Hello! Enjoy this blog post from a blog friend of mine. Veronica has an AWESOME story to share and hopefully this post will help teach you how to sell on eBay.
Have you ever hosted a garage sale where people arrived 2 hours early to look through your old junk? Did they seem overly eager to snatch up what you deemed to be garbage?
If this sounds familiar to you, those people probably weren’t hoarders-they were ‘flippers,’ and that old ‘junk’ you just sold to them for 50 cents might have just paid their bills for the month.
My name is Veronica, and I am one of those flippers.
My husband Andrew and I are both full time health care professionals, garage sale ‘flippers’, bloggers, and seekers of financial independence. We have been paying our bills with the help of garage sales, estate sales, auctions, and eBay for the past few years, and have made quite a dent in our once-staggering amount of debt!
To date, we have completely paid off $96,500 in student loans, our $15,000 wedding, $5,000 in credit card debt, a $6,500 car, and over half of our mortgage- $76,600 and counting!
No, we didn’t receive an inheritance or win the lottery.
Our secret? An extremely frugal lifestyle supplemented by re-selling second hand items on eBay. The second hand items come from the weekly garage sales, estate sales, and auctions that we attend.
While most people are sleeping off Friday night’s indulgences, we are up on Saturday mornings at the break of dawn with our fanny pack full of cash, standing in line with other ‘flippers’ at the sales to compete for treasure.
It’s a battle of knowledge and skill; the ability to recognize antiques, collectibles, designer names, and more determines how much money you can make. It may sound a bit comical, but there’s an entire underground community out there whose members make their livings off of other people’s ‘seconds’.
So far this year, my husband and I have made about $13,000 by selling on eBay part-time. There are a few important strategies that have proved quite beneficial to us, and I am about to share them with you.
The first key to success is…
Master Your Craft
Identify your interests if you want to know how to sell on eBay. Shoes, vinyl records, designer clothes, jewelry, glassware, sports equipment, electronics, artwork, or toys are just a few examples of entire genres that you could specialize in.
Choose something that you already enjoy, and you will probably find that you know a whole lot more about the area than you previously thought. It also won’t feel like a chore to read about the items and do some preliminary research
Once you decide upon a niche that suits you, sort through your house, go out to garage sales and thrift stores, or check Craigslist for cheap or free items in your niche to obtain and begin researching.
Do Your Research
For all of you who cringed at the word ‘research’ and immediately thought of the library, index cards, and citations, relax. It’s eBay research – no books required.
The first thing I do with a new item is try to find that exact item listed for sale on eBay by searching a few general descriptor words and scroll through the resulting pictures until I find something similar. Once I find an item that looks like or is the one I am trying to sell, I search again using only the title words from that listing to find more targeted results.
From that quick search, you can gain two very important things: how much similar items are listed for, and how other sellers are describing the item.
In order to perform this research on the fly, it’s important to…
Related: 11 Best Ways To Sell Used DVDs Online And Locally
Make Your Smart Phone Earn Its Keep
My husband and I don’t pay for our smart phones anymore – they pay for themselves every month and then pay us back ten-fold because we have learned to use them to our advantage.
With the eBay app installed on our phones, we can quickly perform research while anywhere, and extremely fast. I can pick up an item at a sale and learn exactly what it is and what it’s worth on eBay before I put it down. We have made countless dollars by this use of our phones’ capabilities and also saved money by knowing when to pass on an item that was over-priced.
You would think that everyone would be using this tactic, but it surprisingly still gives us an edge as many older flippers have yet to master the smart phone’s capabilities. The majority of competition in our area consists of retirees who go to these sales as a way to stay busy. In fact, I’ve only witnessed about two other flippers using their phones in the same manner we do. The competition is behind the times, and you need to take advantage of that!
We also use our smart phones to post our items directly to eBay, taking all of the pictures with the phone’s camera and using the app to upload everything. This wasn’t a viable option a few years ago, but now that cell phone cameras have evolved to a much higher quality, it works very well. It takes much less time to post an item for sale on eBay now through the phone app compared to the tedious job of downloading photos to a computer and posting from there.
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Keywords Are Important If You Want To Know How To Sell On eBay
Just like SEO for you bloggers out there, keywords are very important in your eBay listing when learning how to sell on eBay. Use every descriptor word possible in the listing title – the title doesn’t have to make sense or even read like a proper sentence.
I used to make the mistake of posting cute titles instead of maximizing my keywords. When my items weren’t selling as well as other sellers’ identical items, I caught on and started using the same jumbled keyword titles that worked for them.
The results were immediate. With more direct keywords and less fluff in my listings, more people viewed my items. I started receiving more bids on my items, which translated to increased sales.
The next step is pricing your item fairly, and that correlates with one of our most important pillars of success…
Let People Make Money Off Of You
It seems counter-intuitive, but a very successful antique dealer taught us this lesson early on.
It is a very difficult thing to do because everyone likes maximum value for their items, but allowing others to make a profit off of youensures your success. By relinquishing 10-15% of your potential profit and allowing someone else to share that profit, you will secure happy, repeat customers, your inventory will turn over quickly, and you can then buy new inventory with your profits to do it all over again, thus making more money in the time span it would have taken you to sell the original item for full value.
The basic principle here is that the opportunity cost of sitting on an item for a longer period of time is greater than the reward of an extra few percent in profit. Most of the time, we find our inventory so cheap that a 10-15% price reduction from competitors’ prices still allows us to have an excellent profit margin. We recently found a designer bracelet at a garage sale for a few dollars, and found it repeatedly selling on eBay for over $400. We posted it for $350, and it sold within a few days. We watched other sellers re-list the same item for weeks at higher prices, and they are still sitting on that inventory.
The hardest part about this strategy is letting go of the need to recover maximum value out of everything. My best advice here is to relax and don’t be greedy-you will be more successful overall by allowing others to share some of the profits.
Now that I have shared with you some of our most important strategies for eBay selling success, I hope you are able to jump into the eBay flipping world with confidence! It’s never easy to start something new, but it can be a very lucrative and fun hustle on the side.
Come ‘sale’ with us!
Author Bio: You can follow Veronica and her husband Andrew’s adventures in second-hand flipping at www.secondhandmillionaires.com or on Twitter @2handmillionair
Are you going to try your hand at flipping as a result of this article? Are you interested in learning how to sell on eBay? Why or why not?
Recommended reading: 16 Best Selling Apps For Selling Stuff Online And Locally
Leave a Reply
Thank you, Veronica, for your very useful tips about selling on eBay. I’ll try to bring them to life. Maybe your tips will help me to revive my unsuccessful (yet) profile on eBay. Good Luck!
You’re welcome! I hope these tips help your eBay selling profile re-awaken! 🙂
Love this! I’ve used eBay and the eBay app a lot, but only to sell my own junk from around the house. I’m super impressed with how awesome you guys are doing on debt repayment, by the way! Sounds like a small amount of time invested has totally paid off for you 🙂
Thanks, Dee!
It’s great that you sell your stuff from around the house instead of throwing it all away. Us frugal people sure know how to recoup any money we possibly can!
This is so inspiring! I used to sell things on eBay, but it was mainly my own stuff. The thing that always seemed like the biggest frustration/challenge, was dealing with the shipping. I think I would invest in a postal scale if I was going to start selling, again.
Thank you, Amy! I agree with you on shipping being a challenge-it’s still my least favorite part, and it’s why we stay away from larger items. We do have digital scales to weigh our items, and we also purchase postage through eBay and print it out from our laser printer so we don’t have to wait in line at the post office every day. It saves us a ton of time doing it that way!
The USPS also has Priority Mail boxes in many sizes that ship for a flat rate, no matter what the weight of the object is, and the boxes are FREE at your local post office! Their motto is “If it fits, it ships”. We use those sometimes, too, if the object is heavy and would cost more to ship in a non-Priority box.
eBay is quite helpful with its shipping cost calculators for the purpose of determining what your least expensive shipping option is.
I hope this helps encourage you to get back into selling again! 🙂
I tried selling on ebay and hated it. It’s just not my thing! But I’m happy for anyone who can make it work!
Yes, Kalie, that is also a very important strategy. Knowing how to look through the sold listings helps you to determine your price. I always get a little bit nervous when an item sells too quickly, because we’ve made mistakes in the past with pricing and let things go for much less than we should have. That’s part of the game of eBay, however, and we’re constantly learning and trying to improve our selling tactics. Thanks for your input!
Hi Holly,
EBay selling is not for everyone. It requires a lot of time to research and post sometimes, and dealing with shipping, returns, and potential scammers can be a huge turn off to those new to eBay selling. Since we sell mostly small, higher-priced items like jewelry, we get a decent ROI on our invested time and energy.
Yes, you do have to be careful of scammers. It can be very frustrating when ebay allows someone to scam you. It happened to me. The scammers bought a jewelry set, then refused to pay. She said that 1. The item wasn’t what I posted in the picture, and 2. That she never got it; So ebay never paid me. So ,much for “Seller Protection”.
The best way to protect yourself from getting scammed by “Buyers and eBay” is to limit who you will allow to buy from you.
There are ways to reduce problems like this, one is to limit where you ship to. I block all war torn countries and 3rd world countries. I refuse to use a third party shipper when shipping my items. I look through old feedback, and if i feel uncomfortable about the sale I just cancel it, eBay might not like that, but bottom line is it’s your item and your money on the line. I also always add tracking, so the buyer can’t say they never received the item. The buyers are always required to mail the item back to you in original condition and provide tracking too. If you don’t get your item back you don’t have to issue a refund. Lastly I always videotape the opening of a return package if it is a high value item. Hope you have better luck in the future!
Great advice. Thank you.
Poshmark is working well for me as I declutter. The idea of flipping is fascinating. There are a few people who tried to buy my items to flip, but now I see that they aren’t getting any bids on them. You definitely have to know what you’re doing and understand the markets. I love your blog and enjoy following you guys on Twitter!
Thanks Penny! We enjoy your blog as well 🙂
We haven’t tried Poshmark yet but we’ll have to look into it when we start going through our clothes in an upcoming minimalist-fueled closet cleanse.
Thanks! We hope this article helps you get started on the right foot!
I haven’t ever used eBay, but I have made quite a bit of money by flipping things on Craigslist.
I have never actually used Craigslist before. For our larger items, we just used a local auction house.
That is amazing! I was just making $200 a month selling my old stuff on ebay to bring in a little bit extra each month. Very inspiring for me to keep looking for large tickets items to sell. Thanks for posting this!
The more you get out there and learn, the more items next time you will be able to recognize to turn a profit. $200.00 is a nice profit, congratulations Jen!
I note that you don’t point out the impact of taxes on your sales. Taking taxes into consideration, you may over $3k or more in taxes. Are you setting that amount aside as you go?
Excellent point Kevin! When we first started we did not set anything aside and that was a mistake! Since then we do, but it is difficult to know exactly how much we will owe until we actual take all the deductions into consideration. Mileage, cost of the item, eBay fees, and so on.
Is there a limit in what you can make before you have to pay taxes on your ebay sales??
Thanks Steve! We appreciate the support!
Some people still fail to believe they can earn a 100% living off of being an affiliate of eBaY, or selling stuff full-time on eBay and earning more money potentially then a person with an MBA or Ph.D working a day job. It’s all about effort, faith, and putting faith to work. Not just talking about it, but showing who has the real entrepreneurial muscle for the hustle. Agree?
I’m sure that is possible, and I would love to be able to do that! It is a great side hustle/hobby for us, but trying to completely live off of our eBay sales would be very stressful. I have a Pharm.D, and if I could make more money on eBay than full-time employment in my profession, I’d have to be selling some pretty expensive stuff!
Wow! Very impressive. I used to try and sell stuff on eBay for fun and profit, back when the whole “get rich on eBay” thing was popular. Needless to say, it didn’t work out for me. :/ I’m sure it would’ve if I was more persistent, disciplined, and savvy. Now I just use eBay to get rid of books, old movies, etc. I invest that money right back too!
I don’t know how many people GET rich on eBay anymore, but it’s an awesome way to add some spending money into your cash flow and recoup the costs of old stuff. Kudos to you for selling what you don’t need anymore instead of just throwing things away, and it’s even more awesome that you invest it! Way to go! 🙂