And a Happy Kijiji New Year

It's been a while.  My Christmas break was busy and I just didn't feel like spending time on the computer most days.  One thing I don't think I've mentioned on here yet is that Brahm and I finally bought a house.  We actually bought it a few months ago, and move in in a couple weeks.  Overall, buying a house and house hunting was a far more emotional experience than I'd originally anticipated and I decided to stop blogging about it.

But anyway, we have now begun the process of purging things we don't want to take with us - this mostly includes a few pieces of ugly, cheap student furniture, the biggest of which was an older blue couch.

You know all about my bad Kijiji experience with the monitors so I was not looking forward to trying to sell a couch on Kijiji.  Plus, looking at Kijiji Saskatoon brought up tons of couches that people were giving away for free - how could I compete?  I asked as many people I could think of if they wanted or knew anyone wanting a free couch, to no avail. 

So finally, I decided to put the couch on Kijiji just to see what happened.  I took a co-worker's advice about not putting it on for free, because free generally means "garbage".  I took a few respectable pictures with my DSLR camera and posted an ad, asking $50.

(Dude - this is the power of a DSLR.  It looks super bright in our apartment, right?  It was totally a cloudy, dreary day but I still managed to take these without a flash.)

I also put some rules in my ad, to the effect of "I hate being jerked around by buyers, so here are the rules you need to follow if you want this couch."

And wouldn't you know, I had an interested buyer in about 30 seconds.  She used real sentences (not "can u take pic thx"), told me what her name was, and showed up well on time.  I also had two more interested people lined up if the first buyer didn't work out.

The girl who picked up the couch told me that I was the only seller on Kijiji who even responded to her.  It drives me nuts when people don't remove their ads after their item has sold and just ignore emails that come in about it - come on people, that is bad Kijiji etiquette!

The moral of the story is, I think I have learned my lesson about Kijiji buyers.  My rules are going in all future ads.  I am sure I'll get burned by some more idiot buyers in the future but this experience has restored my faith that good Kijiji buyers do exist, especially if you lay down the ground rules from the start.