Garage Sale 2 Ebay

The first questions you need to ask yourself if you want to be an eBay seller are: “Where do you find things to sell?” and “What should I sell?” There are countless answers to these questions and many of them can be lucrative. With my business models I choose to buy my items at the following places: Garage Sales and Estate sales mainly, but also flea markets or clearance sections of retail stores. The main categories of items I look are are the following: Records, Toys, Books, games, Cd’s, Videos, Video Games, Sports Cards, and neat looking vintage items. With garage sales and estate sales it is not uncommon to find an item that can turn 100%-1000% Return on Investment (ROI) nearly every day.

A great way to test the eBay waters, or gain some experience is selling items around your home. You can then move on to garage sale/estate sale shopping. The great thing about buying your items at garage sales is that you get to handpick the items for your eBay inventory, knowing what they are worth while the seller usually has no idea. Garage sales are an amazing place to find items for $.10 $.50 $1.00 or even $5.00 that can be consistently resold for $10.00, $50.00, and $100.00. So far my best find was a $.10 baseball card box which held many prizes including a 1955 Topps Hank Arron card which fetched just over $200.00 (Good thing the old woman’s husband wasn’t around to slap her for selling his valuable cards for so little.)

It is important to pick at least a couple area(s)/niches that you are interested in, and then become used to the eBay values of the items in your area(s). It may also help to create a cheat sheet when you are just starting by looking at the closed listings on eBay for common final sale prices. Always bring this cheat sheet and a notebook to sales when you first start. When you come across an item that you are on the fence about buying, just write down some info on the items, then write down the phone number or address of the sale. You can then look the item up online later, and if you end up kicking your self for passing it up, call up the seller or stop by the next day and maybe it will still be there. More often than not the items I write down info on would have not been a good buy, so I opt this method over just buying and hoping. It is also good to keep a mental note, or include on your cheat sheet the prices of very common garage sale item’s values. I tend to run across lots of Gameboys, New Cd’s, Popular Rock albums, Video games and systems, and stereos. One thing to keep in mind when starting is YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES, but because items generally cost under a few dollars you can make an awful lot of mistakes and still come out ahead.

I have put together a few rules that I follow when garage sale hunting.

1.) Always start early, the earlier you arrive, the more likely you will find the good deals before someone else does. Popular items that sell well on eBay tend to be some of the first items picked over at sales, now get up early and make sure they are sold to you, and not another savvy shopper. If a sale is open multiple days make sure you go on the first day, usually visiting sales on the follow days turns up few or no items worth reselling.

2.) Always go to as many sales as possible in your time frame. I will be writing my step by step method of creating an eBay map with a location of every sale in your area in a few days, which I then draw a path so I can hit as many sales with as little driving (so I waste as little gas and time) as possible.

3.) Rarely (I was going to say never, but there are exceptions) pass a sale on the way to another one. Often times I have found my best items at sales that never showed up in the classifieds, maybe this is because no one else managed to find this sale either? My exceptions to this rule are sales that are all clothes, extremely small sales, and sales that are mostly baby and toddler items.

4.) When you find a good sale which has multiple items you plan on purchasing, start a pile or fill a box. When you are done searching the sale for the items, make a mental tally of total eBay value of the items, and a total listed prices of the items. If you have only a few items i tend to offer %60-75 of the listed price for the lot, whereas if I have quite a few items I tend to offer %50 of the listed prices for the whole lot. These offers are rarely rejected, and when they are usually they will counter only asking for a dollar or two more. Buying in bulk is great because you can easily change your ROI from %100-200 to %200-400 which adds up a lot after a while!

5.) Be prepared, Always bring your notebook (and cheat sheets if you have some made). Bring lots of cash (I tend to bring (20) 1′s (6) 5′s (3) 10′s and a couple 20′s.) I have have garage sales unable to make change when I came unprepared with mostly 20′s. And like I mentioned earlier, have your plan of attack set ahead of time. I personally recommend making a map from the classifieds listing the sales that interest you.

6.) Have fun! how many of your friends have a “job” that is actually enjoyable? Don’t take this for granted because few people get to do work they enjoy to earn their living.