The Real Way
To Make Real Money
On eBay

by Valik Rudd

I’ve been looking for a way to make money on the internet for about 5 years now. I have bought books at the book store and on the internet and still have not found one useful publication. All of them are so good looking on the cover, they make you feel like if you get this one, you’ve got it made. Then you go and buy it. It turns out to be a 300 page book or a 100 page e-book with links and go’rounds here and there. To the point that your head hurts and you’re confused. After spending 3 days reading the 300 pages you come to the last page and realize that you just wasted your precious time on something you already knew.

Here is the new way of thinking. I thought I would just put it short and simple for people. You don’t need to read 300 pages to find out you already knew this information and what you were looking for is not in there. I am going to describe a couple most sure ways of making money on eBay.

 

Get Highest Proffits in your eBay Auctions

 

How eBay works

As most people know eBay is an online auction website. People all over the world can go to this one place and trade their personal or non-personal property. A seller will post an item on there for duration of from 1 day to 10 days. A buyer will bid either the next increment or a maximum bid and when the auction has ended the item belongs to the highest bidder.

This information is probably useless for most so I am not going to get any deeper into it. If you would like to learn more about how eBay works visit the eBay 101 article at the following address: http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/buyingselling/a/eBay101.htm

 

The Missing Link

What To Sell

“What to sell?” seems to be the number one question that has been avoided by most books on the topic of making money on eBay.

I have found that there are a few ways to make a fortune on eBay. People are
making money selling Antiques, Collectibles and Electronics.

I have also found that if you try selling your own stuff around the house you most likely loose a bunch of money on eBay fees and not sell anything. When I say “your own stuff” I mean stuff that doesn’t fall into the categories I stated above; Antiques, Collectibles and Electronics.

If you really want to make money you will want to deal in those categories. I must say that there are a few lucky ones that do sell other category items successfully, but there is no statistics for those and I do not recommend you try it unless you have nothing to loose.

 

Take advantage of the misspelled searches on eBay

 

Antiques

Antique sellers are the number one money makers on eBay. If you have a quality item it will sell for what it is worth. There are many antique scouts lurking on eBay looking for a nice piece.

Antiques can be found in many places. Here are the ones I came up with.

Garage Sales
Estate Sales
Estate Auctions
Public Markets
Public Auctions
Sometimes even eBay
Check your local news paper’s classifieds for those events.

I mentioned eBay as one of those places to buy antiques because sometimes for one reason or another some items go for cheaper than they’re worth. Just a couple of days ago I was watching two identical Kirk Repousse Sterling Plates.

One was polished and the other not. The polished went for $118 and the non for $56. That would have been an easy one.

The smaller the item the easier it is going to sell it. You have to consider the
shipping. If the item is small, like a plate, the buyer will not be worried about the shipping as much as if it was a dresser or a desk, which would be expensive to ship.

 

Collectibles

There are always buyers that are looking for collectibles. From figurines to books and shirts, etc. You can either pick a theme and stay with it or you can just sell anything that is a collectible.

Where to get these items is a little bit more complicated. You can pick them up at the same places I mentioned for the antiques but it will be harder to find them. I suggest you stick to one type of a collectible, so you can learn all you can about it and what makes it worth more. For instance there a lot of people that like Winnie The Pooh, my wife is one of those people. She just loves anything that has him on it.

She just bought a wall clock for our kids’ room. As she was looking through the items on eBay, anytime she stumbled on a Pooh item I heard about it. From cookie jars to clocks, to greeting cards. She just adores that Winnie The Pooh. If you search for Pooh items on eBay you will find that most of them have bids on them. That’s because there are a lot of people that like Pooh. So as Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and many other characters.

Stamps, Figurines, Glasses and Vases are other ideas of collectibles. Get to know your items and your category very well so you can tell right off at a garage sale or an auction if the item is worth buying.

 

Hot selling children's books for eBay

 

Electronics

Everyone loves gadgets, new cameras, CD players or TVs. There are buyers for these items on eBay. If you are selling a used item you are not going to get a lot for it, you may not even get what you think you should get for it. Unless you can get this used item for close to nothing, I suggest do not buy it. The way you can make real money selling electronics is new electronics. People will pay up for new electronics.

Where to get these new electronics is the question. There is one way you can get them at prices that you would be able to make money selling them on eBay. That is buying pallets from a closeouts supplier. They will sell a pallet of electronics for a price. Sometimes you get a manifest of items on the pallet, sometimes you don’t. It is better if you do of coarse, so you know you are not getting a bunch of items you don’t want. The risk of getting open packages and broken items is real and is the cost of doing business. Most of the time they will package the pallets to be balanced so you don’t get a pallet of broken electronics.

 

Where To Buy Electronics Pallets

On eBay in the wholesale area
ViaTrading - http://www.viatrading.com
LiquidationDistributors - http://www.liquidationdistributors.com
ABC Closeouts - http://www.1abccloseouts.com/electronics.htm
AAA Overstock - http://www.aaaoverstock.com/electronics.htm
1st Choice - http://www.1stchoicesurplusmerchandise.com/electronics.htm

For more sources see the link list in the left navigation bar on this page.

Warning! Do not buy electronics with drop ship terms to sell on eBay. You will loose money. Selling via drop ship, you will have a tiny margin of profit if any at all because remember eBayers don’t care what the retail price is, they will pay what they think the item is worth. So you will most likely loose money if you sell via drop ship.

Buying from a wholesaler can work if you can afford to buy a big lot of items from them at a bulk price. You will not be able to buy major brand electronics even in this case because companies like Sony want you to be a real retail store to even consider selling to you. They will want you to send them a photo of the actual store where you are planning to sell their products. So I suggest buy a pallet or two. See how it goes.

 

Posting Your Item

When posting your item, make sure you have really good quality pictures. Invest in a good digital camera, something 4 or more mega pixel. If you can’t afford it, take pictures with your 35mm camera, then scan the pictures in at 200 or 300 dpi. Make sure you optimize the pictures before you post them on eBay. Your pictures should not be more then 35Kb.

If you need to know more about optimizing your pictures read this article:
http://www.ibdhost.com/help/optimize

 

Complete guide to making a fortune on eBay

 

Minimum Bid

Ideally you would set your items’ price at $0.99 and have the buyers raise the price to what the item is worth but I don’t think any of us have the guts to do that on a $100 or more item. So make your own decision where to start the auction but keep in mind, let the buyers raise the price. If you post it to high people won’t even look at it. You need to get a buyer hooked. Once he places a bid on an item, even if it’s $1.00 he feels like this item is his, if some one outbids him it will be personal. So you want to hook as many as possible so they fight over your item. That way you will have better success.

Thank You for reading. I hope this short version of how to make money on eBay was what you were looking for. Other information on eBay you can find in any book. This article was written to quickly guide a person to the answers to the main questions that every other book seems to miss.

Valik Rudd
valik at zloot dot com

The information in this article does not guarantee that you will be successful at this business. It is a guide by which you can plan your strategy. I have found the above information to be true but this is my personal opinion and should be taken that way.