There is now no excuse for anyone NOT to sell their stuff on eBay. Even lack of know-how or time aren’t valid excuses anymore. Not since Boxaroo hit the scene.

I am thrilled to have discovered this service as I often turn away opportunities to do consignment sales for people because it’s usually not cost effective for me. Now, I have a place to refer them to that will do an effective job without the exorbitant fees often charged by conventional eBay drop stores.

Boxaroo is a member of the eBay Developer Network and has created a nifty little application that helps people list things on eBay without them having to do hardly anything. I made a nifty little screencast on Boxaroo, but it’s not resizing properly to embed here. Click HERE to view the Boxaroo overview screencast.

How Boxaroo Works

After you submit your listing you will automatic create a new Boxaroo account. Once you verify you email address in the confirmation email they will send you, your item listing will be reviewed.

If Boxaroo approves your item for listing, there are no listing fees if you select the True Auction listing format. As the name implies a true auction listing is a no reserve auction and you must agree to start your item at .99¢. There is minimal risk in starting most auctions this way, so I agreed. The only fees associated with the listing is a 20% commission Boxaroo will charge you if your item sells.

On the other hand, if you have a very valuable item that you are concerned about not getting adequate bidding activity, you can pay for a Premium Listing which will require a listing fee of up to $4.00 plus any extra eBay feature fees you may want.

Regardless of your selling preferences, they have a selling option that will work for you.

Okay, so once the listing begins your item will appear on Boxaroo’s eBay seller account, instead of requiring a seller to use their own eBay account. In other words, this is great for someone who doesn’t want to use their account, or simply doesn’t want to create a new one……or doesn’t know how.

Now, if you’re like me, the part of selling personal property items on eBay that I hate is the packing and shipping part. This is where Boxaroo really comes in handy. After your item sells, they will ship you the packaging materials necessary to to ship off your item, with the address of the buyer and postage already affixed to the box. This is about as easy as packing gets!

Boxaroo Results

For this post I did an experimental Boxaroo listing selling a book I had laying around using the True Auction format. It was listed for a 7 day listing period with a starting price of .99¢.

So how did it go? Well, to be honest, I sat down to write this blog post with an hour and a half left in the listing and noticed that a grand total of 1 person had viewed the listing. However, just a few minutes ago when I logged in to my Watched Items on ebay to capture the following image of the listing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my book has sold.

If you want to see a full size version of this image, just click on the picture below.

As you can see, this is very simple, but functional. In perusing through Boxaroo’s eBay listings, it’s interesting to see some very appealing items that are getting good bidding activity.

On the negative side, the only major thing I’d comment on is the cost of shipping to a buyer. For example, on my book listing, the shipping cost Boxaroo quoted was $7.28, which is more than Media Mail would normally cost. The reason this is a negative to the seller is that the higher shipping costs could discourage bidding activity. However it would be logical to presume that the more valuable, and/or bulky the item, the less out-of-line the shipping charges would be. (Apparently the shipping costs didn’t dissuade this particular buyer from bidding on my book.)

After the Sale

After your item sells you will receive a confirmation email from Boxaroo. Here’s mine:

At this point, I’m going to expect to receive the shipping materials from Boxaroo so that I can pack and mail the book.

In Part 2, I’ll recap how the shipping went and any final reflections I have. One thing I would like to explore is what options exist for Boxaroo to expand into the categories we usually discuss on this blog, like real estate and large asset sales.

By the way, I’m not affiliated with Boxaroo, nor have they compensated me in any way for this article. I just think it’s a great service that really fills a niche in the marketplace. Plus, as I said, it’s just nice to have a place to send non-eBayers who want to sell on eBay.

June 5th UPDATE: If you’d like to try out Boxaroo they will pay you $10 in cash when you use the promo code V4AXWF and successfully sell 3 items using their service. To try it out yourself, go to http://boxaroo.com.

After the original post, I received a nice email from Jonathan Grellas, Operations Manager at Boxaroo, thanking me for my blog post. He provided some new information that you may find worthwhile:

…we have recently expanded the service to accommodate people who would like to sell under their own eBay account, and still get all the benefit of Boxaroo — super easy auction creation, customer service, and complete shipping services. If the user doesn’t have an eBay account, we help them create one quickly and effortlessly. The new service has a reduced commission fee (12.5%) and we still pay the PayPal fees, but the seller is now responsible for their own eBay fees.

We recently surveyed our users and found that many of them would like to get “credit” for their sales via a personal feedback score from eBay so we anticipate that the new selling option will meet an important need in our community.

I don’t know about you, but this new feature will make me consider using Boxaroo for future listings, if only because of the simplicity it offers with regard to the packing and shipping side of things.