There’s a problem with being only an occasional eBay seller: you don’t have a warehouse full of boxes and packing material like a full-time business. No need to worry: eBay has a new idea to make selling easier. In a new service that’s only available in a few cities so far, they’ll send a courier to your house to pack up and ship the item.

This is all thanks to a startup called Shyp, which is yet another of those gig economy businesses that find different ways to pay strangers to do your chores. (Shyp is notable since it made all of its couriers payroll employees instead of independent contractors last year, though.) Shyp is now integrated in the eBay selling app in cities where the service is available: so far that’s only in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The service costs about $5 to the seller on top of postage, but includes the courier’s services in packing up the item as well as handling the part where you actually take the package to the post office or shipping company.

eBay says that, logically enough, about half of the people using the new service had never sold anything on eBay before. This gives sellers a little more control of the process than the eBay Valet service where inexperienced sellers send their merchandise to a valet who handles the whole process.

Too lazy to ship off your old stuff? eBay can help with that [CNET]

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