Is this realistic?

[admylin]

My sister has asked me to declutter her house with her this summer. She has really got loads of stuff and I thought Ebay would be a good idea but we are both total ebay virgins so would we manage to get the hang of it and make it work in a 4 week period or is it unrealistic?

You can do, but is it worth selling the stuff? It's a lot of hassle packaging stuff up and you may not recover your listing and final sales fees unless things are valuable.

Also if you are going to accept Paypal payments that's another 3.5% of the price gone.

It's fairly easy to sell on ebay though

It is not impossible - but in my experience there is a little bit of a learning curve...eg. you learn not to agree to ship ridiculously big things by courier.

Also you do get a better price for your items if you have a little bit of a rating. Can you buy a few low value items to get some feedback first?

Why do you have to do this within a 4 week period?

My parents did some decluttering via Ebay recently, over a similar period. Like SMS says, it's good to have some feedback before you try to sell big stuff - my dad had had an account for a year, and sold five items and bought ten. One of the things that helped was that most stuff was for collection only - so people were prepared to hand over quite a lot of money to someone with not a great deal of feedback because they would be doing so in person, and receiving the item in person.

He made quite a bit of money, including selling mad things like a BBC B computer, and a 40-year-old academic gown which went to a company that hires robes for graduations!

Get to grips with the postage costs before listing on Ebay, or you ccan find yourself out of pocket. Include wrappings etc or you can find y the time it is boxed and wrapped it weighs more than you thought.

As long as you cover postage you can make small amounts on each item and it all adds up.

Well I'll be there for 5 weeks in summer (live abroad) and she is totally uncapable of sorting it out but it has to go. There are full sets of cuttlery, dinners ervices, books, new bedding and things like that (wedding present stuff) and in the mean time she has bought all new again. If not we'll do car-boot sales I suppose. But I've seen things like clothes bundles on MN and that would also be good for her as she has a room full of lovely girls clothes that are too small and gathering dust.

Either or both of you have time to prepare.
Set up the account and paypal account and maybe buy a few little things.
Start looking out for and saving packaging material - brown paper, bubble wrap etc.
If she has books, ask her to send you the book titles and begin a bit of research.
Set up turbo lister now and create some templates and folders.
I think 4 weeks will be enough time to do it! Do it in say 3 batches (using turbo lister) for 3 sunday evening endings.
take the challenge! and have fun