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.

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.

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!

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.

Anyone who has been selling on eBay for the last couple of years, will know we have had to put up with a lot of changes recently.  Namely:

• Banned the sale of digitally delivered products
• Sellers no longer able to leave neutral or negative feedback
• Massive fee structure change including insertion fees, final value fees (FVF), shop subscription fees and cancelled shop inventory listings
• All sorts of policy changes and introductions

There are probably even others I have missed.  Some of the above, I have written separate posts about in my blog as and when they happened.  Just have a browse if you are not aware of them, but you should be as they have all been in place for some time.

What will be next?  You can bet your bottom dollar there will be something.  What you should do is keep an eye on the ‘General Announcements’   page.  To view this on your country’s eBay domain, hover your mouse over the ‘Community’ link in the top right hand corner of the page and click on ‘News’ from the drop down menu.

A lot of eBay sellers stopped selling online , after some or all of the above came into effect. Why I ask myself, as eBay is not the only selling platform on the Internet?  Now this is the point of my post.  Before any more changes come into effect, which may stop you from selling on eBay, get yourself ready now.  I suggest you start using other auction sites such as easybid or ebid.  I am not saying stop using eBay, just get yourself prepared in case eBay force you to stop selling with them tomorrow.  

Ask yourself this question;  Would my online business completely stop if eBay ceased to exist tomorrow? 
If you answered ‘yes’ then you have all of your eggs in one basket, and that is not good to rely on one selling channel.  Think of it this way, selling on two auction sites or more, gives  greater exposure to your items.  Now that has to be a good thing right?

The bottom line is, if you are only selling on one website and/or platform, you need to start using another one as well.

I have already started selling on easybid.  Only just started mind, but I am going to be increasing my inventory on there.  When I am happy with the amount of inventory and sales I am making, I will then start using another site as well.  I am currently in the middle of creating a product geared around selling on the internet that does not rely on eBay.  If you are interested, sign up to my blog by entering your name and email address above, and you will be the first to hear of the release, as well as receiving updates to the blog of course.

I thought that it’s about time I gave you an update on what I have found so far from my research about other methods just in case you had thought I had given up.  Firstly let me assure you, I most definately have not given up.

If you were a digital item seller on eBay, such as selling eBooks or website templates, have you decided what you are going to do yet?  Have you decided if you are going to do anything at all, or are you just going to give up?

Those of you that know me will know I was mainly concentrating on selling eBooks, but I also sell physical products on eBay under another eBay username (marc-in-sure-u-get-it).  This is one example of a point I briefly touched on a couple of posts ago.  And that is not to be putting all of your eggs in one basket.  This, for me at least, is the biggest lesson I have learnt from this change in eBay policy.

Anyway, as coincidence would have it,  before the ban came into effect, I started work on writing my first eBook.  When the ban was announced actually made me even eager to get on with it.  That is because the subject that the eBook is on, is about making a profit outside of eBay by selling on other platforms.  Not just for digital products, but for any product generally.  Mainly physical products as this is what I started selling on eBay when I first started and hence have more experience with.

During my research for the eBook, I have found numerous other avenues for selling online.  I am going to briefly mention those I have found where you can sell digital products.  I have not used any of them yet, except for one (but I assure you I will be experimenting with them), so I will not go into details about any of them, but here are my findings so far:

• Probably the most obvious, and you may have already read a lot about this on other blogs, is to sell your digital items on eBay still, but despatch them on CD or DVD.  You do this by creating multimedia CD roms.  Other blogs which have gone into some detail are John Thornhill (aka PlanetSMS), Daniel Sumner and Socrates Socratous.  This method deserves at least a couple of posts on its own and I will post more on this later once I have had an opportunity to look at it more, but for now I recommend reading the above mentioned blogs if you want to consider this as an option.  Despite what I said in my previous post, I will be looking at this option.
• Sell your digital products via your own website.  There are ofcourse advantages and disadvantages to this.  This is the only place you can buy ebooks from me at the moment.  My website is www.info-sources.co.uk. However, the only item on there available at time of writing this post, is a collection of eBooks, as I have taken down the main pages as I am improving my delivery method of the products, but feel free to go and have a look.  If you would like to consider this as one of your methods, then I recommend John Thornhill’s 90 day powerseller package.  Again there is so much in this package, it really deserves it’s own post to go into depth about it.  I will do this at some point too.
• I have done a search for other auction sites that allow the sale of digitally delivered products.  I have not used any yet, so these are not in any specific order or even a recommendation, but just to let you know they are out there.  www.wagglepop.com, www.ecrater.com,  www.saddlery4you.co.uk, www.cqout.com, www.bidville.com, www.121bid.com.  Remember, all of these sites are much smaller than eBay, but even eBay was small once.  Again, remember not to put all of your eggs in one basket.
• Use clickbank and also get other people to sell your digital products for you.  This is a service where you can register your products and have affiliates help you market your product.
• A site exclusively for buying and selling digital products is www.payloadz.com. The site also gives you tutorials.  One very useful tutorial is on how to set up autodelivery of your products with sales made on this site.  Again, I have not put it into action yet, but I will certainly be giving it a try.

As I mentioned above, I am using one of the above methods and that is having your own site.  At least with this method, you are in complete control of everything.  The other methods I have not yet tried, but I will be experimenting with them.  There are also other auction sites not listed above, but there are just too many to mention.  That does not mean that those above are recommendations, I have put those there as I found them fairly easily on google, and if I did, the chances are potential buyers will as well.  Ofcourse that is important, as it provides traffic.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out, more traffic = more sales.  Also another good reason why not to rely on one selling platform.

If you have used any of the above methods, or if you havent’t yet, but you do in the future, please do post your comments of how you get on and what you think so we can all benefit from your experiences.

Marc Sampson.