Best way to sell my tuba gear?

[Tortuba]

Age and health issues have resulted in the end of my tuba playing days.
I am planning to sell off my tubas and related gear but I am unsure as to the best selling tactics.
Do I sell each piece individually or offer to sell packages ie. tuba, soft case, hard case, mouthpiece(s), tuba stand as a complete set?
What is the best online site to use?
How to I determine a fair value for the horns and gear?

Thanks for the help.
Keith
Toronto

[Easy Mac]

Package deals only sell if they are heavily discounted. Otherwise, most people can't afford everything, and very few come here to set up shop from scratch. (One-Stop tuba shopping is not really a thing.) Also, package sales force people to buy stuff the don't want or need to get the stuff they do want or need, and the larger the package the more likely you will have potential buyers walk away because the things they do not want outweigh the item they *do* want.

I would list each instrument with its case or gig bag in a separate post. You need to read the red text block at the top of the For Sale page to make sure your ad conforms with the site's rules.

After your horns are listed separately, I would list all your accessories individually within a single post, offering a buy-it-all price with a realistic shipping quote and then individual prices if you want to go that route. (Personally, I would do this for sheet music, too, but I would sell books as one buy-it-all block and sheet music as another. I would not sell and mail each piece separately or you will be doing this for many months. Either way, shipping or postage needs to be paid by the buyer and not you or you will end up losing a lot of money in the end.)

There are other places to list your gear, too. Facebook has several tuba/euph-centric selling groups, but I have not had luck with them. Reverb is excellent, like a high-end eBay for musicians. And TubaForum is a small but very active group that also has a great For Sale forum. Both TubaForum and TubeNet are likely your best bets for sales as both are free and have very active For Sale forums. Sign up at the other place and post your ads here and there at the same time. There are no fees to join or to post ads in either community.

Finally, you seriously need to make the effort to take clear, well-lit, high-resolution photos, and you need to host them remotely, like on Imgur, or Flickr or some such place. You have to copy and paste each photo's actual URL and then tag them individually. It sounds harder than it is. (I used the same type of tags to display these names with embedded links.)

For photos only, the tags are like an on and off switch to display what is between them as an inline photo. You use the brackets ( this [ and this ] ) to enclose the tag "IMG" for the opening tag, and then "/IMG" for the closer. I will post a photo below. To see how this works, click the " button in the upper right to get my message to display in a quote window, and you can then look at the image address and how it was tagged. It really is easy once you have your images hosted and have their addresses (URLs).

Note that the image you want to post must have a URL that ends with the image type, like ".jpg" or ".tiff" — otherwise you do not have the actual address of the image but some other address that only points to your image indirectly. It must be the actual image address. Here is my example. Quote this text to see how the tags work.

The two hosting sites I listed above are still free, but require you to sign up. They are legit, though, and very commonly used here.

[arpthark]

Howdy Keith. Easy Mac's post is spot-on. You could start with the For Sale forum here or the other site to see what folks mostly do. Most frequently you see "the whole package" for each tuba listed for a given price. I'd probably list each tuba with hard/soft case individually. Read old For Sale posts to get an idea of what peoples' approaches are. Lots of pics is always helpful with selling, along with location and if you are willing to ship. Post accessories and extra mouthpieces separately, I'd say. I notice you're located in Toronto so specifying CAD or USD for price is also helpful.

The tuba buy/sell groups on Facebook also get a lot of traffic.

Just curious -- what tubas are you selling?

Good luck with divesting -- I am sure somebody will be interested! Feel free to shoot me a PM if you need help with photos, etc.

[TheodoreSmith]

The easy button is consigning it somewhere. Usually they take about 15%. They handle just about everything.

Mack Brass, Baltimore brass, and The Tuba-laire are just a couple examples of places that’l do it.

[bort]

The easy button is consigning it somewhere. Usually they take about 15%. They handle just about everything.

Mack Brass, Baltimore brass, and The Tuba-laire are just a couple examples of places that’l do it.

An excellent option if you can't or don't want to handle it yourself. But, I think you have to be within driving distance of one of these places to make it work. I mean if you're not going to sell it yourself, you're not going to ship it anywhere, either.

[bort]

Age and health issues have resulted in the end of my tuba playing days.
I am planning to sell off my tubas and related gear but I am unsure as to the best selling tactics.
Do I sell each piece individually or offer to sell packages ie. tuba, soft case, hard case, mouthpiece(s), tuba stand as a complete set?
What is the best online site to use?
How to I determine a fair value for the horns and gear?

Thanks for the help.
Keith
Toronto

Here or tubaforum are probably both the best places; I'm not sure if there is anything more Canada-centric, though.

If you tell me what you have, I'll give you an honest opinion about value, if it's something I know enough about. I've bought and sold and shopped for a LOT of things over the years. Would be happy to help out as I can. It's one opinion of many, but I generally think I price things fairly for me my own sales.

Send me a PM if you are interested to chat!