Being able to sell your used Gear be that guitars, effects pedals, amps or other equipment is really based on three key factors. These key factors are critical considerations to take into account when Selling used music equipment online. Let’s jump into to details and explain the important points to pay particular attention to.

Supply and Demand

If you have a product that people need or want you are in business. This is really stating the obvious, but it is an often overlooked aspect of selling used music gear. I have sold a lot of equipment online and this is the main factor that comes into play for selling gear fast and hopefully making a little profit on the side.

So that is not to say you won’t sell your three year old Ibanez ts9 pedal. But you may not sell it right away and may have to take a small loss. This is just the unfortunate reality these days as there is plenty of supply for this type of product. Now if you are selling a 80’s mint condition Rat Distortion Pedal now you are selling from a commanding position. You have the Demand in you favor as the pedal is rare and condition is excellent and hopefully your cost of purchase was low.

So back to gauging supply and demand. There is no real way to measure supply and demand unless you are privy to some insider e-commerce product sales stats. Most of us don’t have that kind of information, so it is a bit of a guess.

There are a couple of tools out there to help your guess become an educated guess as it relates to supply and demand. The two tools I recommend for this is effectspedaldatabse and reverb.com. I think both of these sites do a good job at giving you some great reference points for further researching your effects pedal. Next we have demand, a little harder to gauge but there are still some logical ways to approach this. First do a search on Ebay and Craigslist, how many pedal do you see listed? Anything less than a few is usually a good sign and points to low supply. Now that doesn’t mean you are in the money, remeber supply in only half the battle.

Condition

Now jumping into condition, which will always impact the asking price of an item. Of course the better condition the more one can ask. Seems like common sense right…well you should see some of the pedals and gear being sold. I mean even if the condition is not great, don’t sell or take pictures of dirty music gear or effects pedals. It takes about 5 to 10 minute to give you equipment a thorough cleaning. Once cleaned and reconditioned, you may find you can up the condition rating a bit. That ten minutes cleaning and reconditioning your music equipment may allow you to increase the asking price by as much 10%. Check out one of our previous post on effects pedal cleaning to help you get started.

Price

Last but not least we discuss asking price. Get this part wrong and you can definitely alienate some potential buyers. First you need to asses the type of item you are selling and how does it rate against other items currently for sale online. Walk yourself through the 3 main factors of selling Music Gear Online we discussed above. Supply and demand what is the rarity of my item, what is the condition, based on these attributes what is the typical asking price.

Ok asking price is a tough one, but can be approach very logically to minimize the guesswork. First thing is to assign the item you are selling a rating based on 1 to 10 for demand and condition. So let’s say I am selling a three year old TC Electronics Hall of Fame effect pedal that I originally paid 70.00 dollars for used. So on the demand scale, it is around a 3 because it really isn’t rare all and there are plenty of these around for sale online. Next is the condition, this is where I have an advantage as it is in near mint condition so the rating would be a 9. When I look online to research competitive prices based on demand and price I find the median price for this effects pedal is around $85.00 dollars. So I would list this pedal for 80 dollars and offer a free shipping incentive.

So here is the great part of this particular use case. I got to use this piece of gear for free and made around $10.00 dollars. Of course this is not always the case; sometimes you are going to make a decent profit and other times you may have to take a loss. It all depends on the condition and price of the gear that you purchased. Hopefully this article gives you the ammunition to buy and sell music gear online like a pro, taking the mystery and guesswork out of play.

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