A guide to using Geartrade.com
It’s a conundrum as old as outdoor recreation: we who love outdoor sports tend to accumulate gear and clothing in our garages and closets. Yet, we’re often in the market for additional gear and clothing we love.
Over the years, our gear piles grow deeper and our shelves clutter up, with the older items gathering dust. Geartrade.com set out to solve this problem by giving people a user-friendly web platform to sell off their old unneeded gear, making money they can put toward the next gear they want to buy or new adventures. By selling used gear on Geartrade, you’re putting more cash in your pocket and keeping gear out of the landfill, which is great for you and the planet.
The system works more efficiently than listing your stuff on your local classifieds—Geartrade gets your goods in front of a national audience of outdoors people, marketing the latest listings to them. Used-gear shoppers can easily search and filter on the site to narrow down to what they’re looking for, so the right people can find your items. Geartrade handles the payment processing, too. You just get a handy email letting you know your item sold and where to mail it. A few days later, you receive the money for your gear —with Geartrade just taking a small percentage for their portion.
Sell your old gear, stockpile pocket money, repeat.
- List your Gear
Give your gear stockpile a quick clean-out. What do you actually use regularly, and what has sat unused for a season or more? Chances are, you have some skis you almost never take out, a softshell jacket you’ve replaced with one you like more, or an old helmet you replaced with a newer color. All this stuff is still perfectly usable. Give it a quick wipe-down or cycle through the washing machine, then post it on Geartrade. They have a handy guide for taking good photos of your items, plus a quick how-to on writing a product description that will help your item sell.
Geartrade will automatically recommend a listing price. If you list it lower, your item may sell faster. But you can list it higher if you’d like to see what you can get for it.
- Ship your Gear
You’ll receive an email notifying you when your gear has sold. Now, you have five days to get your booty to the post office and send it to the buyer. Most items are quite easy to mail—you can fold up a jacket or empty backpack in a random Amazon box. But oversized items are manageable, too. You can easily get an empty ski or snowboard box from a local ski shop, or a bike box from a local bike shop, or a paddleboard box from your surf shop. All you need to do is bubble-wrap your item, secure the box around it with packing tape, and take it to your friendly corner UPS or FedEx store.
- Get Paid
You let Geartrade know you’ve shipped your item by entering its tracking number on the site. Then, the system automatically checks for the delivery to make sure your item makes it to the buyer, then they direct-deposit your cash via Venmo, Paypal, or ACH (direct deposit to your bank).
Stoked yet? Yep, us too. It’s time to unload the skis, bindings, boards, boots, outerwear, gloves, and helmets you haven’t used in a couple of years. Someone out there would love to be using them. Give that gear the continued life it deserves—while lining your pockets with a little bonus money, too.
CATEGORIES
