eBay Arbitrage: Cross Auction Abritrage. Buy At Offline Auction, Sell Online, or Vice Versa, or - By Avril Harper

Cross auction arbitrage is where you buy something at one auction to resell at another auction. It’s very common practice at offline salerooms where I know many people who buy at north east auction where visitors are few and products often go below market value. Those items are carted off to bigger auction salerooms in major towns and cities, including larger London auction houses like Sotheby’s and Phillips. City and big town auctions often attract hundreds of international bidders with deep pockets and keen to bid high, unlike their small town counterparts which are often poorly advertised.

eBay is the biggest most successful online auction site with buyers and sellers, products and prices towering way above hundreds of other online auction sites, including Amazon. PowerSellers frequently buy at Amazon, both auction and from shop products whose prices are often low in comparison to eBay. This often happens with books and on Amazon you’ll find second hand books on countless different subjects priced in pennies which can attract frenzied bidding when resold on eBay.

Amazon is just one of hundreds of sites where products can be bought inexpensively and fetch far higher prices on eBay.

Like price comparisons on eBay and seeking out poorly listed items to resell, it’s all down to personal research, it can be time-consuming, definitely boring, but the rewards are usually well worthwhile.

This is how I would look to buy books on Amazon to resell on eBay.

* First off I’d look for best selling titles on eBay, using the Advanced Search button top right of eBay’s pages, next page key something generic into the search box, we need to find all books within the overall ‘Books, Comics and Magazines’ category. Something like ‘a’ or ‘the’ should return most recently completed book auctions. I’ll key in ‘a’, pick ‘Books, Comics and Magazines’ from the dropdown menu, tick ‘Completed Auctions Only’, next page I’ll choose ‘Price: Highest First’ from the dropdown menu right side of the screen. Today it returns 32342 completed listings over ten plus sub-categories including children’s books, textbooks, antiquarian books. I need to narrow down a bit so I’ll choose ‘non-fiction books’ and then ‘sports’. That gives me 1060 books to study.

* Still with the ‘Price: Highest First’ option, I find six of the top ten highest priced books are about fishing, specifically carp fishing. That took me about five minutes and already I know carp fishing is a subject I should keep in mind at offline book sales, and also online at Amazon and other auction sites.

* At www.amazon.co.uk I found hundreds of books available on the subject of Carp Fishing, not rare books but some decent quality items at lower prices than similar titles selling on eBay. That’s just one subject and I confess I didn’t look beyond the first page or investigate other subjects.

* Here’s my own secret book buying weapon, it isn’t an auction site, it’s just a place I turn to for books that regularly fetch £100 each and often lots more for my favourite subject: Dogs. I can’t reveal the actual book I buy, my PowerSeller daughter would disown me, but I will tell you where to look for second-hand booksellers charging incredibly low prices for high resale value books on eBay. It’s www.abebooks.com. I looked for my books today, also keyed in ‘carp fishing’ and found several costing just a few pounds each. Most were in the USA, meaning hefty postage costs to UK buyers, so be careful, check before buying and ask about postage discounts on multiple purchases.

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.