Thrift Stores – I have done this. In fact there is about 15 thrift stores within 20 miles of my house. The items at mostthrift stores are donated and the employees don’t take the time to ascertain the real value of each and every item. You can pick up some good deals here. In fact you may get addicted to going and picking up the deals. Finding stuff to sell on EBay may become a second reason to hit the thrift stores. Garage Sales – I grew up on stuff from these. My parents worked hard to get by and we sometimes didn’t have enough money to go around. So we would go to yard and garage sales on the weekends. In fact, my parents still do this each and every weekend. The profit from these will be even more than that from thrift stores.
Offline Auctions – There is a big difference between a hundred people bidding on an item in your town and a thousand bidding on your item on EBay. It is a possible to make a profit with this difference.
Flea Markets – About the same profit potential as garage sales. Just remember that before you buy something, you must make a profit.
Pawn Shops – It may be possible to make a profit from things you buy from a pawn shop, but it will be few and far between.
Drop Shipping – You can find hundreds of ebooks online for sale on making profits from drop shipping. But remember that people shopping on EBay are looking for a deal and you have to make some money too. Finding drop shipping sources that will give leave you with a profit may be hard to do. But this is a good way to get started selling on EBay.
Online Auctions – Yes, you can buy things from an auction online and turn around and sell them on EBay. Auction sites like Yahoo and Amazon get much less traffic than EBay. If you find something undervalued at one of these sites, buy itand resell it on EBay. I even have an auction site listed in the appendix where you can purchase pallet sized lots online.
You can even do this on EBay itself. Go to http//pages.eBay.com/catindex/catwholesale.html. Here you can buy lots of products on EBay itself which you can then split up and resell.
I did this on accident once. I found a lot of laptops for sale. There were twenty of them. They were each missing various parts and were random brands. The price was pretty good. Or so I thought because I thought I could buy them, fix them up and resell them. After all, I have been putting desktop computers together for years.
Wrong. I received the box of laptops and tore into them. I could hardly recognize the parts in the cases, let alone put one back together and the pieces that were missing on the laptops sold for almost as much as the resale value of the completed laptops.
So I thought, what the hell, I’ll go back to EBay and sell the lot over again and I did. But I broke the lot up into three
separate lots by brand name, so that there was a Dell lot, a Compaq lot, and a generic lot.
I ended up make a good profit, selling each lot for almost the same price that I bought all of the laptops for. Lesson learned. By sell brand specific lots I increased the value of the laptops.
The Dump – One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
The Classifieds – Online or in your local newspaper. Remember that having knowledge pays and if you findsomething listed in your local paper that you know can be sold for a lot more, jump on it.
Antique Malls
Factory Outlets and Outlet Malls
Government Auctions
Police Auctions
Government Surplus Retail Stores
Unclaimed Freight
Closeout Stores
