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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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In my experience selling it as a whole never happens outright. Buying someone out goes the other way around. I've owned my own business twice.
You will honestly be better off holding your accounts if you ever change your mind or direction. You will get stuck with junk or make selling off stuff your career for a time. If you cannot keep your tools, make some impossible to pass up deal in bulk lots divided so that there is a good distribution of value.
If you placed everything on eBay piecemeal, you will never sell your last item before you die. That is the case on any single platform. I was the buyer for a chain of bike shops for several years. I have sold over $136k on eBay, and I used swap meets to offload overburden too. If anyone consigns for you, if their business model is viable, they will take at least 40% out of the gross margin.
All of eBay's fees, shipping, taxes, all combined with an account in perfect standing came out to 39-42% of the total sale price. So with consignment, you will actually get around 20% of the total sale price or a little less. It is not at all sustainable and why no one runs successful businesses doing eBay consignments. eBay should be less than half their present fees, especially considering the poor quality of service.
Think of offloading stuff from the perspective of the interested individual, not like a business. Part out and sell your excess tooling while still running your business with what you have.
Personally, I don't paint cars any more and if I could physically do the work, I still wouldn't want to. However, many of my tools and stuff are still kicking around and something I do not regret keeping. Quite the opposite, I really wish I had kept what remained of my mixing system, and all of my welding and polishing gear.
This is really thoughtful advice. I super appreciate it. I don't know what to do, I've had a lot of fun making stuff to solve peoples needs, but this year it's all dried up and I've been spending the reserves to get into shows, pay for marketing etc....
Maybe I'll just put everything on pause for a long time.
Everyone is bracing for the economic free fall that is going to be the next 5 years. We are still at the upper end and it's only going to get worse under this administration.
So, I have no doubt that people just aren't spending money on the kinds of things that they were even just last year. I wish I had something better to tell you, but it is going to be a while before we see people having the money to spend on custom designing anything. As the previous poster pointed out, you need to either decide to get rid of stuff and then sell it like you want it gone, or accept that now it is just a hobby that basically paid for itself.