One Person’s Trash is another Person’s eBay Treasure

This week we learnt that you can literally sell rubbish (yes, I'm talking about the stuff you’d normally clog your recycling bins up with) on Ebay. For real.

January: it’s cold, it’s long and we’ve generally got to make those post-Christmas £s stretch even further than normal thanks to the early December payday that many of us get.

So it’s probably a good time to start thinking about earning some extra money. One way that many of us will do this in the new year is by selling old items or unwanted Christmas gifts.

Loads of us will sell unwanted Christmas gifts on Ebay, clear out CD and DVD collections or sell clothing that no longer fits. But did you know you can sell RUBBISH on Ebay and people will actually buy it? Oh yes. You can also get great savings on your purchases with the latest eBay voucher codes we list here on My Favourite Voucher Codes.

We did a bit of research into some of the most commonly sold items that might typically be classified as ‘rubbish’ and the results were very surprising. We found that empty perfume bottles, empty wine bottles and even cardboard toilet roll tubes were amongst the “treasures” that people have been successfully selling on Ebay instead of binning. Take a look:

Household Rubbish You Can Sell on Ebay

We did some research and looked specifically at used auction listings that successfully completed (i.e. they ended with the item selling) for various queries and here are some of our findings:
 

1. Empty Perfume Bottles

How many empty perfume bottles have you thrown away? A couple a year maybe? More, perhaps?

Well you might want to look away now because our research reveals that the average successful auction for used “Ebay empty perfume bottles” ends with a bid of £4.33. That was from over 1,900 auctions we were able to find when we did our research on 3rd January.

There were some particularly big sellers too! The highest prices from the most recent auctions were:

• 1: Tom Ford Empty Perfume Bottle Set of 8 - £100!
• 2: Empty original designer men’s fragrance bottles (multiple) - £64.00
• 3: Tom Ford Neroli di Portofino Empty Bottle Original Perfume 100ml - £40.01

Amongst the more common of these auctions were empty Marc Jacobs bottles like this one:

One bottle and the box might secure you £4!

Is it time for you to clear out those old perfume bottles?
 

2. Empty Glass Bottles

With Christmas just over, there’s every chance your glass bottle bin is crammed full to the top awaiting the next bin pick up day. Well, you might want to have a little rummage through it because our research found auctions for used “empty glass bottles” had successfully completed almost 500 times in the period we were observing.

Of these, listings were selling for an average of £5.58!!!

The top 3 in terms of highest bid:

• 1: VODKA RED ARMY KALASHNIKOV Vodka Empty Bottle With Case And Grenade Glasses - £81.99
• 2: 5 x 70cl/700ml Crystal Head Vodka Bottle With Box (empty) - £45.00
• 3: 5 x Crystal Head Vodka Bottles (empty) 70cl/700ml - £41.00

If you happen to have any empty Crystal Head vodka bottles lying around, they could be worth a pretty penny. But we even saw bottles like Hendrick’s gin bottles selling for several pounds too:
 

This collection of mixed empty vodka bottles also fetched £20!

So maybe it’s time to make some space in your glass recycling by popping some of those empty bottles on Ebay.

3. Cardboard Boxes

We ran a search for “cardboard boxes,” filtered for auction only and used only and found 114 listings with an impressive average sale value of £12.21.

The top 3 clearly show the big money here is in having a few to hand:

• 1: 45 - 50 Used Double Wall Cardboard Boxes - £55.00
• 2: 100 X Cardboard Brown Packing Boxes, X-Large to Small - Excellent Condition - £50.00
• 3: 50 X  A Cardboard Removal Boxes & Wrapping Paper, Strong Various Sizes. - £40.00

Cardboard boxes still sitting in the loft after your last house move?

Now might be a good time to clear those out!

4. Toilet Roll Tubes

And, yes, by “toilet roll tubes” we really do mean the cardboard tubes inside toilet rolls - just bog standard (no pun intended) toilet roll tubes.

If you happen to have saved your loo roll tubes for some time, you might have a batch that could earn you a few £s - and you could save some space clearing them out.

The 37 successfully completed auctions we found sold for an average of £2.50. It won’t change your life - but it’s money for old loo roll centres!

The top 3 listings:

• 1: 95 EMPTY TOILET ROLLS CARBOARD TUBES - £10.00
• 2: 291 Cardboard tubes empty toilet roll centre - £10.00
• 3: 90 Cardboard Empty Toilet/Loo Roll Tubes/Centres  - £6.00

So if you have a hundred or so, there could be a tenner (or close to it) in your back pocket.

5. Empty Jars

399 successful used auction listings for “empty jars,” unveiled an average selling price of  £5.79 per listing.

The top 3:

• 1: Elemis pro collagen EMPTY jar pot vanity bag - £50.00
• 2: Diptyque Candle Jars Empty X 10 - £49.50
• 3: Empty Douwe Egbert Coffee Jars Storage/Crafts X 40 - £45.00

Jo Malone candle jars perform particularly well:

And so too do Bonne Maman jam jars:

6. Empty Jewellery Boxes

This one astounded us. A search for “empty jewellery boxes” filtered to show “used” and “auction” only revealed 428 recent successfully completed auctions with an average selling price of £10.89!!!

The top 3 listings:

• 1: ANTIQUE  & VINTAGE EMPTY JEWELLERY AND WATCH BOXES X 15 - £128.00
• 2: ANTIQUE  & vintage empty jewellery box x 17 - £127.00
• 3: 8 Antique Leather Jewellery Box Boxes Empty Display Rings Pin Pendant Boodle & D - £112.01

But even if you don’t have loads of them and they’re not antique, your empty jewellery boxes could fetch a few quid.

Empty Pandora boxes sell regularly:

A Tiffany Box could fetch over £10!

And even a Warren James box might bag you £4!

Don’t Bin it - Sell it!

Ok, so we’re not suggesting that you empty your bins and start sticking everything, right down to the crisp packets, on Ebay. But what you might have thrown out (things like jars and bottles in particular) could be worth a few pounds. And even if it’s only a few quid here and there, if you make an effort to list these items on Ebay over a whole year, you might well just end up with a very Merry Christmas fund by the end of it.

Happy Ebaying.

Methodology and Data

We manually searched Ebay.co.uk on 3rd January 2018. We made the following 6 searches:

• Empty glass bottles

• Empty jars

• Empty perfume bottles

• Toilet roll tubes

• Empty jewellery boxes

• Cardboard boxes

Following each search, we then did the following:

1. Filtered to show auction only

2. Filtered to show used listings only

3. Filtered to show sold listings only

This gave us a list of the recent used auction listings on ebay.co.uk that had successfully completed with a buyer and matching the queries above.

For each of the queries, we then wrote the data up into a spreadsheet for analysis.

You can see obtain a copy of that spreadsheet by clicking here

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Posted By: Mary-Ellen Simper - My Favourite Voucher Codes - 4th January 2019