Where to Buy & Sell Used Furniture Fast

Like other parts of your home, your furniture plays an essential role in ensuring the comfort of your dwelling. Aside from improving your place’s aesthetic appeal, it allows you to create a comfortable and relaxing environment. It also provides you with great convenience and functionality. 

However, the quality of furniture eventually deteriorates due to wear and tear, so you eventually need replacement. In other cases, your new home’s style may not accommodate your old furniture’s aesthetics. In that case, you would want to purchase new furniture from a reputable dealer that offers a vast collection of options, including Bellagio furniture, that you can choose from. Now that you’ve chosen new pieces, it’s time to decide what will happen to the old ones.

Whether you’re planning to move soon or are simply looking to make an upgrade, you’ve likely found yourself with a few spare pieces of furniture on your hands. While keeping these spare tables, chairs, and more around the house may be feasible in the short-term, you’d probably like that valuable living space back as soon as possible. Selling your used furniture may be the best way to make that happen.

Of course, you’ll need to do more than slap a “for sale” sign on your used furniture and stick it in your front yard in hope of finding a buyer as they pass by. You’ll need to go about selling your used furniture with tact and knowledge in order to ensure that your possession sells efficiently and at a top dollar value.

For decades, running a newspaper classified ad was the single best way to find a new home for your used furniture. While this method is still viable in some cases, you should also take advantage of modern sales platforms such as Craigslist and Letgo to ensure that the broadest possible audience has an opportunity to buy your used furniture.

If you’re ready to reclaim space in your house and make some extra money while you’re at it, then don’t delay when it comes to trying out several or all of these methods for selling your used furniture fast:

Facebook Marketplace

By its very nature, used furniture is almost always hefty in size, if not also in weight. Transporting it about can be a major inconvenience, especially if you end up selling it to someone who lives outside of your geographical area (and that’s to say nothing of potentially shipping that furniture). As such, finding a local buyer for your used furniture is almost always necessary, which is where Facebook Marketplace comes into the picture.

This specialized component of Facebook’s larger social media platform was designed to provide a convenient method for existing users to advertise and sell their used goods to their collection of friends and the general public online. This service does not cost existing Facebook users anything extra, making it accessible to almost all used furniture sellers.

Making a listing on the Facebook Marketplace is fairly easy and comparable to other digital platforms. With a few descriptive words and a handful of photos, you can give prospective buyers a peak at what your furniture piece has to offer.

Once a prospective buyer takes interest, they can contact you through Facebook’s platform. This integration with Facebook also adds a layer of security between you and the buyer because your interactions will be connected with your real name and information.

Facebook Marketplace’s largest advantage as a used furniture (or any used product, for that matter) sales platform is its advertising integration. Should you choose to pay a little extra for Facebook to promote your listing, you’ll find that inline ads for your product will begin to pop up on news feeds of folks in your geographic area. This will make it more efficient to find a buyer that doesn’t require long distance shipping for delivery.

Craigslist

Tried and true for folks trying to sell…well, almost anything for the past 20 years, Craigslist is still the online platform most folks turn to when they are trying to sell goods and services (both new and used). As a pioneer in the online classifieds field, Craiglist remains unique for its implementation of a pared-down platform that emphasizes function over aesthetics.

One major asset of trying to sell your used furniture on Craiglist is the ease with which prospective buyers can find your listing. For example, Craigslist features a devoted furniture subsection that is accessible directly from the homepage. Your listing will appear here, making certain that thousands of users will see your piece of used furniture each day.

This section also provides price-based options, making it easy for budget-conscious shoppers to find your affordably-priced furniture listing. This is a direct result of Craiglist’s use of a diversified tagging system to categorize its listings. As a result, Craigslist is able to easily serve your listing against user searches so long as you provide plenty of details when you first post the listing.

When searching on Craigslist, the platform automatically returns options related to your search within your geographical range. However, many shoppers navigate the platform starting with a geographical location and looking through all of the local listings, regardless of their content. This can provide a used furniture seller a great opportunity to pique the interest of a shopper who didn’t come to Craigslist looking for a new table or chairs, per se.

Craigslist has been known in the past for its slight insecurity when it comes to anonymous or misrepresented buyers and sellers. Similarly, Craigslist requires sellers and buyers to work out an in-person exchange once the sale is finalized, which can put some folks into one-on-one situations that they’d prefer to avoid. But even so, Craigslist represents one of the most detailed methods of getting your used furniture sold fast.

Letgo

In the past several years, Letgo has crashed onto the scene in order to shake up the online user-generated sales platform hegemony held by Craigslist since the early 2000s. To this end, Letgo has seen minor success given their successful publicity campaigns and overall growing user base. You can certainly add yourself to this growing app-based platform if you want to sell your used furniture fast.

Many consider Letgo to be the primary Craigslist alternative available today due to its overall similar functionality apart from one significant difference. Craigslist is heavily based around textual promotion, with listing titles gaining the majority of emphasis in individual search results. Letgo is different in that it emphasizes visual methods of advertisement, meaning that it uses listing photos to attract prospective buyers more than any other factor.

This systematic difference can really impact used furniture shoppers, who often want to see a product’s condition before finalizing a sale. Along the same lines, Letgo will provide you a distinct advantage with modern shoppers who primarily access the internet through their smartphone. Letgo is built around its app, providing you with better opportunities to reach shoppers who do not care to navigate Craiglist’s wordy platform on a small smartphone screen.

Listing on Letgo is completely free also, providing a major financial incentive to a used furniture salesperson who wants to maximize their eventual profit. Given its price point, you should certainly consider using Letgo as part of your larger plans to sell your used furniture fast.

Apart from free listing, Letgo provides a rating system that is useful for both buyers and sellers. From the standpoint of sellers, reviews help screen prospective buyers. Scams are less likely to happen if you can sift through accounts and transact only with those holding high ratings. Similarly, getting high ratings as a seller can help you attract more buyers and sell your furniture more quickly.

OfferUp

OfferUp stands out as another prime Craigslist alternative available to used furniture salespeople online. In fact, OfferUp promotes themselves as “the simplest, most trusted way to buy and sell locally.” This high mantle is not overblown by any means as you’ll be able to produce and post listings on OfferUp’s platform in just a few minutes. You can even complete your entire listing in their mobile app, including taking product photos with your phone.

Per its name, OfferUp also provides users the ability to “offer up” alternative prices on listings that they take interest in. Then, as a seller, you can make a counter offer to effectively begin a haggling process. As a furniture seller, you can really take advantage of this system to ensure that your pieces sell in an efficient manner while still procuring a reasonable profit (rather than allowing an item to go unsold for a long period of time due to a seemingly high asking price).

OfferUp also offers one significant advantage over its online competitors when it comes to user security. OfferUp has redoubled their efforts to ensure that all transactions on the platform are safe for both buyers and sellers, resulting in their proprietary TruYou system. Through a series of background checks that includes confirmation of your state-issued ID card and phone number, this system is able to provide you with a publicly visible certificate that communicates your trustworthiness as a seller to your prospective buyers.

Etsy

Though it may not come to mind immediately, Etsy may actually be a worthwhile option for selling your used furniture in an efficient manner. While this won’t necessarily work for all types of used furniture, Etsy currently houses perhaps the most diverse and visible market for selling that holds intrinsic value beyond its conditions or functionality. In other words, if you have vintage furniture, this is the best place to sell your pieces at a top dollar value.

For example, the owner of a set of ice cream parlor chairs and table that they inherited from their grandparents may turn to Etsy to find a buyer that will appreciate their pieces for their age and unique aesthetics. If you choose to follow this route, you may even consider investing a few resources – such as a fresh coat of paint or varnish – into your furniture piece in order to make it more marketable on Etsy’s platform.

Seller fees on Etsy are fairly low, all things considered, and clock in around 6.5% for most sellers. If you’re trying to gain proper appreciation for a special piece of used furniture, then Etsy’s seller fees will be well worth paying when you find a worthy buyer.

Aside from reasonable seller fees, selling used furniture on Etsy is much easier and faster. The platform provides a step-by-step guide that can assist you with establishing your shop, setting up billing, and creating listings. It also offers hints that can help you get your first sale.  

Also, with the platform’s buyer pool, selling items on Etsy has become more beneficial. A built-in audience allows you to promote your products and improve your chances of selling your furniture at a reasonable price. Lastly, Etsy has excellent advertising tools that you can use to reach your prospective buyers and make it easier for your product listings to stand out.

Newspaper Classified

If you hadn’t even considered placing a classified ad in your local newspaper, you certainly aren’t to blame. With the advent of so many other digital classified ad services such as Craigslist over two decades ago, newspaper ads began to feel like an expensive, analog endeavor that rarely found success in a shrinking newspaper-reading audience. But you should give this method a second look, especially if you live in a high demand area.

For example, if you live in or near a college town, you should not pass over the opportunity to place a classified ad in your regional or university newspaper. While you may believe that today’s tech-centric college students would simply ignore such an analog sales tactic, you’ll be delightfully surprised how many of these students still turn to newspapers while looking to furnish or find a new apartment.

Newspaper classifieds can be a bit on the expensive side given that most papers charge per word for such valuable print real estate. But even so, this cost may well pay off if you are able to quickly offload your used furniture to a buyer in your area.

Donate

Perhaps you’ve tried all of the above platforms for selling your used furniture and still, it sits in your home and takes up space. For one reason or another, no buyers have shown interest in your piece and now you need a solution to get rid of it (even if you don’t make a profit from it). Rather than throwing that furniture in the dump, you should strongly consider donating your used furniture to a charity refurbishing organization.

Habitat for Humanity, for example, runs a series of ReStores across the country that accept donations of large items (such as furniture in descent condition) and then work to refurbish them for resell at a deeply discounted price. You won’t be paid for such a donation, but you can walk away from the experience knowing that you’ve helped folks in your area while also cleaning up your own home.

The Bottom Line

All in all, there are quite a few different methods for selling your used furniture in an efficient manner. While many of these methods embrace today’s digital marketplace, you shouldn’t pass over effective analog sales methods in your efforts to sell your used furniture for a worthwhile price.

While considering where you should sell your used furniture, don’t forget that you can use multiple sales platforms at once. For example, you could place listings on Craigslist, Letgo, and in your local newspaper to maximize your potential purchasing audience. Using a diversified set of listings may very well be the best method of finding a buyer for your used furniture in a time-efficient manner.

Regardless of your budget or skills, there’s a used furniture sales platform that is right for you. Try one of the options out today in order to find your new go-to method for selling your used furniture.