Best Places To Buy, Sell, and Trade Paintball Guns Online

tips for selling online

Looking to sell a paintball gun online?

Or maybe you’re looking to buy a used paintball gun?

No matter whether you’re looking to buy, sell, or trade, you need to know which websites and apps are best suited for paintball guns and equipment. 

Here below are the options I would recommend.

The best places to buy, sell, and trade paintball guns online are Facebook Groups, Craigslist, eBay, reputable paintball forums (such as Pbnation.com and Mcarterbrown.com), and used selling apps (such as OfferUp, 5miles, and VarageSell).

Unfortunately, you still have to do your due diligence when buying or selling paintball gear online. With so many scammers out there, I recommend you either read my tips for selling a paintball gun or my guide on how to avoid scammers further down the page. This guide will teach you the common scam tactics to look out for and what the obvious signs are that you’re talking to a scammer. 

So without further ado, let’s begin. 

Best Places To Sell Paintball Guns Online

Below I’m going to list the best places to sell paintball guns online and why I recommend them.

You can also buy and trade paintball guns on any of these platforms, but I’m mostly going to discuss these websites and apps from a seller’s perspective as I feel it will make things more simplistic and therefore helpful.

Facebook Groups

My favorite place to buy, sell, and trade paintball guns online is Facebook.com.

Unfortunately, paintball guns were banned from being sold on the Facebook Marketplace back in 2016. This means that if you’re going to buy, sell, or trade paintball guns on Facebook, you’re going to have to do it in approved Facebook groups.

The most popular Facebook groups for selling paintball guns and equipment are Paintball Talk/Buy/Sell and Paintball BST.

The reason I love selling paintball gear on Facebook is because you can view the person you’re having a transaction with. 

This can be highly helpful as you could easily make the mistake of selling to a young kid. And in most states (maybe all) it’s illegal to sell a paintball gun to anyone under the age of 18. 

Viewing someone’s profile can also give you a good idea of how trustworthy a person is and whether they may be a scammer or not, but we’ll talk more about this later. 

eBay

The best website for buying and selling paintball guns online without getting scammed is what I like to refer to as the flea market of the internet — eBay.com.

Selling paintball guns on eBay has a wide variety of benefits that you don’t get from selling on other platforms. The main benefit of selling on eBay is that you can easily sell to people from all over the world.

Whereas if you sell on Craigslist or one of those used selling apps, you’re most likely going to be selling to someone in your area. On eBay, however, it’s much easier to showcase your items to people all over the world, instead of people within a 10 – 50 mile radius.

This means that more people can view your item and you can make more money than you could from selling on other platforms. Plus, you can always list your paintball gun at a higher price point if you’re unsure how much it’s worth. The worst that can happen is it doesn’t sell and you simply have to relist it again.

The only possible downside of selling on eBay (other than the small fees) is that it’s a little more complicated than selling to someone locally. You have to go through the process of boxing it up, traveling to your local UPS, FedEx, or post office, and slapping a label on it so they can ship it away.

I honestly see this as a benefit though as I’m antisocial and hate having to sell to someone in person. And while you can ship it to people on other websites and selling apps, you then run the risk of being scammed.  

Now, I know it’s possible to be scammed on eBay as well, but at least on eBay there are some protective procedures in place to try to make things right. Whereas on other platforms you have no protection.

Of course, eBay does charge a small fee for their services, but you can always charge a little more so that’s okay.

Reddit

Reddit is another great platform for buying, selling, and trading paintball gear online.

If you’ve never been on Reddit before, it’s essentially a forum comprised of many subforums (known as subreddits). You can browse the different subreddits by entering the niche, hobby, person, e.t.c. into the search bar and picking the subreddit you like best. 

One of the most popular subreddits related to paintball is Paintball Buy/Sell/Trade or r/PaintballBST. Every subreddit has an “r” listed in front of the name which simply means reddit/subredditname.

Even though the Reddit BST may have fewer members than the Facebook BST, it’s still worth checking out if you want to buy, sell, or trade a paintball marker.

Read More: How to Find a Paintball Team In Your Area

Now if you do decide to sell a paintball gun to someone on Reddit then I recommend you search through the user’s history before you go through with any form of transaction. On Reddit (just like on forums) you can see everything that someone has posted before so it should give you an idea of who you’re dealing with.

If someone has no history (or very little) then I would avoid selling to them altogether.

It’s simply not worth it.

Craigslist

When it comes to selling used items online there’s no way you can forget about Craigslist.com.

Craigslist has been around for a long time now, and while some of its traffic has been swallowed up by apps such as OfferUp, 5miles, and Mercari, it’s still a great platform for selling used products (including paintball gear) and services online.

The way that Craigslist works is depending on where you live it will show you items, services, jobs, and more within a certain mile radius of your location. You can always increase or decrease the number of miles you are willing to travel, depending on how badly you want the item you were looking for.

When looking to buy or sell something on Craigslist you will typically head over to the For Sale section and click on the category that best fits the item you were looking for. The category that paintball guns fit best under would be the sporting section.

Be warned though, you’re going to get a lot of low-ball offers when buying from a website like Craigslist. I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard where people went to sell an item and the person shows up claiming they only have half of the money they promised to buy it for. This is a common scam tactic and something you should be aware of. 

Paintball Forums

At one point in time, the best place to buy and sell paintball gear online was actually paintball forums. 

The B/S/T (Buy/Sell/Trade) section of popular paintball forums such as Pbnation.com and Mcarterbrown.com used to be more popular than an all-you-can-eat buffet after church service on a Sunday morning. Now both forums still get a fair bit of traffic, but it’s not quite like it used to be.

What I love most about buying paintball gear on forums is the wide variety of sub-forums available in the BST section such as mechanical paintball guns, electronic paintball guns, pump paintball guns, etc.

Unfortunately, the internet has evolved and the overall traffic on forums has slowly dwindled to what it is today. Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to sell your paintball gear on a forum, but you should be aware that it may not sell as fast as it would’ve in the golden days of paintball (R.I.P. — 2004 – 2011).                                                                                                 

Now if you do find someone that wants to buy your marker on a paintball forum then I recommend you first take a look at their reputation and see if they’ve ever attempted to sell anything in the past. If their reputation is lousy and they’ve never bought or sold anything before without complaints then I would personally avoid that buyer. 

Used Selling Apps

The last place I would recommend shopping for a paintball gun online would be on a used selling app.

Unfortunately, most used selling apps follow a similar approach to Facebook Marketplace and don’t allow the listing of paintball guns on their platform.

Thankfully, there are still a few apps available that haven’t banned the buying and selling of paintball guns such as OfferUp, 5miles, and VarageSell. If you don’t want to waste the data or storage space on your phone you can also visit the website versions of these apps on offerup.com, 5miles.com, and varagesale.com.

These apps (or websites) are great for anyone who prefers to sell in person instead of having to deal with the annoyance of shipping something through UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc.

Tips For Selling Paintball Guns

Here are some of the best tips for selling paintball guns and equipment. Use them if you want to get as much money as possible out of your paintball gear. 

Make Sure Everything is Legitimate 

This is the most important tip for selling a paintball gun online — make sure they’re legitimate.

The first step you should take when selling a paintball gun is to make sure their account is real (or at least it appears to be) and you’re not getting scammed by a “catfish”. Of course, just because it’s a real profile doesn’t mean you can’t get scammed, but it at least gives you some levels of comfort knowing they probably don’t want to ruin their online reputation.

Read More: How Far Can a Paintball Marker Shoot?

However, even if the account is real but something feels off then stop all contact and don’t do the deal.

A common way to know that someone is trying to scam you is they will try to convince you to do the deal on platforms other than PayPal and often hit you with random excuses trying to change the deal in one way or another.

Like I said before if anything feels off then don’t sell them your paintball gun. After all, paintball gear can be fairly expensive and it’s not worth losing out on your hard-earned money.

Take Good Images

Back when I used to sell items on eBay, I quickly learned that my product would sell way faster if I took the time to take really good images.

Fortunately, you no longer have to invest in a really good camera with high megapixels to take good images. As long as you have a relatively new smartphone your camera is plenty good enough to take high-quality images that will sell well online.

Just make sure to take the picture in good lighting (I recommend LED or fluorescent) and try to use a good background that isn’t going to distract from the paintball gun (I prefer plain white). 

Do Your Research

Doing your research is essential if you want to get as much money as possible from selling your paintball gun. 

The first thing I would do is to go over to eBay.com and find out how much your paintball gun has sold for in the past. You can do this by following these simple steps below.

  1. Enter the name of your paintball marker into the search bar.
  2. (Mobile only) Click on Filter and scroll down to where it says Sold Items and click on the grey button to the right until it turns blue.
  3. Click on the blue rectangle on the bottom of the screen that says “Show ___ Items”
  4. (Desktop only) Scroll down to where it says Show Only on the left hand side and click on Sold Items

Now you can look at every single time that paintball gun was sold on eBay and based on those numbers you can estimate how much you think your paintball marker is worth. 

Let Them Know Price Is Firm

If you’re selling to someone locally then make sure they know that the price is firm before you drive out to meet them.

I couldn’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard where people went to meet someone to sell something locally, only to find out once they got there that they only brought half the money and were trying to scam you. Scammers commonly do this because they hope you will sell since you already wasted your time and drove out there.

I’ve had this happen to me before but thankfully I only lived two minutes away from where I met them. 

Accept Payment Upfront

It’s common knowledge in the paintball world that when selling a paintball gun you accept payment first before shipping out the marker.

If anyone tries to tell you differently and try to convince you that you should ship out the marker and they will send payment when they receive it, don’t listen to them.

Even if they have no intention of scamming you, this simply isn’t how it works and they’re going to have to send you the money first if they want to purchase your paintball gun.

Don’t Accept Returns

Never accept returns when selling a paintball gun online. Even if they try to pretend or say they didn’t do anything to the marker, you never know if this is true or not.

It’s very likely that they tried to take the marker apart for some reason and broke it in the process. Always let everyone know upfront there are no returns and all deals are final. 

How to Avoid Scammers When Buying a Paintball Gun

Here are a few tips to help you avoid getting scammed when buying a paintball gun online.

View Their History

Not only do you need to make sure that everything is legitimate when buying a paintball gun online, but also when selling one as well.

The easy way to do this is to view their history if you’re buying a marker on a platform such as a paintball forum or Reddit. Now if you’re buying a paintball gun on Facebook or eBay then you need to view their profile and make sure everything seems legit. 

What I like to do is I like to view their post history and ask myself “ would a trustworthy person talk like this?”. If the answer is no, then I won’t buy anything from them, much less a paintball gun.

Stick to Paypal

When buying anything online I like to stick to using PayPal as they seem to offer good protection for anyone buying or selling on the platform.

Now I know I’ve heard some complaints from people using PayPal in the past, but I’ve heard more complaints from people using other websites or apps that don’t offer the same protective features that PayPal has.

This is only my personal experience though and how I feel from hearing people complain about being scammed on Facebook groups, paintball forums, Reddit, Etc. 

Use Your Credit Card

Another great tip when buying anything online is to use your credit card.

Most major credit card companies will easily give you your money back if you report to them that you were scammed. 

No questions asked, here’s your money and have a nice day! 

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