I list several ways of sourcing products, most of which I have not yet covered.  Now is an ideal time of year to be using one of these methods in particular.  That method being car boot, garage, yard sales etc.

Many people use this method, and not any other method as you have virtually an endless supply of products at next to nothing prices.  It is amazing what price people sell their unwanted items for at a car boot sale.  For example, my sister went to a car boot sale two weeks ago, and bought a Barbie doll for her 3 year old daughter for 50 pence.  I saw it too, it is in immaculate condition.  Now you go and search completed listings for used Barbie dolls, that’s all I am saying.  And that is just one item from which there are literally thousands of bargains to be had.

If you are not sure of where your nearest car boot sale is, then carbootjunction.com will tell you what you need to know.

To learn more about finding products at car boot sales, garage sales etc then Garage Sales Strategies for eBay Success will tell you what to look for when finding products to buy to resell on eBay.

Now that finally we have some good weather, get out there and grab some bargains to make hugh profits with.

Please share any success stories you have and products you find from this method, by leaving comments below.

GOOD LUCK.

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Watch this video to see the results.  Remember this video is just to show the procedure of what I do in this method of product sourcing.  Each auction ended up with a higher price than those auctions that I won.

I use this method regularly, and it is very successful.

To learn more about this subject, I recommend eBay arbitrage, the complete guide to flipping, which will show you in more detail how to search, find, buy and re-sell products on eBay for huge profits.

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There are however, in my mind, a couple of disadvantages over using high street retailers when they have a sale on.

• it is not so convenient to return merchandise to the retailer, as you have to pack and ship it which costs you, so you need to be more careful when selecting products to resell, else you could end up with stock you can’t make a profit on or worse, sell at all.  With the high street retailers, at least you can do that with ease.
• there is the potential for the competition to be greater, as the online retailer has it’s doors open to a wider audience than your high street retailer, therefore you may find more people selling the same product as you.

These are small disadvantages though if you do your research properly and buy sensibly.  I have created two videos for this post.  One shows you how I search for products with an online retailer that I use, and the other shows bad products to buy to resell for profit.

The first video shows how I find items to resell using an online retailer. Enjoy…..

In the second video, I show you examples of bad products to buy to resell, and explain why….

This is another very good method of getting started to sell in the world of online auctions, as your initial outlay is low, and risk very minimal if you research.

If you use or are already using this method of product sourcing, let us know how you get on.

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This takes me nicely to the next series of posts in this series of ‘product sourcing ideas for your online auction business’.

The title of this post speaks for itself.  Getting your products from high street shop sales to sell for profit on the online auction site.  But ofcourse, it is not just a matter of going to whatever shop has a sale on, filling your basket with bargains and then listing them on eBay.  There is more to it than that.

After all, you don’t want to be left with lots of stock you can’t sell, or sell but make a loss on it.

Here is what you should do.

1. Decide on a niche area, for example clothing, media products such as DVD’s, Blue Ray, PS3 games etc.  This may well depend on how much you have to outlay in the beginning.    The reason you want to do this, is you are more likely to get a buyer purchasing more than one item from you.  If you have just X BOX 360 games, the chances are someone may bid on more than one auction, but if you have an X BOX 360 game and a Hugo Boss pair of jeans, this is less likely to happen.

When deciding on your niche, I would bear in mind that some items are seasonal, and some items will devalue over time, some very quickly.  Unless you are very confident you can turn over the items that will devalue very quickly, I would steer clear of them.  If you choose seasonal items, such as Christmas items, you need the space to store them safely until the time to right to sell them.

2.  It’s going to be tricky to know what the store will have on sale, but it is a good idea to do a bit of research on eBay before you go.  In my previous post, I done a video showing you how to check completed listings.  Look to see what is selling for good prices and make a note of them, and what they have sold for.  Say you have chosen to sell Nintendo Wii games and accessories.  Just type in ‘Nintendo Wii’ and click on search.  Then look at the completed listings.  Don’t forget you need to be signed in to your account to use the completed listings feature.  If you haven’t already, I suggest you watch the video on my previous post so you get an idea of how it works.  Once you have the completed listings up, sort the search by ‘price and postage highest price first’, then you will know what is the most people are prepared to pay for an item including the postage.

If you have access to eBay on your mobile phone, I would still do this excercise before you leave for the shops, incase you are not able to access it in the shop due to poor signal.

3.  Go to your chosen shop(s).  Make sure you get a receipt for everything you buy.  This may seem obvious, but if when you get back home and checked the completed listings, you may decide you don’t want to try to sell it, so take it back for a refund.  For example, I would imagine DVD’s and CD’s are going to be very difficult to make any profit on, but say you didn’t think of this, and you bought a load of CD’s, and you checked completed listings, and found the most anyone paid for a CD was £4 including postage, and you paid £3, you probably wouldn’t want to try to sell it.

4.  When considering if you want to sell the item, remember your other associated costs when trying to work out your potential profit.  There is your eBay listing fee, final value fee, postage, packaging, pay pal fees. This is a common mistake, especially for those new to selling.  Here are links to the fees associated on eBay:-

eBay selling fees for the United Kingdom eBay site (ebay.co.uk)

eBay selling fees for the Republic of Ireland site (ebay.ie)

eBay selling fees for the United States of America (USA) site (ebay.com)

eBay selling fees for the Canadian site (ebay.ca)

eBay selling fee for the Austrailian site (ebay.com.au)

If you sell on any other eBay site other than those mentioned above, use the help link from your eBay home page to find the fees.  I only use ebay.co.uk, and I found all the above easily enough so you shouldn’t have any difficulty finding it for your site.

5.  For any items you have decided you don’t want to sell, take them back with the receipt and get a refund.   Now you are left with a load of items you are confident you will make a profit with.  Simple.

Now comes the question of listing and selling your newly acquired items successfully.  This requires another set of posts, but I have already written some simple listing and photography techniques.  Look in the eBay category of this blog.  They are some of the very first posts I wrote.

This method is one I have used and had success with in the past, so I know you will too.  I would love to hear how you get on.  Drop me an email, or leave a comment below.

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Welcome to the first post about product sourcing for your online auction business.   Remember, I am going to write about my own personal experiences and tell you and show you what I do.  This way you know that you are getting information from a real eBay powerseller, as it is the same methods I have used.  I make 100′s of £££’s a month on eBay.  I hope that each post will spark a little bit of excitement inside you. 

As the title of this post suggests, I am going to talk about sourcing products from around your home.  The reason I am starting with this, is this is how most people get started.  This is how I got started a few years ago.  I am also going to show you my eBay store.  Not to advertise my listings to you, but to show you items I have found from around my own home, one which when I tell people I sell them, they can’t beleive that people pay money for these items.  I will show you this in a video below.

When I got started selling on eBay, I needed to raise some money quick.  I took a load of CD’s that I didn’t listen to any more down to one of those cash converter places.  I got such a small amount of money for them, I could have cried walking back out of that place, but I needed the money.

I then discovered eBay.  I can’t remember how exactly.  Most probably from a television advert.  Anyway, I opened up an account, read through some tutorials and started selling my CD collection on eBay.  I put each one on an auction and sold each CD for much more than I would have got at the cash converters place. 

Of course, I soon ran out of CD’s to sell, but I was hooked and wanted to keep selling.  I started looking for other ideas of sourcing products.  Basically I just rummaged around the house some more and found some stuff that was just sitting in drawers and on shelves etc.   I listed and sold these items.  I generally didn’t make as much per item as with the CD’s but I didn’t care as it was only things not wanted any more.  Things like ornaments, clothing, books, key rings, video tapes etc.

In this video, I am going to show you some listings in my shop and a recent auction that ended, just from items I found around the house.

To browse around my eBay shop, click here www.marcsampson.com/eBay_shop

Another way of getting ideas of things around your house to sell, is to look in the ‘home & garden’ category of eBay’s main listings.  To go straight there, click here http://home-garden.shop.ebay.co.uk/.  These links will open in a new window so that you don’t loose this blog post.

Watch this video to see how you can get a rough idea of what to expect to receive for the items you find around your home.

I do hope that this post has given you food for thought.  If you haven’t yet started to sell on eBay, but would like to, this is the perfect way to get started, mainly because you do not have any initial financial outlay.

Good luck!

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Welcome to the first of a series of posts that I am going to write which will help you get starting selling on online auction sites such as eBay and for those already selling, learn strategies you probably are not using.  I do not know yet how many posts this seres will be, but I hope you like them.

I mentioned in one of my more recent posts that I would deliver the following information on my blog: 

• how to source products to sell on eBay for profit, including some you can get for free
• how to increase the visitors you get to your listings and hence sales and bids on your auctions
• how to get repeat customers coming back to you
• how to encourage your customer to buy more than one item in the same transaction
• how to increase the visibility of your listings

I am going to cover the above in this series of posts, starting with this one.  Each point will be covered in several posts, some with video so that I can show you exactly what I do to succeed on eBay.  If you are not on eBay, but another auction site, the information I will be providing, can just be adapted to suit.

In this post, I am going to start covering product sourcing.  This post will simply be a list of the several methods you can use.  Some of which I use today, and some which I am still to experiment with.  The posts following this one will go into more detail on some of the sourcing methods.  For example, how to use auction sites themselves to source your products to sell back on the auction site.

• eBay and other online auction sites
• wholesalers
• around your home
• car boot, garage, yard sales
• sales from shops on the high street
• sales from online retailers
• charity shops
• friends and family
• creating your own products
• drop shipping
• auction houses
• government auctions
• police auctions
• getting items for free
• second hand shops

I think that list is enough to be getting on with for now.  As I have already mentioned, I have not used all of these methods myself, but in the following posts, I will write a dedicated post to those methods I do and have used.

I hope that this series of posts will be useful, informative and interesting for you.

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This is a very quick post.  If you have read any previous posts of mine, you probably know that I listen to eBay radio regularly.  I was listening just now, and thought this particular segment of a recent show would be very useful to my blog readers.  Here is the link to listen to it.  CLICK HERE.  You will listen to some fantastic tips from an eBay powerseller called Suzanne Wells.  Even if you are an experienced eBay seller, this is well worth listening to.

To be taken to the eBay radio home page, here is the link:

http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/eBay-Radio.html

Please let me know what you think to eBay radio by leaving your comments below.

Happy listening.

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Since I last made a post, I have done a couple of things to help increase traffic to my listings.

I have continually added new products to my store, as usual.

I have been increasing my twitter followers which in turn will increase traffic to my eBay store.   I now have over 1,000 followers.

One of the new products I have added to my eBay listings is the series of videos which has taught me all I know about Twitter.    Here are just a few things the video series will teach you

• How to quickly increase your followers
• How to design your own graphic for use as your twitter background and how to upload it
• How to integrate Twitter with Aweber
• How to integrate Twitter with your wordpress blog
• How to automatically follow people when someone follows you
• How to automatically send a customised message to your new follower
• plus much more

I now have these videos available on CD ROM viewable on all PC platforms, via my eBay store.   Click HERE to see the Video CD ROM category of my eBay store.  Hint: especially for my blog readers.   I have not advised of this anywhere else.   I have set this up on ‘best offer’.  It is on a buy it now for £9.99, but if you put in an offer for £5.00 or higher, I have set the listing up to automatically accept your offer.

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Clicking HERE will take you to the ‘software’ category of my eBay store where you can find this.  It will open in a new window.

I have also made this short video to show you how it works and how easy it is to use.

Here are just a few uses for this software:

• create an eCover for the product you have made
• resale rights products and private label rights products that does not come with graphics
• resale rights and privalte label rights products that does come with an eCover, but you want to make your own to make it look more unique when selling it on auction sites where others are selling the same product

Click HERE to view the ‘software’ category in my eBay store.  At the time of writing this post, I am selling it for only £2.99.

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I have seen an increase in my eBay store visitors as you would expect, and I also saw an increase in sales, especially towards the end of this listing.  Not only that, the auction finished for higher than I expected it would.  Click HERE to see the final result of the auction.   By the time you read this post, this eBay page may not exist, as they don’t stay there forever.  So just to tell you, it ended up at £7.50.   I also paid for the international visibility upgrade for 5p, and this was worth doing, as someone in the USA won the auction, as I am in the UK.

So I received £7.50 for something I used to throw away, and made extra sales on my other items.  Not a bad result for something I used to throw in the bin eh?  Will this make you think twice before chucking anything out?

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