eBay Arbitrage: Big Profit Margins Without Leaving Home - By Avril Harper

This article offers a few simple techniques that let you benefit from sellers who either don’t know or don’t care how their products are listed on eBay and consequently their mistakes and omissions often lead to items going unsold or selling way below their real market value. The upshot is: you look for items poorly or wrongly listed, buy them cheap, correct mistakes and improve their earlier listing, then resell at a profit on eBay.

The best way to make steady money is to literally stalk eBay looking for items available for you to buy at less than their normal selling price on eBay. This discrepancy can be due to several reasons, for example:

- The item is poorly listed and failing to attract interest because it is listed in a category where few potential buyers will find it;

- the seller offers an item Buy It Now or accepts a ‘Best Offer’ at much below the price the item regularly fetches on eBay’s highest bidder auctions;

- the listing has spelling mistakes or typos which render it oblivious to eBay’s search engines when potential buyers seek for similar items;

- the pictures are poor and that deters people from bidding;

- the item is highly desirable but the seller doesn’t know this or fails to describe it properly.

These and other anomalies present a product you might buy cheap and relist almost right away to at least double your investment and maybe earn a great deal more. Many people see this as a regular feature of their eBay ventures.

Tips

* Look especially for items failing to attract bids which are poorly described, listed in the wrong category, having typing mistakes or typos, have poor illustrations, or which are missing essential words and fail to respond to eBay search engines. In all cases the item can usually be purchased below typical eBay value and relisted immediately after corrections and improvements are made.

* Look for items with no bids and close to auction end, you might find many are poorly described or another reason deters bidding on an otherwise valuable item. You might also find sellers of Buy It Now items remaining unsold just a few hours before auction end will accept Best Offer bids way lower than would be so when the auction began. Check manually or find last minute no bid auction and Buy It Now listings using www.no-bids.com or click on the ‘All Items Ending Now’ icon normally middle of screen on the home page on any eBay country site home page.

* Do price comparisons on eBay. You’ll often find items available Buy It Now or Best Offer which regularly fetch far more on auction listings. This is because people get caught up in the thrill of bidding and chase items they don’t really need or want just to prevent someone else winning them.

Apart from spelling and typing errors for which seek-and-find software is available, it’s a question of physically looking for items to resell. With so many items listed on eBay, in several country sites and in hundreds of different categories and sub-categories, you really do need to focus on one or a handful of product types or you’ll just get horribly confused. You also need a good system to keep count of items viewed, low price Best Offer opportunities, and so on. A spreadsheet will usually do or try one of the diary and note-taking programs available for most computers.

Avril Harper is a UK based writer and PowerSeller. Learn more about eBay arbitrage at http://www.publishingcircles.com/arbitrage.htm or download a free guide ‘103 PowerSeller Tips’ at http://www.toppco.com.