Originally Posted by Surferbruce
unless some of your parts are something special,in most cases you'll get more for a complete bike than parting it out.
In my experience, this is the opposite of true. Admittedly I deal mostly with vintage bikes, but I've only ever had 1 bike where I had any hope of getting as much for the complete bike as for the parts. Up against that, I recently parted out a bike I got for $100, and got around $500 for the parts.
Study the market on eBay using Advanced Search to let you look at the results of completed auctions to determine what will get you a better result.