How to price garage sale items
The whole job is deciding what you would rather have on Sunday evening: the money, or the thing. Almost every pricing mistake comes from not answering that first.
The one rule everything else follows from
Price it to go. A garage sale is not a shop. You have two days, and everything unsold is something you now have to store, donate or haul to the dump. The right price is the one that makes somebody pick it up without thinking, and that is usually lower than feels fair.
The common failure is not underpricing. It is pricing a houseful of things at what they are “worth”, selling a third of it, and spending Monday loading the rest into a car.
Start from a tenth of retail
For most used household things in good condition, a tenth to a quarter of the new price is where buyers are. Anything above a third needs a reason: it is barely used, it is sought after, or it is the kind of thing people specifically came for.
What you paid is not a reason. Neither is what it is worth to you. That is the hardest one, and it is why people cannot price their parents’ things without help.
By category
Furniture
A tenth to a fifth of what it cost new
A $600 sofa in good condition is $60–$120, not $300. Solid wood holds value; flat-pack does not, and a flat-pack wardrobe that has been moved once is worth what somebody will carry away. If it is heavy, price it to leave. You do not want it back in the house.
Clothes
$1–$3, or a box for $5
Adult clothes barely sell at a garage sale unless they are priced to clear. Do not price them individually; it costs you an hour and earns pennies. Coats, boots and anything with a label people know are the exceptions and can be tagged on their own.
Children’s things
Half of new for gear, near-nothing for the rest
Strollers, high chairs, bikes and car seats are the one category where buyers arrive specifically looking. They will pay a real fraction of retail for something clean and complete. Toys and outgrown clothes go in a box at a dollar an item.
Tools
A third to a half of new, and more if it is old
Hand tools and older power tools are the thing people drive across town for. A working circular saw is not a two-dollar item. Anything cast iron, anything Stanley, anything with a wooden handle. Look it up before you tag it.
Books, DVDs, records
50¢–$2, records apart
Paperbacks are 50¢ and hardbacks a dollar, in a box, sorted only into fiction and not. Vinyl is the exception: check the spine of anything that looks like it was somebody’s collection rather than somebody’s chart singles.
Kitchen and household
A quarter of new, and bundle it
Matching sets sell; single mugs do not. Put the odds and ends in a box marked with one price rather than pricing thirty things at 25¢ each.
Round numbers, and no haggling tax
Price in whole dollars and quarters. Nobody wants to make change for $1.75, and a table of odd numbers slows every transaction down.
Do not inflate prices expecting to be beaten down. It reads as unserious, and the people who would have paid your real price walk past before you get to negotiate.
Bundle the long tail
Anything you would price under a dollar should be in a box with one price on the box. Thirty individually tagged items earn the same as one box marked “$5 the lot” and cost you an evening with a pricing gun.
Drop prices on the last day, out loud
Halve everything on the final afternoon and put it on a sign. The people who came on Saturday and hesitated will come back, and the alternative to selling a bookcase for $15 is not selling it for $30. It is moving a bookcase.
What our price suggestions actually are
When you photograph something on WhimSale we suggest a price. It is worth knowing exactly what that is: a model looking at your photograph and identifying the thing, then estimating from what such things generally go for. It is not based on what similar items sold for here, because this is a new marketplace and there is not yet enough sold to say anything honest about it.
So treat it as a starting point from somebody who has seen a lot of sideboards, not as a valuation. It also only appears when the model is confident about what the item is, because a confident price on a doubtful identification is the one that does real harm.
Selling the good things separately
One or two things at a sale are usually worth more than everything else combined, and they are the ones a passing crowd will not pay for. Those are worth listing online so somebody who is specifically looking can find them: priced properly, picked up during your hours, paid for before they arrive.
The rest is what the driveway is for. And when you are ready, print signs for the roadside.