eBay have just released a new iPhone app for casual sellers who can’t be bothered to sell. Known as “eBay Valet“.
It’s an expansion of eBay.com’s “Sell for me” service and works essentially as a modern version of a Trading Assistant.
You download the app, take a photo of the product you want to sell and having done a quick bit of research your eBay Valet will contact you with an expected price range. If you’re happy with the anticipated price (not sure what happens if the Valet wildly overestimates and you’re disappointed?), eBay sends you a shipping label (and even a box if you don’t have one) and your eBay Value goes ahead and lists your item on their eBay account.
There’s some of the familiar auction selling excitement as you can follow the bids on the eBay Valet app, when your item has sold you get 70% of the final value paid into your PayPal account.
It’s really selling with none of the hassle of dealing with buyers or having to create a listing or having to worry about what shipping options to offer. What we don’t know is how the item is listed, barring that it’ll be an auction. For instance we don’t know if it’s only listed with domestic US shipping of if eBay Valets do a full job and are willing to ship world wide.
What we do know is that it’s an easy intro into selling for US consumers (if they have an iPhone, there’s no Android option yet), and once they’ve had their unwanted possessions sold for them they’ll have money in their PayPal account which hopefully they’ll respend on eBay.
4 Responses
well, seems like a good way for some people to get rid of the stolen stuff, easy, without the hassle of finding a buyer…
so who gets the defect?
I really like this statement from above “once they’ve had their unwanted possessions sold for them they’ll have money in their PayPal account which hopefully they’ll respend on eBay.”
Does this mean that ebay are finally realising that they need small time sellers on ebay or shall I be the cynic here and say perhaps ebay are looking for a way to get more money from non business sellers and hopefully push all non businesses this way ?
Brilliant idea, have someone who’s never seen the item write the description!