OfferUp is the mobile-first local marketplace — smaller than Facebook's audience, but built entirely around buying and selling nearby, with an app experience that makes listing a sixty-second job. For furniture, electronics, tools and appliances in a metro area, it is the strongest second channel next to Facebook Marketplace, and often the better-organized one.

The fee structure

  • Local, in-person sales: free. No listing or selling fees.
  • Shipped sales: 12.9% of the sale price, with a $1.99 minimum, when the buyer purchases through OfferUp shipping.

Same logic as Facebook Marketplace, slightly steeper on the shipped side: sell heavy things locally for free, ship light things when the wider audience justifies the fee.

What works on OfferUp specifically

  • The first photo is the listing. OfferUp's feed is a photo grid; a bright, square, clutter-free first image is the difference between taps and invisibility.
  • Build the profile before you need it. Buyer ratings, verified identity (TruYou), response speed — trust badges decide which of two identical couches sells, and OfferUp surfaces reputable sellers more.
  • Answer inside the hour. Local buyers are impulse buyers. The window between "is this available" and them buying elsewhere is short.
  • Relist rather than let listings age. Fresh listings ride higher in the feed; a stale one costs nothing to relaunch.
  • Meet safely. Daylight, public places, police-station exchange zones for anything valuable. Decades of Craigslist habit apply unchanged.

Scaling past the driveway

OfferUp rewards volume sellers with a steady local flywheel: more listings, more ratings, more visibility. The constraint arrives as square footage — a flipping operation that works from one garage cannot store forty items and stage six meetups a day. That is the point where warehouse space by the pallet, pick and pack for the shipped orders, and a spot to receive inbound freight turn a side hustle into an operation. The same inventory should be listed on Facebook and Craigslist at the same time — local buyers check different apps, and cross-listing costs nothing.