How to Sell Your Furniture Online (And the Best Places to Do It)

Before you do anything else, you’ll need to decide where to list your furniture. Here’s a close look at some of the most popular options and what kinds of furniture they’re designed to sell.

Best platforms for selling furniture locally

If you want to skip the shipping headaches and sell directly to people in your area, these are the best sites to showcase your furniture.

• Craigslist: This is the classic choice for selling furniture locally. You don’t need an account and won’t pay any fees for listing or selling. However, you’ll need to negotiate payment and shipping with your buyer on your own. Craigslist won’t provide any help.
• Facebook Marketplace: You can reach a much larger audience here, since about 3 billion people have active Facebook accounts. With shipping fees of $0.40 for sales under $8 and 5% for everything else, it’s a fairly low-fee marketplace.
• Nextdoor: As with Craigslist, you’ll need to do all the legwork yourself, but it won’t cost you anything to list your furniture. Your potential buyers will be in your neighborhood, making this a good option if you want a straightforward local sale.

Best platforms for selling either nationally or locally

Want to cast the widest possible net? These marketplaces let you ship items nationwide (although you can still arrange local pickup if someone in your area buys them).

• eBay: This is one of the most flexible online marketplaces out there. You can sell as an individual or as a business and allow buyers to either bid or buy your furniture outright. However, eBay’s fees are higher and more complex than other sites’ and depend on your item’s category and final sale price.
• eBid: You’ll pay significantly lower fees on this site than on eBay (only 0%–5% of the final sale price), but many of its features, like a thumbnail image that will appear in search results, require you to pay $9.99 per month for a “Gold” account.
• OfferUp: You won’t pay any fees for local pickup on this site, but the 12.9% shipping service fee is on the high end. OfferUp is also only accessible via its mobile app if you’re a seller, making it a good choice if you live on your phone, but a bad choice if you prefer to conduct business on your computer.
• AptDeco: This site accepts all kinds of furniture, ranging all the way from old IKEA chairs and desks to mid-century modern pieces. You’ll need to plug in your item’s info to see what you’ll pay in fees. AptDeco’s team will pick up your furniture from your home and help you deliver it.

Best platforms for long-term businesses

If you want to turn furniture selling into a long-term side hustle, you’ll want to check out these sites, which provide you with more extensive toolkits than the others.

• Bonanza: This site will only take a 3.5% cut of the final value of your item. You can sync your listings from other marketplaces (like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon), and examine your sales data with Bonanza’s stats dashboard.
• Ruby Lane: This curated site’s $25 monthly fee is canceled out by a rebate if you list at least 15 new items each month. You’ll pay a 9.9% service fee capped at $250 on your sales. However, you’ll also need to keep at least 10 items available at all times and meet Ruby Lane’s quality standards.
• Shopify: With Shopify, you can create your own website with a built-in payment processing system and behind-the-scenes analytics tools. Bear in mind that you’ll need to handle all of your own marketing and pay at least $39 per month plus payment processing fees on your sales.

To offload your furniture, just follow this guide:

Step 1: Choose the right site to sell your furniture

As mentioned, this is the first step. Review the list above and consider:

• The age and condition of your furniture
• Whether you’re selling antique, vintage, or designer items
• Whether you’d prefer to sell furniture locally or ship it nationally

If nothing pops out at you and you aren’t selling high-end or antique furniture, you’re probably safe if you go with a tried-and-tested platform like Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Whichever site you choose, read the listing rules carefully and be sure you understand the fees for listing and selling furniture.

Step 2: Clean or repair your furniture

Furniture can fetch a better price and sell faster if it’s been touched up a little. A fresh wood finish or layer of paint can make older furniture look new. If an item has minor damage, like a small rip in the fabric, repair it before listing it.

Step 3: List and promote your items

Once your items are looking their best, snap a few photos and get ready to list them. Check out our tips on crafting eye-catching listings below, and be sure to follow your marketplace’s rules.

It’s sometimes worth cross-listing your items (posting them on multiple marketplaces). This can expand your visibility and increase your possibility of a quick sale. However, you may find that managing multiple listings across multiple accounts is a hassle if selling furniture becomes your long-term hustle.

You can also promote your listings on social media. Facebook and Instagram are especially good for grabbing the attention of people in your area with pictures of your furniture.

Step 4: Ship the items or arrange pickup

What’s involved in this last step depends on where you’ve listed your furniture and how your buyer wants to receive their purchase.

Some platforms, including AptDeco, will pick up and transport your furniture to your buyer with their own delivery team. With other sites, you’ll have to handle shipping (including scheduling pickup) yourself. Refer to FedEx’s guide on how to ship furniture to do this safely.

Safety tips for meeting up in person

If you ship your furniture, you never need to meet your buyer, but if you’re selling locally, you’ll probably opt to bring the item to your buyer or have them come to your house.

Here are some tips to ensure you have a safe in-person sale:

• Agree on all payment details beforehand and ask for payment before you hand off your furniture.
• Don’t give buyers your personal information beyond what’s necessary for payment and coordinating pickup.
• For smaller items, put them in your trunk and meet the buyer in a public place, like the parking lot of a grocery store.
• For larger items, move them down your driveway so the buyer doesn’t need to enter your home.
• In either case, bring a friend or two along. They can also help you move your furniture and keep an eye on the transaction.

Making a great listing involves just three elements: clear pictures, an honest description, and fair pricing.

Take clear pictures of your furniture

Nothing convinces someone that they need an item like a beautiful photo. While your description will do the heavy lifting when it comes to your piece’s qualities, your pictures will be what makes buyers click on your listing in the first place.

Here’s how to take attractive and useful pictures of your furniture:

• Use natural lighting: Nothing can compare to good, old-fashioned sunlight when it comes to accurately rendering a piece’s color and details.
• Snap multiple angles: Give your audience a 360-degree look at your furniture, plus any interior spaces (like drawers).
• Highlight flaws: This sounds counterintuitive, but many people will overlook minor damage or defects if you’re open and upfront about them.
• Showcase fine details: If your furniture has patterned fabric, engravings, or other details that are hard to see from a distance, snap a close-up so buyers know what to expect.
• Create scale: While most of your photos should feature just your item, staging a photo with your furniture in a fully decorated room can help buyers judge its size and envision how it might look in their own home.

In general, you should try to limit yourself to about five pictures, although more complicated pieces (like an antique writing desk with lots of drawers) may need 10 or even more. When in doubt, err on the side of being too thorough instead of not thorough enough.

Write a snappy (but honest) title and description

When you create your listing, make sure to use appropriate keywords in the title and description. This will make it easier for people to find it. (On a similar note, double-check that you’ve placed your listing in the right category; if it’s a dresser that you’ve listed in a section for tables, people might ignore your listing, or it might get deleted.)

If you’re not sure what keywords to use, work backwards. Imagine what you would search for if this was your dream purchase, then run searches to see if other listings with those terms match what you’re selling.

However, don’t overdo it. Marketplaces often have rules against jamming your listing with too many keywords. Stick to basic descriptive terms, like “round metal end table” or “vintage brown leather barstool.”

Some basic information your listing will need, no matter what kind of furniture you’re selling:

• Height, width, and depth, including features like armrests and shelves.
• Materials, if you know them.
• Age and brand of your furniture, and the retailer you bought it from. This information helps buyers evaluate the legitimacy of your item.
• Whether the item was in a smoking home or around pets.

These guidelines don’t mean that your listings need to be formulaic. Many platforms encourage you to include some background info about why you’re selling the piece or why you bought it (“I found this floral sofa at a yard sale and it charmed me immediately”). If you can use your listing to spin a little story, that will grab people’s attention.

Price your furniture fairly

Finding the right price for your furniture can be one of the most daunting parts of the selling process.

For most items, pricing is a matter of age, origin, and quality. Be realistic about the value of your furniture—no one wants to buy used mass-produced dining chairs at retail prices, but an unusual and quirky vintage item might not need much of a discount.

Your competition is the best pricing guide, so the first step is researching similar items. Use our list of sites in the first section of this article to check marketplaces that reach similar audiences. Etsy’s reputation as a vintage marketplace, for example, makes it worth checking (even if you don’t plan on using Etsy and will list your vintage furniture somewhere else).

For antiques and high-end furniture, you’re better off getting an appraisal. Some services, like Sotheby’s Home, offer this as part of their regular selling process. Getting an appraisal will ensure that you price your furniture at its proper value.

You should also consider what you’ll pay in shipping costs and whether your marketplace has a bidding option that may drive the price up.

On some sites, you can indicate that the price is negotiable in your listing description. Decide on your lowest acceptable price when you list your item to avoid making a deal you regret.