Most people start selling on eBay by listing used stuff from around their house. This is an excellent way to get familiar with how eBay works. But you can’t make a sustainable business doing that – eventually you’ll have nothing left to sell! You can take this a step further and actively seek out stuff to sell on eBay at carboot sales, jumble sales, pound stores, charity shops, auctions, pawnbrokers, etc.

In a “perfect market”, every buyer would know what every seller was selling and at what price. If one seller’s price was higher than every other seller’s price – no one would buy from him because they know they can buy cheaper from the other sellers. If one seller dropped his price, the other sellers would have to drop their’s or no one would buy from them.

But the second-hand goods market is NOT a “perfect market”. Every buyer does NOT know what every seller is selling for. This leads to price discrepancies enabling you to buy goods at a LOWER price that you can then sell on eBay at a HIGHER price. The difference in your buying and selling price, minus your costs, is your profit. This is called “arbitrage”. Here’s an example …

Some Denby Daybreak crockery is for sale at a jumble sale. Denby no longer make the Daybreak line so it can only be bought second hand. There are a few hundred people at the jumble sale, but none of them are looking for crockery and none of them have any Denby Daybreak crockery at home. There is no demand for the crockery at the jumble sale so it won’t sell – no matter how cheap it is.

That same crockery is then listed on eBay. Throughout the world, there are MILLIONS of people searching eBay at any given time. Of course, they are not all looking for crockery. But SOME of them WILL be. And of course, not everyone who is looking for crockery on eBay will be looking for Denby Daybreak. But SOME of them WILL be. Provided that it has been listed correctly, anyone looking for Denby Daybreak on eBay WILL see the listing for the crockery which is now in demand. Several people will compete to buy it, pushing up its price.

So you can get used products at very low prices, particularly from jumble sales and charity shops, and re-sell them on eBay for massive mark-ups.

You can use conventional off-line auctions as a source of used products to sell on eBay. Ideally you need to get hold of a list of the auction lots in advance, so you can look at eBay’s Completed Listings search results to find out if they sell on eBay and how much they sell for. You can then decide on whether you want to bid on each lot and the maximum that you are prepared to bid knowing what you are likely to be able to sell it for on eBay to make a profit. If you can’t get a list of the lots in advance, you need to have wireless access to the internet to do your research on eBay whilst you are at the auction (or ‘phone someone who is sat by a computer!)

Sourcing stock to sell on eBay from auctions can include online auctions such as eBay itself! Many auctions on eBay don’t get any bids because they are listed in the wrong category, the copy is rubbish, or the seller has missed out something important from the listing. You can buy these items on eBay at bargain prices, improve the listing and re-sell them on eBay at a profit.

Many people misspell the title of their listing. As most people search for items on eBay using keywords that appear in the listing title, titles that have been misspelled won’t appear in the search results and so will get no or few bids resulting in a much lower final selling price. Locating such misspelled listings can enable you to buy products at a bargain that you can re-list correctly and make a profit. By doing a Completed listings search on that item, you will know how much you could sell it for if you listed it correctly and so would know how much you would be willing to bid on it to make a profit.

All you have to do is a Google Search on “misspelled items on eBay” and you will find many websites that enable you to enter the keywords relevant to the product you are looking for and they will find all the current listings on eBay for that product that are misspelled.

Another way to locate cheap items to sell on eBay is to do an eBay search by clicking on Advanced Search next to the Search box that you will find on most eBay pages. Then conduct a search on the key words “No Reserve” in “All Categories” to include “title and description” in the price range of 1 cent to, say, $10 in the Auction buying format. Then click on the Search button.

The results pages will display items that HAVE to sell, no matter how low the highest bid is, because there is No Reserve. Scroll through the results pages and place ridiculously low bids on any high value items that you reckon you could re-sell on eBay. But read the listing details BEFORE you bid to make sure that there aren’t any defects that are affecting the price; or outrageous terms such as inflated handling and shipping costs; or that the item must be collected in person from a remote island!

Obviously, you will get out-bid on most of these auctions but OCCASIONALLY you might just win a high-value item for a ridiculously low bid. By improving the way you list it you may then be able to re-sell it for its true value.

There are also many, many online auctions other than eBay. Most of these other online auctions are little known and so get much less traffic than eBay. Consequently their listings tend to attract far less bidders which means you may be able to buy items at a bargain that you can re-sell on eBay at a higher price. Again, it would be very easy to minimize your risk because you can use eBay’s Completed Listings search results to determine what the item is likely to sell for on eBay before you decide how much you are willing to bid for it.

Martyn Boaden

This post is based on an extract taken from The Lazy Way To Wealth On eBay