as others have suggested, start your selling journey slowly rather than diving in with your ‘blender’ type idea. Sell things you know about.
If you want to know how a buyer may feel when they realise that you are on-selling at an inflated price then have a read of this thread:
The item the buyer receives is likely to have an invoice attached showing the price you paid. You may see the extra $ as a fee for service in sourcing discounted goods, but buyers are fickle creatures . . . especially if the feel they have been duped! You will only need one or two feedback exposing your selling strategy and your eBay ID will be doomed.
There was a tricky poster here years ago who thought it a good idea to list Playstations. His plan was that when a buyer bought from him he would order one from the USA to ensure they had the latest one. He had express shipping with a 20 day handling time to allow for the item to come from America. He was asking $1,200 and thinking he could make money if he sourced them at $1,100 from the USA. He didn’t do his homework as he thought he could say “no returns” and avoid having to refund any buyers if a dispute was raised. Fees alone would ensure he lost money on his genius idea!
His previous selling experience was listing empty product boxes with ambiguous titles, pictures and descriptions. His selling career didn’t last long.
There are some strategies for making money on eBay that, while not foolproof, can be profitable. There are YouTube videos showing these. I’m not going to spoil your excitement at finding out these strategies for yourself . . . but I will let you know one that works for me (in spoiler), and one that I have used just a few times (below spoiler).
Spoiler
some time back, when the A$ was high against the US$, I bought up a lot of Pentax K1000 film cameras for the USA. I was paying about A$50 to A$100 for each camera. Last year, in the lead up to Christmas, I sold some of these cameras for anything from A$350 to $1,000 depending on what extra items I included with the camera. Many of my buyers indicated they were buying as a Christmas present for a loved one. Bottom line is I found a ‘niche item’ that has greatly increased in value in the last 5 years. I still have some K1000 cameras to sell. I will sell them in the lead up to Christmas this year i.e. ‘timing’ can influence selling success.
The other strategy involves sourcing items on eBay where titles have spelling mistakes. There is even a website that will find misspelled listing titles for you:
http://www.watchcount.com/misspelled.php
From that site:
Best advice I can give you is to let you know that selling can be a hard slog. Gone are the days where eBay provided golden opportunities for sellers. Start your selling experience selling item/s that you know about, items that you might find at low prices that will enable a decent markup to be made if you flip them. I know Pentax K1000 cameras, a very specific interest. I buy cameras, clean them up a little, take good pics and write detailed descriptions. This works for me.
ALSO, and very importantly, do not buy items for resale on the same ID. Set yourself a ‘buying’ ID and a ‘selling’ ID. This way your potential buyers won’t see what you paid for the items.
I have some time to spare, so I’ll let you in on another strategy that worked very well for me some time back. When I was teaching I would regularly head off to Sydney or Melbourne during school holidays (I taught in S-W NSW and live in N-W Victoria). In the lead up to holidays I would search for listings of bulk darkroom equipment. These listings for bulk items would usually be ‘pickup only’ . . . meaning limited buyer pool. I would message sellers and ask if they would hold the items until the holidays if I won the auction. Most would say ‘yes’, especially when I told them I would bid aggressively.
I bought so much darkroom equipment that I was able to sell off one or two items from a purchase and make all my money back. I would then donate some equipment to my school and sell some to fund future purchases. One purchase that comes to mind was for an enlarger, enlarger timer, paper easel, paper shear, film developing tanks, bulk film loader and a heap of other stuff that I won for around $50. When I got home from holidays I cleaned up the enlarger timer and auctioned it and it sold for $72. I still have a lot of equipment here to sell and will get around to selling it in future. While I wait I have noticed that asking prices for items similar to those I have have increased, so I am in no hurry to sell.
If you live in a major capital city this strategy can work so long as what you buy is ‘pickup only’ but can be sold off in bits and pieces. Things that might be suitable include:
- boxes of comic books
- large collections of collector cards, CDs or DVDs
- bulk lots bought at clearing auctions (g’day chamo)
- items that can be stripped for parts (I also sell K1000 parts/accessories on another ID)
As someone else posted, posters are not likely to help you so that you become a competitor. What I have done is point you in some directions that can work for anyone who is prepared to work at it.
