Eight Years on Xianyu: My Seller's Guide

What? You got a new phone again? What about the old one?

The old one? Well, obviously it's sitting in a drawer...

Honestly, social media has been flooded with ads for Zhuanzhuan for years now, and their catchy slogan has almost turned into an internet meme.

But as someone who's been buying and selling secondhand for nearly eight years, I still don't think much of Zhuanzhuan.

These days Zhuanzhuan seems to have turned itself into a platform for official buyback and official resale. When it comes to people trading secondhand with each other freely, Xianyu is ahead, both in how it's promoted and in how it actually feels to use.

So if you just want a platform where you can sell your unused stuff yourself, I still recommend Xianyu.

I've used Xianyu for eight years and bought or sold at least four hundred items on it. Before this, I wrote two guides about using Xianyu and buying secondhand.

If you're interested, you can read them through the links below.

[[Eight Years on Xianyu: My Guide to Buying and Haggling]]

[[Eight Years on Xianyu: What I Want to Talk About Isn't Making Money]]

As the title says, this post is about how to sell your unused things on Xianyu, and everything in it comes from my eight years of using the app.

I'll go through it question by question:

1. What can you sell on Xianyu?
2. What should you watch out for when listing an item?
3. What do you do when someone haggles?
4. How do you avoid getting squeezed after delivery?
5. Which courier should you use?
6. What if the buyer never confirms receipt?

What Can You Sell on Xianyu?

First, a quick look at what Xianyu is. No need to overthink it. At its core, Xianyu is a platform built around trading secondhand things freely. So selling your own stuff and buying things you love are the two things you should be doing there.

What you can sell breaks down into a lot of categories.

• Electronics: phones, computers, headphones, cameras, Switch, PS5, CCD cameras, and other gadgets all fall here. This is also the category I trade in most on Xianyu.
• Clothing: plenty of people sell clothes they no longer wear on Xianyu.
• Services and listings: renting out or selling homes, cleaning services, topping up memberships for others, and so on.
• Industrial and mechanical: car parts, motorcycle parts, machined parts, and cars, motorcycles, and bikes themselves.

If I tried to sort everything you can sell on Xianyu into categories, I'd basically have to post a link to the complete catalog of human manufacturing.

A secondhand item is anything that was once useful to you and now just sits around. It can be anything at all. For example, one thing I sold recently was a leftover tempered glass screen protector from an old phone. It went for 50 yuan.

Funny, right? Who sells a leftover screen protector? And what's even funnier is that someone actually bought it!

That's the magic of Xianyu. What you can sell there usually depends on your imagination, not on the thing itself.

So take a look at the things that have been sitting around you for ages that you don't know what to do with, and try listing them on Xianyu!

What Should You Watch Out For When Listing an Item?

Listing an item is the first step of selling. It's like a street vendor: you have to put your goods out front where people can see them, or nobody knows what you're selling.

Listing is how you get people to see what you have.

When you list something, you usually need to fill in a few things:

• Item name
• Description
• Photos
• Price

Let me break those four down:

• Item name: the most direct few words that tell people what you're selling. If you're selling an iPhone 17, just write iPhone 17 as the name.
• Description: this is where you tell the story of your item. Usually it should cover the following:
  • When did you buy it? How many years have you used it?
  • Is there any damage to the exterior? Does everything work?
  • Do you still have the original box? Is there a receipt or invoice? Cover those three points, six questions in all, and the buyer basically has a first impression of your item.
• Photos: this one matters a lot. The photos should show what you're selling as clearly and completely as possible. Don't cut corners here. Show the good parts and the bad parts from every angle, and point them out and label them clearly.
• Price: the last step is setting a price. My habit is to list a bit above the average market price, and how much above depends on the total. For something worth one or two hundred yuan, I list it thirty to fifty higher. For something worth a few thousand, two or three hundred higher.
• Remember: whatever price you list, people will haggle you down in the end, so you might as well list high from the start.

What Do You Do When Someone Haggles?

Relax, friend. If you buy or sell on Xianyu without haggling, you've wasted the trip. Whether you're the seller or the buyer, you need to learn to haggle and be haggled without any baggage.

So as a seller, what should you do when someone haggles?

• Step one: you have to know what your item is worth. As long as you know for sure it can sell for that much, you won't panic when someone lowballs you below market price.
• Step two: keep your nerve. Depending on what you're selling, you should know how many people are likely to want it. If it's something lots of people use, like a phone, computer, keyboard, or mouse, then when you get a brutal lowball, remember that if this person doesn't buy it, someone else will. There's no rush.
• A few days ago my friend Liang Mouyin put his mouse up on Xianyu for 40 yuan. I told him he could list it higher, and he ended up listing it at 60. Not as many people asked about it, but because I knew it was worth that much, I knew someone would buy it eventually. In the end, Liang Mouyin sold his mouse for 55 yuan.
• Step three: accept reasonable cuts based on your situation. If the price you listed was on the high side to begin with, selling after a small cut is almost inevitable. Even if lots of people want your item, it'll still be hard to sell if you price it like a family heirloom.

Those three steps are the best mindset to have when selling:

• One: I know what my item can sell for, so I know where I stand.
• Two: I know that if you don't buy it, someone else will, so I don't panic.
• Three: I'm not after the highest price, just a fair one, so I don't feel cheated.

How Do You Avoid Getting Squeezed After Delivery?

Getting squeezed after delivery is the thing almost everyone new to selling on Xianyu fears most, especially people selling electronics.

Here's what it means: after the buyer receives the item, they claim something's wrong with it and demand you knock a few hundred yuan off.

The scariest part isn't just the price cut. It's that if you refuse, the buyer might break the item, or swap out parts, and then send it back to you.

This happens especially often with electronics, and I'll write a separate post on buying and selling electronics in the future. Follow along if you're interested.

Here I'll share some broader lessons that work for almost every kind of item. Get these right and you can avoid being squeezed after delivery in most cases.

First, screen your buyers.

People who squeeze you after delivery are usually repeat offenders, and their profiles almost always have a few bad reviews.

From where I stand, I just want to pass my things on to someone else who needs them. So to keep the weirdos away as much as possible, I set myself a few iron rules:

• No Sesame Credit authorization, no deal.
• Sesame Credit not rated "Excellent," no deal.
• Default Xianyu profile picture, no deal.
• Any bad reviews, or bad reviews that are way out of line, no deal.
• Too many questions and too much dragging their feet, no deal.

If you stick to these five, I think you can avoid more than 90% of the weirdos.

Let me explain the last one, why I don't deal with people who ask too many questions and drag their feet. I don't mean to look down on anyone. It's just that from the people I've met, buyers on Xianyu who keep pressing for details tend to nitpick once the item arrives, too.

For people like that, all I can say is they're better off buying new.

Learn to screen your buyers. Don't sell to just anyone. Use your right to choose.

The second step is just as important. It's your last line of insurance for when a weirdo buyer slips through all your screening anyway.

There are a few things you need to do.

• Once you've agreed on a price and the buyer has paid, test the item's functions, record a video, and send it to the buyer.
• Then state clearly: no returns on the grounds of condition once the item has been received.
• When you ship, record a video of yourself packing if you can. At the very least, take a photo of the item after it's packed.
• Send the shipping video to the buyer.

Here's why:

• The function test video leaves you with final proof that everything worked.
• Stating that there are no returns over condition means the buyer accepts the condition shown in the video. If they later try to return it over condition, you can refuse on that basis.
• The shipping video and packing photo protect you from weirdo buyers who claim they got a different package.

All of this is about protecting your rights as much as possible if you do run into a weirdo buyer.

And if it does end up going to Xianyu's dispute jury, all of this evidence carries a lot of weight.

It happened to me once. I sold a road bike handlebar on Xianyu, and after the buyer received it, he sent me a photo of an LED box, said I'd shipped the wrong item, and filed for a refund.

I sent him the photo I'd taken of the shipping box and the tracking number, and refused the refund. In the end he didn't push it any further.

So preventing the after-delivery squeeze comes down to two steps: screen your buyers and keep your evidence. Do that, and most of your trades will go smoothly.

Which Courier Should You Use?

No fluff.

• Electronics: SF Express
• Valuables: SF Express
• Delicate, fragile items: SF Express
• Anything that can be squashed and tossed around: any other courier

When it comes to couriers, there's SF Express, and then there's everyone else.

What If the Buyer Never Confirms Receipt?

Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about this one.

Whether the buyer confirms receipt is entirely up to them. Put simply, we can't do much to steer the buyer's decision.

But one thing is different now. Receipt used to be confirmed automatically ten days after the courier marked the package delivered. Starting at the end of 2024, Xianyu shortened that to 72 hours after delivery.

That's a huge step forward. Now, unless a buyer is deliberately stalling, the trade generally completes after 72 hours.

These days I no longer chase buyers to confirm, because for me, 72 hours flies by.

Final Thoughts

That wraps up the seller's guide. I've written down in detail how I sell things on Xianyu, and I hope it helps.

In the next few days I'll post another piece on buying and selling electronics on Xianyu, since that's the category I trade in most.

Once the whole series is done, I'll probably write one or two follow-up pieces to cover the extra points I've thought of over the past few days.