girls - Free
Little Tykes Car (Flinstone Car - Older Model) - $10
Melissa and Doug Fire Truck Floor Puzzle (like new) - $5
Snap and Go Stroller for Graco car sear - Free
Garbage Ball full of assorted girl clothes - Free
Two lamp shades - $7 - This completes a ridiculously long project, not that it was hard, just took forever to do.
Pair of shoes (Franco Sarto wedges, actually in my size) - $5
Dress - $4
I fully intend to pay it forward with passing on these items I have gotten for free to other people in need. The Snap and Go Stroller has been the most useful win since our other stroller is a Bob (bought from Craigslist), and is way large to shove in a car if you want to cart anything else with you. All in all though I have made out pretty well. One lady was having a moving sale for a while and I swear almost everything in her house was for sale and for cheap! I ended up acquiring 4 fabric bins (couldn't find purple in the stores and wanted them for my daughters room), a purple rug, a kaleidoscope, a pair of Mary Jane clogs, and a paper cutter for $21. I was ecstatic.
I have only had one bust and that was from a lady selling step stools. When I got to her house she couldn't find them. How that is possible I am not quite sure, but whatever. I guess we will have to buy those from a store. They are needed for potty training and those would have been ideal.
For all the other grief and eye rolling Facebook can something cause, I think the online yard sale is a pretty awesome feature. If you don't have one for your area, you should put a group together and see how it goes!
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2 comments:
I've done a ton of selling (not so much buying) on Craigslist and local yardsale sites. From a seller's standpoint, craigslist seems to work a TON better. I have had so so so many people say they were interested in something, and then back out or never answer you on the yardsale sites. It makes it an extremely frustrating experience. It probably depends a lot on your area. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most of the people in Hampton Roads are poor and living paycheck to paycheck. I always get, "can you hold it until my next paycheck"...and then you're nice, and you do, and they never reply again.
This is a good point. I haven't been a seller on this site yet. :) I am probably the diamond in the rough for the sellers on the groups here. Works in my favor though!
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