Last month, I explained how you can sell your possessions on Amazon.com Marketplace, and promised to share some tips gleaned from my three years of selling there. Here’s the first set of tips, on listing your items. (Sorry it so long, Sam!)

• Read Amazon’s explanation of how the Marketplace works. Be sure you understand what fees are involved, how shipping credits work, and what your responsibilities are. Decide whether you can meet the obligations imposed, especially shipping items within two business days of the order.
• Decide what you want to sell. Unless you have a Pro or Subscriber account, you can’t create a listing, so your very first step should be to make sure the item you want to sell is listed on Amazon.
• Next, check other sellers’ prices and decide whether the item is worth listing. At this point, you should decide what profit will make the item worth selling. When I first started selling on Amazon, I was on maternity leave after my first son’s birth, and getting to the post office was easy. So as long as I made any profit, I listed my items. But these days, with time at a premium, I only list things that will make a profit of $5 or more. You can see what profit you’ll make before you complete the listing – on the page where you confirm the listing, Amazon lists the price, fees, and the total you will receive. Don’t forget to subtract your shipping costs from the total to determine your profit.
• Set your price. Are you pricing your item to sell, or are you pricing your item for maximum dollar? If it’s the former, set a price at or just below the lowest competitor’s price. If it’s the latter, you’ll need to look at the competitors’ prices for items in comparable condition.
• Give a detailed and accurate description of the condition of the item. As a buyer, I like to see that the seller is letting me know exactly what to expect. I have avoided some big-volume sellers because they provide no description, and I believe that I have sold many items despite my comparatively low volume because I list specific details, such as a tiny bent corner on a paperback, or a scratch on a CD cover.
• Complete your listing and put the item in a safe, easy to locate place. Be sure the item remains in the same condition you described in your listing, and that you can find it easily when it sells. I keep all of my items for sale in a bag under my desk. The kids know not to go there, it’s easily accessible, and I know exactly where all of my items are.

Those are my selling tips – please add your own in the comments. And stay tuned for my tips on what to do after your item is sold.

I wrote about Amazon.com Marketplace when I first started selling our used books there, but I thought it was time to revisit the topic since I’ve been selling there for three years now.

What is Amazon.com Marketplace? If you shop at Amazon, you’ve probably noticed the “Used & New” price option on most pages. If you click on that option, you’re taken to a page with a list of sellers who are selling that particular item. The list includes each seller’s price, the condition of the item, the seller’s feedback rating, and hopefully a description of the item. This list is the Marketplace page for the item. And the sellers are usually a mix of businesses, who find customers at Amazon, and individuals, many of whom are like me and simply having their garage sale online.

My favorite thing about Marketplace is that you set your own price and wait for someone to decide to pay it. Unlike eBay, there’s no listing fee, no auction, and no calculation of shipping costs. Amazon sets the shipping charges and gives you a shipping credit. The fees you pay to Amazon are higher than what you would pay to eBay, but with Amazon, you only pay a fee if your item sells.

You can also ensure your profit by pricing your item accordingly. Amazon makes this easy by telling you what you will receive if the item sells during the listing process. The amount you receive from Amazon includes the shipping credit but not the actual shipping cost. More than once, I have gotten to the “confirm your listing” page and realized that after paying for shipping, my net profit would be so small, it would be a better use of my time to simply donate it.

My least favorite thing about selling on Amazon is that a sold item must be shipped within two business days. Shipping for me means a trip to the post office, since I sell only books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, and U.S. mail is the cheapest way of shipping these items. (If you’re selling these types of items, you should definitely learn about Medial Mail rates.) Items over 13 ounces must be delivered to a post office employee, and can’t simply be dropped in a mailbox or even left at the counter with adequate postage already affixed (unless your post office is different from mine).

Since heavier books require waiting in line, something that’s not always convenient, I usually do a cost-benefit analysis when my net profit after shipping charges would be low. If the item does not require a wait in line, I’ll usually complete the listing. But if I have to wait in line, my profit must be at least $5.

Another thing I like is that I can list an item whenever I want, put it aside, and wait for someone to buy it. Listings expire after 90 days, but Amazon will send you an email to let you know that a listing has expired and include a link to relist the item with just a couple of clicks. I believe listings no longer expire.

When I first started listing books on Amazon, my husband and I went through our bookshelves and sold about half of our books. One corner of our office was just filled with stacks of books, but over a period of about six months, the stacks gradually disappeared and I had a few hundred dollars in the bank from the online equivalent of a garage sale. Ever since then, I’ve had a grocery bag under my desk containing the items that are currently listed for sale, and every once in a while, I’ll get a “Sold, ship now” email from Amazon.

In Part Two of this series, I’ll share some listing and shipping tips that I’ve acquired in the last three years, so stay tuned!

Update: Part Two: Listing Your Item and Part Three: Shipping.