How to Sell Your Excess Crap for Cash in Just a Few Hours with Amazon’s Fulfillment Program

Author: Adam Dachis (Lifehacker) · Published: February 22, 2012 (updated by Lifehacker December 10, 2019) · URL: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-sell-your-excess-crap-for-cash-in-just-a-few-hou-5887412

One-line: A step-by-step guide to using Fulfillment by Amazon — a service built for high-volume merchants — as a household decluttering tool: fill a box, list what is in it, ship it to Amazon, and collect the money as it sells.

Summary

The pitch is convenience. “Got crap? Want money instead?” Dachis points out that Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), though designed for sellers with lots of inventory, is open to anyone with a seller account. You “dump your crap in a box,” create listings for what is inside, print a shipping label and send it off; the whole thing takes “an hour or two” and need not involve leaving the house. Amazon then lists the items on its product pages, ships them in its own packaging and handles any customer problems. In the 2012 version the seller pays a small storage fee, $1 for shipping and handling, and the usual Amazon selling commission.

He is upfront about the limits. It is “not great for cheap items” — below roughly $4 a sale there is not much left after fees, though Amazon shows the expected payout before you ship. Items missing a barcode or ISBN can be hard to add. And the first run is “a little cumbersome.”

Most of the piece is a click-by-click walkthrough of Seller Central as it stood in 2012: create a standard (not professional) seller account and add FBA; add each item by name, UPC or ISBN and mark it as an Amazon-fulfilled listing; group everything into a “shipment” treated as case-packed items so warehouse staff can find it; let Amazon pick the nearest fulfillment centre (Dachis, in Los Angeles, was routed to PHX3 in Phoenix); then print item labels and a packing slip, enter the box’s weight and dimensions, accept the discounted partnered-carrier (usually UPS) rate, and schedule a pickup. After the first box, he says, you “breeze through the process,” and the proceeds transfer straight to your bank account.

The 2019 republication keeps the argument and structure but updates the screenshots and fee details.

Full text

Archived privately against link rot, in its original February 2012 form: ../attachments/how-to-sell-your-excess-crap-for-cash-in-just-a-few-hours-with-amazons-fulfillment-program/how-to-sell-your-excess-crap-for-cash-in-just-a-few-hours-with-amazons-fulfillment-program.md (plus the current hero image).

Connections

• Amazon — FBA turns Amazon’s warehouses and customer service into infrastructure a single household can rent by the box.
• Marketplaces — the article shows the supply side of a marketplace being lowered all the way down to someone clearing out a closet.
• Sharing Economy — the same 2010s current: platforms making it cheap to shed possessions and turn idle stuff into cash.