What was your most bizarre eBay (or other selling site) success story?

vacheron

As title.

Reading an earlier post made me think about times unexpected items have turned out to be gold dust, so was wondering if anyone would like to share their most surprisingly profitable selling experience?

Thinking back over 22 years of eBay selling, my biggest surprise was when my american style fridge freezer packed in just 2 months after the 5 year manufacturers warranty expired. 

Disgruntled and wanting to recoup at least a little of the initial £909 that I originally paid for it, I decided to scrap the fridge body and the two doors, but take out all of the internal shelves, ice makers, compartments, egg holders and all the other stuff and list them on ebay.

Long story short, after about 6 months 85% of the parts had sold, to places all over the world including beauty salons in Monaco, hotels in Israel, a US Government agency in Delaware and dozens of other more normal addresses across the UK.

By the time the final part was sold (about 2 years later) the total for all the parts sold came to £1045! 

I guess many people would have had it all taken away and scrapped, and may even have paid money to acheive this!

In hindsight, it turns out that if I had had somewhere safe to store the fridge, I could have got at least £150 for each of the two doors, and about £200 for the main body too.

mrcol1000

I brought a box of old kids books at auction for £5. I could see most of them were Biggles and had no idea if they were worth anything or not but went on gut feeling. Anyway there were 20 books in there. Quite a few first editions. The cheapest sold for £20 and the most expensive for £200. 

GrubbyGirl_2

I paid £20 for a vase 3 years ago and popped it on eBay and was shocked when the bidding went up to £66 quickly.  Nice thought I until the last 30 seconds of the auction and it sold for £262 with 3 people bidding on it.  Result.

ballisticbrian

I was in the local charity shop when a policeman in the queue in front of me brought in a curious box and when he opened it. inside was a human skull. He proceeded to tell the women serving at the counter that she was allowed to sell it and that he had made all the necessary checks. The woman looked really worried that she now had to sell it, maybe she thought she'd got rid of it to the police, or maybe it just didn't fit well with the name of the shop, "salvation army". Seeing the look on her face, I leaned forward and said, "I will buy it" and she said "£20?" and I quickly agreed. Before I left the policeman said he didn't want to find it cropping up in peoples gardens or practical jokes, which was fine by me. I kept if for about 10 years, as an item of interest but found most people didn't like it, including my sister who had a collection of animal skulls, so I sold it on eBay for £100 and it went over seas to an artist.

GadgetGuru

When I moved into my house 5 years ago now, I found the owners had abandoned everything that was in the outbuilding. 
Here I found 2 laptops in working condition, as well as a lot of stock from their business - plain and printed sheets, bedsheets (single and double), duvets, etc

Everything brand new and still sealed in plastic packaging and in original shipping boxes!

Listed it up on GumTree and had a market trader take the lot for £1500.

Belenus

IftiBashir said:

When I moved into my house 5 years ago now, I found the owners had abandoned everything that was in the outbuilding. 
Here I found 2 laptops in working condition, as well as a lot of stock from their business - plain and printed sheets, bedsheets (single and double), duvets, etc

Everything brand new and still sealed in plastic packaging and in original shipping boxes!

Listed it up on GumTree and had a market trader take the lot for £1500.

In the 1980s some friends of mine bought a house from the relatives of a deceased owner. They informed my friends that the deceased owner was a hoarder and that they might find all sorts of stuff in odd places. They said to just keep or dispose of anything they found.

Some years later my friends replaced the stair carpet. They found several hundred pounds in sterling bank notes hidden under the carpet.

olgadapolga

We refurbished a bathroom and threw the shower valve out onto the rubbish pile. DH was taking a break from tiling with a cup of tea, saw the valve so decided to clean it up with some vinegar to get rid of the limescale and put it on eBay with a 99p start price. There was a last minute flurry and he sold it for nearly £50. The buyer received it, fitted it and left positive feedback all on the same day. DH was quite shocked that something destined for the tip made so much money. It's been a talking point for years.

vacheron

olgadapolga said:

We refurbished a bathroom and threw the shower valve out onto the rubbish pile. DH was taking a break from tiling with a cup of tea, saw the valve so decided to clean it up with some vinegar to get rid of the limescale and put it on eBay with a 99p start price. There was a last minute flurry and he sold it for nearly £50. The buyer received it, fitted it and left positive feedback all on the same day. DH was quite shocked that something destined for the tip made so much money. It's been a talking point for years.

I was once walking along a main road near my parents house about 15 years ago and found a chrome Alfa-Romeo front grille just lying, undamaged on the grass verge, all the attachment clips perfectly intact! 

Took that home and listed it too, IIRC it eventually sold for about £45+postage. 

maisie_cat

About 15 years ago I bought a job lot of of vintage Ravenhead storage jars for £13, the ones with the ground glass lids. I kept them for a few years to store pasta/rice etc. One day I noticed that a single version of a jar I had 10-15 of was selling and had reached £50. They had apparently got quite fashionable and at the time money was tight so I listed them and got around £600. In 2020 a local on facebook marketplace was also getting rid of a job lot so I started collecting them again.

Belenus

olgadapolga said:

We refurbished a bathroom and threw the shower valve out onto the rubbish pile. DH was taking a break from tiling with a cup of tea, saw the valve so decided to clean it up with some vinegar to get rid of the limescale and put it on eBay with a 99p start price. There was a last minute flurry and he sold it for nearly £50. The buyer received it, fitted it and left positive feedback all on the same day. DH was quite shocked that something destined for the tip made so much money. It's been a talking point for years.

Our house is one of about 60 houses on a 2004/5 development. All were originally fitted with Potterton Powermax HE boilers. 

Many of those boilers have been replaced in recent years.

One of my enterprising neighbours asked if he could have parts from some of the old boilers being replaced. Normally he sees the old boiler placed outside a house awaiting removal and disposal and asks permission to take it.

He has built up quite a stock of various parts which he has used to keep his own boiler going and also helped other neighbours with spare parts. He is generous and does not want payment for this. He sees it as part of being a good neighbour. He does ensure that a Gas Safe person gets involved if necessary but often it is a simple plumbing job.

Those parts would cost quite a lot of money if bought from merchants or even second hand on eBay.

Baxi/Potterton charge well over £300 for a call out and repair, even if the problem is an inexpensive part that takes little time to replace.

Jerry_Cornelius

I have had several watches in my life; a few Casio LCD's from Argos in the 1980's/1990's whch i've always kept, even after i've stopped wearing them. One I think was used in a Doctor Who episode or some such programme, and it suddently became valuable to collectors. I think I paid about £20 for it originally, but i sold it in 2016 to someone in Germany for £137.

Another was at a car-boot in 2011 where i bought a box of toy parts for £10 as I noticed some Thunderbirds bits I wanted for my collection (Gerry Anderson fan here). The seller didnt want to sell me just the bits I wanted, he wanted to flog the whole box, so I said OK, thinking i'd just dump the stuff i didnt want. The other stuff was some very dusty toy parts which turned out to be Power Ranger Megazord figures from the 1990s which I found out about online and was able to sort the pieces out into their respective figures, clean them up, and then i put them on ebay as i had no real interest in them. There were 3 and they turned out to be complete, and were in excellent condition once i'd cleaned all the dust off - sold for £57, £40 and £36.

The other big deal i made was when I decided to sell my old home computer, a Commodore Plus/4 from 1980's on ebay in 2005. Although the computer sold OK, I had a shed load of cassette games that i put on individually over many weeks, and being one of the few it seemed prepared to sell outside the UK, I had basically 4 people from the US, Germany, Hungary and Sweden just bidding on these games, often against each other, so whereas the UK only sellers were getting £4-5 a game, I was averaging £15-20 and i must have sold 100+ games in the end.