You could use the Bank Holiday weekend to stream all of the best new TV shows on Netflix, but it's also a great time to sell your unwanted tech – and luckily eBay has a discounted home collection service to help you do it without leaving the house.
The eBay offer lets you get home pick-up for exactly the same price as dropping your sold items off at a courier collection point. All you really need is a printer to print off the delivery label and you're away.
This weekend is a particularly good time to declutter your tech drawer because eBay's offer, which uses courier comparison service Packlink, is only valid until 31 May. That gives you just about enough time to put up a few 7-day listings and book your home pickups.
But how does it work and what tech is hot right now on eBay? We've just sold a piece of tech on eBay and sent it using the discounted home collection service, so we've got all the details – including the second-hand tech that's most popular right now...
1. Find something to sell
The first step is, naturally, to list your unwanted tech on eBay and (hopefully) find a buyer. What kind of things are selling well right now?
Broadly speaking, the most popular types of second-hand tech recently have been mobile phones (with a £163 average selling price), followed by video games consoles (which fetch around £85 on average) and then tablets and e-readers, which pick up a decent average of £115.
Beyond those three, it's computing that's proving the most popular area. This includes Apple MacBooks (fetching £483 on average) and slightly cheaper PC laptops, which are going for an average of £166.
More anecdotally, we've found fitness trackers and smartwatches to be increasingly popular too, due to the growing audience for home fitness accessories. Found something to list? It's time to stick it on eBay, making sure you pick Packlink as one of the delivery options, and watch that auction timer tick down.
2. Sold? Head to 'Print postage label'
Found a buyer for your eBay listing? Now it's time to get that home collection booked, if you want to avoid heading to the local Post Office.
First, head to 'My eBay' menu and go to the 'selling' section. Now click on the 'sold' section.
In here you should select the ‘Print Postage label’ option. That might sound a little premature, but it's in here that you can see all of your home collection options with Packlink.
Choose the weight of your parcel, then under 'select dispatch method' click the 'Collection' tab.
3. Pick your delivery service
You should now see a list of delivery services – in our case it was Hermes, UPS and DHL. Deciding which of these to go for will largely come down to how quickly you promised to dispatch and deliver the item in your listing.
Hermes tends to be the slower, cheaper option for 2-3 day delivery on smaller items that weigh up to 2kg, while UPS and DHL offer a more expensive next-day delivery service that can nevertheless work out cheaper than Hermes for larger items above 5kg.
The real value right now is for those smaller items up to 2kg, which you can get collected and delivered for only £2.84. We were given the option of next-day collection too.
The only downside we found was that this collection window can be quite long – between 8am-8pm in our case, although that's not a major issue considering most of us are staying at home as much as possible.
To give you an idea of current home collection prices and also how long you'll need to wait for a pick-up, we made the table below of the quotes we were given on May 22 – this will vary according to where you live, but it's a rough idea.
| Parcel weight | Cheapest home collection price | Home collection availability |
| 0-2kg small (max 45x35x16cm) | £2.84 (Hermes) | Next day |
| 0-2kg medium (max length 120cm) | £4.20 (Hermes) | Next day |
| 2-5kg | £6.49 (Hermes) | Next day |
| 5-10kg | £7.39 (UPS) | Four-day wait |
| 10-15kg | £7.89 (UPS) | Four-day wait |
4. Now actually print your postage label
Once you've chosen your collection day and slot, you'll be taken to shipping payment within eBay.
After you're all settled, you'll get the option to download your parcel's label, so you can print it out and slap it on your parcel, ready for collection.
All in all, we found the process to be pretty slick and straightforward, but if you'd like to try services other than Packlink, it's worth also getting quotes from the likes of Parcel2Go , which offers a 'Quick Send' option for single eBay collections.
At least until May 31, though, it'll be hard to beat the value offered by eBay's Packlink offer for items weighing under 2kg, so it's a good time to raid your old tech cupboard for phones, wearables and tablets and earn a bit of extra cash from your spring clean.
