What Goes Around Comes Around

The art of regifting.

By Carol Tisch

Tis the season to regift. I know because we held a New Year’s Day party and we regifted a bottle of wine. We think it was wine we had given the regifters. Don’t know if we got it from a regifter in the first place. It occurred to me it might be fun to secretly mark such gifts to document their journeys. Think of it as sending a message “on” a bottle. Where will your unwanted gift turn up?

But society has a whole new outlook on the disposal of unwanted gifts. The stigma associated with regifting is gone. Unwanted gifts are one more form of clutter. And clutter causes stress (see my “Out with the Old,” a guide to deaccessioning in SARASOTA Magazine’s January issue).

Point of no returns: If your holiday gifts don't suit you and you don't fancy waiting in the line at the mall to return them, just sell them on the Internet instead.

So if you cringe at the thought of returning presents to brick and mortar stores (not to mention offending the giver by asking for a sales receipt), you can regift OR resell on the Internet. Just as neighborhood stores have tightened return policies—I’ve read reports that several national retailers track habitual returners—the Internet is making it easier to sell unwanted gifts online.

Especially popular with the under-35 demographic who is fearless about navigating the web, Internet reselling is being promoted by many auction websites. Check out overstock.com, which has a link on its home page to walk first-time resellers through the process. EBay ebay.com has reduced its listing fees for holiday gift resellers. And Yahoo has a new site with no sellers’ fees at all: www.auctions.shopping.yahoo.com

If you aren’t inclined to devote the time required to sell your stuff on line, there are several auction drop shops in Sarasota who’ll do the work for you (and charge a fee of 25 to 30 percent of the selling price). What’s more, they’ll do the pricing, monitoring, photography and description of the items to help them sell.

The attraction to auction websites is that holiday gifts can be marketed as “new” merchandise, a lot more saleable than the used items typically posted by non-professional web sellers. But what’s even more intriguing about this new market is the hierarchy of perceived value for certain gifts in the minds of buyers.

Apparently, they’ll pay more for gift cards (would you have thought of reselling something that was a cop-out gift to begin with?) than they will for clothes. But you won’t get face value for either. What you will get is less clutter at home, more cash than when you started, and the anonymity of selling on line —your friends or relatives need never know the item they bought on EBay in January was actually the one they liked enough to give to you in December.

Posted: 1/5/2007 9:22:01 AM | 0 comments

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