After five years of selling, Creel has recently revamped her business and moved to her own domain name, Popfizzvintage.com, where she can have more control over her marketing. “I also have an email marketing list, a MySpace page where I'm constantly posting bulletins for auctions or store discounts, and I pour through the Want-It-Now section on eBay daily,” Creel says.

If and when you do start selling your things on eBay, or other ecommerce sites such as Craigslist.com or Amazon.com, you will have to craft your own selling strategy.

Scalisi has this advice to prospective online sellers: “Spend as much time as possible on your listing's details. Provide as much information as possible. Do not talk about why you're selling the item, and instead focus on the details of the item itself. People bid on items that look professionally listed or, at least, listed by someone who will act professionally throughout the transaction. If the price is right, your feedback is good and the item is what they're looking for, they'll bid.”

And, both Scalisi and Creel agree that a picture is always worth a thousand words, particularly now that owning a digital camera is so cheap and easy. “I used to use a mannequin for women's clothing and plain hangers for men's stuff and it just didn't represent well,” Creel says. “So I started using myself and my boyfriend as models and now I hire my friends to model, too. People really like to see what the clothes look like on a real body and it's way more fun and personable!”

So how do you decide what the best site is for selling your stuff? “Unless the item is very heavy and will cost a lot to ship in relation to its selling price (a cheap printer or bowling ball) and unless the item is virtually impossible to ship (a sofa or refrigerator), eBay is by far the best place online to sell an item,” says Scalisi. “For those items that would sell better as local pickup, I often turn to Craigslist. eBay does have an option for local pickup, but it's just not normally as efficient as Craigslist is.”