Guitars

Why I Buy Gear on Reverb and Sell It on Craigslist

By Mike · Published October 17, 2026

I buy almost everything online and sell almost everything locally, and the reason is simple: I hate shipping. I have been buying on Reverb and eBay for a long time. The Reverb order history I went through for this site runs from 2014 to this year, and it includes several of the guitars I have reviewed here. When it is time to let something go, I list it on Craigslist, ask for pickup, and take cash or Venmo.

That sounds like a contradiction, and it is not. When you buy online, shipping is the seller’s job. When you sell online, it becomes yours.

Why shipping is the part I skip

Guitars are awkward to ship and amps are worse. Budda’s catalog lists a 20-watt, two-6V6 1x12 combo, the same spec as my Superdrive V20, at 50 pounds, and a tube amp is a box full of glass that does not like being dropped. Even a small head is something you have to box, label, insure and hand to a stranger, with a buyer on the other end who opens it and decides whether it matches the ad.

A local sale skips all of that. The buyer plugs the amp in, hears it, and either hands over cash or does not. Nobody opens a box a week later and finds a problem. Craigslist makes the same case on its own listings: the safety notice at the bottom of every post says to deal locally and to beware of wire transfers, cashier’s checks, money orders and shipping.

What a local listing still has to do

A local listing still has to do the work a shipped one does. I write out the full spec list for every amp, down to the tube complement and what comes in the box. I say what is wrong with a guitar in plain words: the Squier Custom Telecaster in my current listing says “normal playwear, a few surface scratches and dings” and then points at the photos. I list what comes with it, like the original three-button footswitch on the Subway Rocket and the original box on the Baby Budda.

When I can, I get an amp looked at before I list it. I had the Subway Rocket checked by a well-regarded amp builder and said so in the ad, which answers the first question any buyer has about a used tube amp. Payment is cash or Venmo, or PayPal if the buyer covers the fees. For the buyer’s side of the same deal, the used tube amp checklist is what I would want a stranger to be running on my amp.

What local selling costs

It is slower, and the pool of buyers is smaller. Not everything moves. Two items in my listings, the Squier Custom Telecaster at $375 and a Friedman BE-Mini head, new in the box, at $175, have been up since at least July 2026 without selling. Those are asking prices as of mid-October 2026, not sold prices. A long list of other gear sold from the same listings, so the method works. It just does not work on a schedule.

For what it is worth, I paid $435.51 for that Squier on Reverb in February 2023 and $640 for the V20 on Reverb in January 2018. I am asking $375 and $750 today. That is what I paid against what I am asking, and it says nothing about what either will actually sell for.

The fee math on Reverb

Shipping an amp through Reverb costs something too. Reverb’s help page for Preferred Sellers, which I checked on October 17, 2026, lists a 5 percent selling fee plus 2.99 percent and 49 cents for payment processing, and the selling fee is charged on the sale total including shipping. On a $750 amp that is $37.50 plus about $22.92, roughly $60 or about 8 percent, before you have bought a box or paid anyone to carry it. Your own rate may differ, so check your account.

Cash costs me nothing. What I pay instead is time and a smaller audience.

Why I buy online anyway

On the buying side the math flips. A specific model is a search problem, and searching everyone’s inventory in the country beats whatever happens to be within an hour’s drive. The two FujiGen-built Telecasters I wrote about in Why Japanese Telecasters Keep Winning both came through Reverb, bought about three weeks apart in the spring of 2023. And the seller does the packing.

What I do budget for is what shipping does to a guitar: a setup when it arrives, and a look at the return window before I get comfortable. The full checklist is in Buying a Guitar Online Without Playing It First.

I buy to try

Mostly I buy to try. In my experience used gear sells for about what you paid for it, so trying something costs me the hassle more than the money. That is a rule of thumb from my own buying, not a law, and it only holds if you pay a fair used price to begin with. It is also how I found my best guitars. My first thinline came off eBay, and outside of my Buddas, almost everything else I have owned was ordered online and tried.

Modelers are the clearest example. I tried both a Kemper and a Fractal, kept the Kemper and sold the Fractal. I also tried a Kemper Profiler Player, sold it, and later bought another one. Buying to try means you are allowed to change your mind in both directions, and the two Kempers are written up in Kemper Profiler Stage vs Player.

If you live somewhere with few buyers

This works better near a lot of people. If your nearest city is a long drive away, Reverb’s fees may just be the price of an audience. That is my reasoning, not something I have tested.

I would rather wait for a local buyer than pack a 50-pound combo, and that preference is the whole strategy. The longer story of why I had so much to sell in the first place is in Player, Not Collector.