To sell on ebay, you have to be in good standing with Paypal. As a seller, I mean. One too many complaints - merited or not - and they freeze your account while they “investigate” and you can’t sell anything or use the funds already in your Paypal account in the meantime. They also, and quite often, freeze your funds just for the hell of it, even if there is no outstanding complaint or suspicion of fraud - and they don’t even NOTIFY you. You just go to use your Paypal Visa card to buy something and it’s declined; when you call them to see what’s up, they tell you there’s a hold that will be taken off sometime in the next 14 business days. Maybe. Because they’re not legally a bank, they don’t have to follow banking regulations set up to protect depositors.
To sell on Craigslist, you have to have what someone wants when they want it in the neighborhood they’re willing to buy from.
Shipping is another concern, too. It’s almost impossible to sell anything without free shipping these days, and shipping is not cheap. If I’ve got a $20 record to sell, I’m going to have to spend at least $5 for Priority Mail, not to mention the packing materials and box (because there’s no premade Priority Mail box big enough.) Parcel post is actually more. Media mail is less, but takes too long; you’re going to get shitty feedback or an outright complaint filed from your buyer, and then you end up with the aforementioned Paypal issues.
Plus, stuff just doesn’t sell on ebay like it once did. The market for “antiques and collectibles” is in the toilet right now. The market for Useful Things is more than filled by Walmart and Target and Amazon. ebay itself is quite open about wanting to encourage The Big Guys to sell there, and has done everything they can to hamstring the small seller, including manipulating search results so that small sellers end up on the 11th page where no one ever clicks.
We spent about two years of unpaid unemployment and disability appeals getting by selling our stuff. We’d post it on Craiglist first, then ebay, and when it didn’t sell, take it to the pawn shop. We took a lot of stuff to the pawn shop. Eventually, we learned our lesson, and just took stuff straight to the pawn shop. We sold less than $1000 worth of Stuff on ebay/Craigslist and paid over $300 on shipping costs over those two years. We actually made a much better percentage selling at the pawnshop, where the only cost of delivery was a bit of shoe leather to walk there, and no one could freeze our account.