How to auction something off for charity with eBay's Giving Works

Image by ebayink via Flickr

When the terrible earthquake in Haiti struck last year, I wrote this post Using eBay Giving Works to give more to Haiti earthquake victims than you can afford by yourself. Of course, we’ve all spent the last few days hearing about the horrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I wanted to re-visit the idea in that post and strip out everything except just a straight how-to.

If you want to help raise money for any charity, you can do an auction (or fixed price listing) through eBay Giving Works giving a percentage (all the way up to 100%) of the final sale price directly to the charity. eBay will also donate the fees.

Here’s how you do it:

Go to http://donations.eBay.com and select the charity of your choice. (Giving Works search is kind of a pain. Unless they are a huge charity, it helps if you know their ID number ahead of time.)

On that page, you’ll see three tabs, Buy, Sell and Donate. Donate just allows you to make a straight donation. It’s sell we are really interested in. But this is where you’d go to bid or buy items going to charity so you may want to remember it for the future.

To sell an item, go to the Sell tab. Once there, there is a explanation of how it works from the seller’s point of view and then a big button to Sell Now. Once in the eBay listing page, where you see the Giving Works option (designated by a little blue and yellow ribbon, under where you set the price), you will need to select the charity of your choice as well as the percentage that you want to donate. Other than that, you will set it up just like any other eBay listing. If you don’t see the charity you want, click the “Or select another nonprofit you love” option. Once you’ve gone through this process once, the option to donate should show in all future listings from this point on.

It will look a bit like this:

Then just go through and list the item as you would any other eBay listing. Once the item sells, the buyer will pay you as usual and then you’ll pass the percentage you pledged over to eBay Giving Works.

Have any questions? Let me know below and I’ll try to walk you through any issues. 🙂