Will's Web Watch: To eBay or to FreeBay?

The popularity of eBay continues to soar and January is likely to be a bumper time as unwanted Christmas presents are sold and households make room for new purchases. But with many items often selling for nominal amounts, Will Sturgeon wonders whether you might be happier 'Freebaying' them instead.

In common with around 40 million fellow Europeans I'm an eBay user - albeit a very occasional buyer and even more infrequent seller.

I recently bought a fine coffee table on eBay which was an absolute steal at £50. And with people shopping for new furniture in the January sales there is a lot of older stuff on eBay right now.

But you only have to trawl through the listings pages of eBay to see people selling items in expectation of making about £5 or less on some TV unit or occasional table which probably cost little more than £30 when they bought it from Ikea a couple of years ago.

Before eBay came along these items would probably have been put out for the bin men - and many still will be.

Of course I'm not surprised eBay is regarded by many as a dumping ground for such unwanted items, given the added bonus that not only will somebody come and take it off your hands but they might even give you enough money to buy a cheap bottle of wine for the privilege.

However, this is certainly where I lose touch with the appeal of eBay. There's no part of me which could list a bulky item of furniture, say, in expectation of selling it for just £5 and then having to arrange for it to be collected and go through the awkwardness of accepting the meagre payment when in truth the buyer would be doing me a favour taking the item.

Why not give it to a charity shop or similar - unless of course that £5 really will make a major difference? I suspect a great many people are really only selling on eBay for the sake of it rather than out of necessity.

Far better, in my opinion, is a site I was recently put onto - called Freecycle, or 'Freebay' (see what they did there?). (For services around Europe and the rest of the world, check out Freecycle.org.)

The benefit of this site, if you're disinclined to go to the effort of taking stuff to a charity shop, is that it puts you in touch with people who are willing to come and pick up your item providing you're willing to let it go for free.

Although the prime objective of the group behind the service is to keep items of furniture out of landfill, there's no reason why it shouldn't be seen as an alternative to auction sites.

So if you have an old sofa, for example, which you're really looking to get rid of, all you would have to do is find your local Freebay community via the site (though in some instances you may still have to set up a local community - which is pretty easy as the service is growing rapidly in the UK).

Here there will be people listing items they are looking for and people listing items they are looking to get rid of - cue many matches made in second-hand furniture heaven.

Some communities such as Warwickshire and Coventry have eschewed the Yahoo! Groups format of the Freecycle service and are running their own community Freebay sites, with the backing of the Environment Agency, whose interest is clear, given many of the items swapped might otherwise end up in landfill (not everything goes on eBay, even in this day and age).

Of course if you have a valuable piece of furniture it make sense that you would still look to sell it but any time you find yourself saying 'let's put it on eBay - it might go for £5' why not try Freebaying it instead?

You won't get the same nominal financial reward for doing so but these schemes are doing a lot to help people on a tight budget furnish their homes as well as preventing the unnecessary discarding of items that could still enjoy a useful life with a new owner.

And certainly if you even entertain a notion such as 'let's just take it to the tip' you really must check out FreeBay.