Flipping eBay Auctions - I Really Do This!

You might remember my post a few weeks ago about "Local Sources for Inventory, I Really Use Them!" Now I am going to show you another cool way to make money flipping auctions. You can do this from home, in your pajamas, 24 hours a day, without ever leaving your chair.

The purpose of this exercise is to find good, expensive items that will sell well, that are very badly presented by people who don't know what they are doing. Find it, buy it, present it better, resell it.

1) Think of an item you have sold that brought you a good profit, or maybe one that you read about here on my blog. Let's use cycling jersey as an example. (That is on my "things to look for list.")

2) So I put "cycling jersey" in the search box on eBay and got thousands of results. Now, sort them by "ending soonest." We don't care what is going to happen 5 days from now, look for items ending in the next few hours.

3) I found this listing, with many fatal errors. Click on the photo to enlarge it an look at these issues:



a) no brand name in title
b) the keyword "cycling" not used in title
c) no measurements of garment given on listing
d) background of photo is distracting and unattractive (ok, it is really awful)
e) no returns accepted (affects your sales!)
f) shipping time is 7 business days (I can do better!)

According to my Hammertap research, I can sell this same item for around $20. I can buy this item for $8.99, retake the picture, rewrite the listing, and make a profit of about $10 for about 15 minutes of work. $10 for 15 minutes of work equals a pay rate of $40 an hour. That is called working smart instead of working hard. $40 an hour working from home, in my pajamas if I want. I use a free auction sniper program to set up my bids and walk away. (There is a reason not to bid until the last seconds, which is what a sniper program does.) This takes me about a hour a week and I make several hundred dollars a month with this technique.

I do this weekly and many times make 3-4 times what I paid for a item, just because I present it better, do the research, use more powerful and popular keywords, ship faster, and have more accommodating customer service policies.

This strategy is also called eBay Arbitrage. I found a great eBook that explains exactly how to do this. Some people do this full time and it is their only source of eBay inventory. Click here to check out the eBook and add this technique to your eBay bag of tricks.

Happy Selling!