Don’t Sleep on ebay
ebay can provide any entrepreneur with an additional stream of income from auctioning off items that 1.) are just laying around the house/room taking up space 2.) items that can be purchased from yard sales for cheap amounts and sold for much more and 3.) selling items for someone for a small commission.
For the past few years I have used ebay to make a few bucks here and there every few months. ebay has proven to be a great way for me to make some additional income to put towards my business; to help offset my hosting fees and pay for advertisements. A few weeks ago I wrote an article – Sell it All — that touched upon selling items on ebay, but in this post I’ll go into a bit more detail on my experiences with selling on ebay.
Books
My ebay experience began with selling books. I first started off by collecting as many books as I could from around the house; it wasn’t that hard because we literally had hundreds of books that we’ve already read and were just taking up space.
I would filter through them and find the books that were valued at $10 or more and try to make packages of 10 – 30 books to sell in one shot. If the books were in good shape and held a decent value, then I made pretty good money.
I tried to go to yard sales every few weeks to purchase big boxes of 10-25 cent books that people just wanted to get off their hands. Little did they know, many of the books were valued at $5 - $25 a piece, especially if they were in volumes, i.e. , children series, encyclopedias, and history books.
Sell for others
My mom is always telling me about how her friends have tons of stuff that’s just being kept in storage or in obscure corners of their apartments that they wish they could get rid of. A few months ago my mom introduced me to her friend, Alan, who literally had around $20,000 worth of items that he wanted to sell.
He had expensive clocks, paintings, books, and other neat things that he wanted to sell on ebay but he just didn’t have the time or inclination to do so. So for a small commission, 15 – 35%, I spent the few hours that it took to list the items and made myself some quick cash, win-win situation.
Time for an upgrade?
If you have cell phones, televisions, digital cameras, computers, you know, things like that, and you’re thinking about upgrading to something more sophisticated to match the current technology, then it would be smart to sell your old stuff on ebay and use the money to help purchase something better. Makes sense, eh?
There are tons of people who would be willing to take that old cell phone off your hands and ebay is the perfect market to match you up with those buyers.
Nowadays I don’t have as much time to constantly list on ebay, but when I was doing it constantly it worked out very well for me. So if you have the time and the skills to list an item on ebay (it’s easy, don’t worry), then give it a shot and make yourself a few extra bucks. Who knows, maybe you’ll like it so much that you’ll create a business by selling stuff on ebay, I’ve seen it happen. Heck, it beats a summer job, right?
Share your ebay stories with FTT.
In high school I made a decent amount of money by selling old cell phones of my buddies on Ebay. It worked really well for a year or two, then I got burned a couple of times and moved on to other things. Ebay is still a great place to move old items, its just hard to find sources for new products that will sell well.