How to Make Money Selling Government Surplus on eBay - By Dean Novosat

Wouldn't you love being your own boss. Working when you want. Not having to answer to anyone but yourself. And not putting your money in someone else's pocket? Lots of people work from home making a living selling government surplus and police auction items on ebay. ebay is arguably the world's largest online marketplace. Millions of collectibles, appliances, computers, furniture, equipment, vehicles, and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, and sold daily. And anyone can buy and sell on ebay from virtually anywhere there is an internet connection.

The secret to making large amounts of money on ebay is to sell things for a large profit. In order to make a large profit, you either need to sell something that is highly desirable which causes the bidding to escalate, or to sell items that cost you pennies on the dollar. In my opinion, this second option is the easier method. And where can you find items to sell on ebay that you can buy for pennies on the dollar? At government and police auctions.

Governments are required by law to auction off any and all surplus items that they no longer need or use. This can include things like airplanes, automobiles. boats, cars, office equipment, computers, furniture, office supplies, trailers, trucks, and more. This is an excellent way to find bargains that you can resell on ebay for massive profits! For example, at a recent government surplus auction, I saw a lot of HP inkjet cartridges sell for 90% off retail! These were brand new genuine HP printer cartridges that sell in the stores for $30-$40 each. And entire box of 50 cartridges sold for $60! Just do the math! Each inkjet cartridge cost the lucky bidder just over $1.00 each! These same cartridges sell on ebay for around $15.00. So it is easy to see that your profits in this case would be huge! Discounting the listing fees for ebay, you would have realized a $690.00 profit! And this is one just one item. Imagine buying a car at a government auction at a huge discount. You could potentially make thousands of dollars in profits on each vehicle.

Police auctions are similar. But at a police auction, there are all kinds of merchandise. Some of it is seized during an arrest. Some of it is recovered stolen merchandise. But, again, police departments can't keep all this property. If the owner can't be found, or if it is confiscated, it must be sold at auction to the public. You can pick up anything from exotic cars to expensive jewelry and watches at police auctions. Just sell it on ebay and watch your profits soar.

Selling government and police auction merchandise on ebay is a great way to make money and have the ability to work from home. You can buy items at a deep discount and sell it for great profits.

Get a FREE newsletter with government and police auctions near you. Simply go to target="_new" href="http://www.buysurplus.info">http://www.buysurplus.info. Here you will find valuable items up for auction near you!

Dean Novosat attends local government auctions at locations he won't disclose! And the bargains get bigger and bigger all the time! Find auctions near you at http://www.buysurplus.info.

Click Here To Read This Article

Mystery Auctions Are The New Hot Commodity On Ebay - By Joe LeKostaj

Quite a few sellers on eBay have found a new gold mine. So much so that eBay has a whole category dedicated to this new type of auction.

Mystery auctions, which now reside in the “Everything Else” parent category, are getting bids in the thousands of dollars. And buyers don’t even know what they’re getting!

The basic premise behind a mystery auction is to create some virtual or imaginary object to “sell” to buyers. To follow eBay’s TOS, sellers must list this item for sale, whether it’s a virtual dandelion or a Wonka Bar, and suggest that:

Anything else you receive is a gift from me to you.

Those magic words are making buyers flock to these auctions. A “tube of sunscreen” recently sold for over $4,500, but I’ll talk more about that later.

There are two major types of mystery auctions.

First is the multiple-item raffle type auction. This is a dutch auction, with each item ranging from $0.99 to $50. Many of these auctions are as simple as the seller sending cash back to the buyer’s paypal accounts. This is a “gift” in addition to the virtual item they actually bought. Some buyers get less than the sale price, some get more. The seller gets to keep the rest.

People love to gamble. As long as the cash remains “a gift from the seller”, it’s ok by eBay.

All you have to do is write an interesting auction, and you don’t even have to have an actual product.

The second type of mystery auction involves offering a silly item, such as Cheez Whiz, or a 7-year old hamburger, as the “item”. Then irresistible gifts are implied for winning the auction. Once a reputation is built up that the seller offers valuable items, bidders just can’t stop bidding.

Not only that, buyers are more than happy with what they receive. Another “tube of sunscreen” sold for $3,500 recently, and buyer feedback reads:

EZ IS THE MAN!100%Genuine&Trustworthy!Amazing GIFTS & MORE!Beyond SATISFIED!:-D

Figure out how to break into the mystery auction market and you’ve got a license to print money. And judging by the best selling items, anything you ever learned about building good looking websites is out the window. These auctions look terrible. Big flashing text, terrible music playing in the background, animated gifs, the whole bit.

Make it as ugly as possible, and rake in the cash. I’m gonna go write one right now.

Joe LeKostaj is a seasoned webmaster and runs several sites including Weird eBay Auctions You can find links to many well established mystery auctions on his site.

Click Here To Read This Article

Some Ways You Can Take Advantage Of Some Little Known Tactics To Buy Collectibles On eBay - By Gregg Hall

One of the great things about the internet and with eBay in particular is that due to the company being in existence in almost every corner of the globe you can find some very unique and interesting items that cannot be found in any other place. The key to finding collectibles and being able to buy them at a decent price is to take advantage of some little known tactics that many people don’t know about. One way to keep up with items that you are particularly interested in is to find the category on eBay and then add it to you favorites in your web browser so that you can easily keep up with it. Another thing that happens all the time is that sellers on eBay often make mistakes when selling an item or they may not know the real value of the item and will list it as just an average item when in fact it may actually be quite rare.

One caveat that I must offer is to not blindly believe that the description of something being sold on eBay is factual. I have seen many auctions advertise something as valuable, rare, or hard to find when they were really nothing special. Never bid on something that you do not have an idea of the value of. One thing that will save you a lot of time in your searches is to keep track of certain sellers whom you have found to always have the particular collectibles you are seeking, you can even contact them and ask them to email you if they get certain items.

Don’t get wrapped up in the auction hype and think that if you don’t win the item you will never have another chance. eBay is enormous and they have millions of items for sale everyday so the odds are that what you are looking for will become available again. You must never put yourself in a position of thinking that you must have an item, if you do you will end up paying too much. You must always be willing to let the item go if it brings a certain price so set a price that you think it is worth and if it goes above that you just let it go. I used to buy cars at auctions and I would have a figure that I was willing to pay for each car I bid on, if the price went above my figure I walked away and didn’t look back.

Always calculate the shipping costs when you are bidding on items and if you are buying multiple products from a single seller contact them and ask them what kind of deal they will give you on the shipping or postage if you win multiple items.

Gregg Hall is an author living in Navarre Beach, Florida. Find more about collecting as well as buying collectibles at target="_new" href="http://www.actionfiguresandcollectibles.com">http://www.actionfiguresandcollectibles.com

Click Here To Read This Article

eBay Pricing strategy - By Sunil Tanna

When you first begin to sell on eBay, you probably will not immediately realize just how important pricing is. In fact, many new eBay sellers don't even realize that "pricing" needs to be done at all! What happens is if you over focus on the auction process at eBay, and how to attract bidders, you can easily forget that pricing plays a very important role in the site.

When you sell an item through an eBay auction, there are really are three (and only three) prices that you need to think about:

1. The "buy it now" price.

2. The reserve price.

3. The starting bid price.

The first two of these three are in fact optional, and the starting bid price is the only one that is required in order to initiate an eBay auction.

As far as the starting bid price is concerned, the key thing to remember is that you want to attract bidders. Lots of bidders. Because the more bidders you have, the higher the final selling price is likely to be. Thus, it's usually a good idea to set this price to a low value - $50 is a good upper limit, no matter what your item is really worth.

The most important price, especially since you have a low starting bid, is the reserve price. The reserve price is the absolute lowest price that you want to get for your item, and is your guarantee that you will never be required to sell your items at a loss. eBay does give you the option to sell the item below the reserve price, but it will never require you to do so. In fact, if the highest bid is lower than your reserve price, there are absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever from deciding not to sell item.

Furthermore, what can happen if you have no reserve price, is that scammers can use two eBay accounts in collusion to get your item for much less than the real-value: The first account bids very low, the second immediately bids high to deter other potential bidders, and then immediately before the end of the auction, the high bid is cancelled or withdrawn. However, setting a reserve price, will protect you from this particular eBay scam.

The last price to consider is the "buy it now price". If you choose to enable this feature, visitors to your auction will see a "buy it now" option that will allow them to buy immediately, without bidding, at your chosen price. You can use this feature for any type of item, but it tends to be most useful if you are selling multiple identical items, or items that you are drop shipping.

One final thing to remember is that hipping has a price, and potential buyers will take this into consideration when they are looking at your auctions. Your item description should therefore should make clear any shipping costs associated with your item. If you become an eBay regular, you might want also experiment with offering free shipping - you could be surprised at how many extra bids this can trigger.

Of course the prerequisite to choose the right prices to sell at, is knowing what your item is worth, or, at the very least, what it cost you. For recent purchases, or items that you are drop shipping, you probably already have a very clear idea. On the other hand, for highly unique items, collectables, and high ticket items, their value may not be so clear: for these types of things, it's probably best to seek a professional valuation before you list them on eBay.

For more auction articles and product reviews, please visit http://www.guide2auctions.com/

Click Here To Read This Article

Make Money On Ebay With Auction Promotion Strategies - By Evan Gould

Have you ever used Ebay to make money online? If you answered no, then you are missing a huge opportunity no matter if you are running an established web business or just a newbie at making money online.

You should think about Ebay as a promotion strategy that puts literally thousands of buyer’s right in your hands providing you leads and sales at the same time. And if you have a good sales funnel once you gain one lead from Ebay you can use that lead to up sell higher priced items in the future.

Here is how it works. First plan out your sales funnel. Your sales funnel normally starts with a lower priced item which is used to get a lead. Then the sales funnel will use this lead to up sell higher priced items down the road.

For instance, if you sell barbecue grills, perhaps one of your promotion strategies would be to start selling barbecue accessories on Ebay for a cost that you can break even at. Then by capturing the e-mail, and physical address information of the customer, you use this customer database to sell higher priced items such as grills down the road.

In addition, with millions of people using Ebay, it is one of the best website free traffic methods you can use to drive traffic to your website. And best of all one you capture this traffic and gain a customer database out of it you can market to that database of customers for years to come.

Ebay is an opportunity sitting right in front of you and you can take advantage of it for fairly little effort. But in order to take advantage of it you must act.

Don’t just sit back and rely on the same promotion strategies you have used in the past. Selling customers as they walk though you door, really limits you. In today’s world to remain competitive you really need to focus on building a lead database and using those leads to market to over and over again.

And if you are already in the internet business, don’t just rely on your website to deliver traffic to your site. Focus on a much more broad promotion strategy that can get traffic from a variety of websites. Ebay is one of those great traffic strategies that is often overlooked by many internet businesses.

If you want to learn how to drive online traffic and leads to your website or Ebay auction be sure to pick up a free copy of my http://wholesaleproducts.directory-lab.com

Click Here To Read This Article

eBay Seller Path To More Sales - By Eric Scott

If you are an eBay seller who is setting up and running an auction site you should use the eBay tools and resources that can be found on eBay and other auction themed websites.

You can build your eBay seller site around the items you are selling faster and with greater success by using these eBay tools and resources .

eBay Seller Listings

After you have found a product that you want to sell on your eBay auction site search the eBay seller item listings and locate the same and similar items.

Keep track of the items prices on the seller sites that are listed.

Take note on when the auctions began and when they will be ending.

Go back to them many times and check out which of the sites are getting the most sales of the item you also want to sell.

eBay Seller Sites


Take note on the auction sites that get more sales than the others, how they are set up, designed, and their overall look.

You can also compare these seller sites to the other auctions that didn't do as well as they did.

When you start setting up and designing your own eBay seller site you'll have alot of other auctions to compare to that have already run or are up and running.

This part of your plan will save you a lot of time and you'll also get better results.

Compare Prices

Add up the price that you could sell the item for at a profit after paying your best priced and reliable supplier.

Compare your price to the prices of the other eBay seller sites that had a good amount of sales.

If you can make a profit by coming close to, matching, or beating these prices you have found a good product to sell on your eBay seller site.

eBay Tools

You can find a lot of articles, eBooks, eBay tools, and resources that will show you how to set up an eBay seller site that looks like it was designed by an experienced eBay store owner.
This will increase your eBay sales and success as an eBay seller.

eBay Sales

Start off with a small to medium inventory. After your auction begins you can lower the price just enough as needed to get more sales or raise the price just enough as needed to cover your costs and profits.

There will be more new visitors and customers going to your eBay seller site or eBay store and any improvements you add to the setup and design will increase your eBay sales in your current and future auctions.

After a while if the item sells well, then you can buy more from your supplier than you did on the first order.

Buyer Discounts

You can offer your customers a discount when they buy more than one item from your eBay auction site or sites that are listed in your eBay store.

Your customers will appreciate any discounts that you offer to them. They will feel that they got a good deal from an eBay seller on something that they needed and/or wanted.

eBay Shipping

If two or more items are ordered from your auction site that can be shipped to the customer together in the same box or as part of the same eBay shipping order you can offer a discount on the s/h cost.

Your customers will appreciate it if you use a shipping calculator in your auctions because they will be getting an accurate s/h cost based on their location.

This eBay tool is offered for use in all eBay seller auctions and can be found on the eBay business shipping page.

Auction Details

Put all of the buyer discount, shipping, and other important details in your auction where your customers and visitors can easily find them.

If you have an eBay store with other related auction items you can mention that and you can list some of them with their description and picture towards the bottom of your auction listing.

eBay Seller Plan

A good eBay seller plan will help you find the right products to sell in your eBay auctions.

It will also help you set up and design an effective eBay seller site that will increase your eBay sales.

Follow your eBay seller plan and you will be a successful eBay seller !

Eric Scott is an internet marketing researcher who specializes in internet home business. To find out more about: target="_new" href="http://www.Internet-Work-At-Home-Online-Info.com">eBay seller plans, target="_new" href="http://www.Internet-Work-At-Home-Online-Info.com">eBay sales, eBay tools, and resources:
http://www.Internet-Work-At-Home-Online-Info.com

Click Here To Read This Article

Marketing Your Ebay Store - How To Help Buyers Find Your Items - By Susan Deppner

You're a seller on eBay and you've decided to open an eBay store. That's simple enough to accomplish. Then, suddenly, you realize that your store items don't show up in eBay searches. At this point the $64,000 question seems to be, "What do I do so that people will find my eBay store items?"

The first piece of advice it seems everyone gives when that question comes up is to be sure to run eBay auctions regularly and mention in your auction listings that you have an eBay store so people will go there to see what else you have. That's good advice, but the problem is that too many times people just stop there. Next thing you know they've closed their store because so few people seem to be finding it. That's too bad because there are numerous methods they could have used to market their store more effectively. Here are a few.

1. EBay Express, assuming you and your listings qualify. EBay provides this check list to help you grow your business on eBay Express. Read it to learn about seller and listing criteria for this eBay venue. If you qualify as an eBay Express seller and want your listings to show there, make sure you follow the specific guidelines.

2. Make sure your items show on Google search and other search engines. Always enable your store listing feed and export your store items regularly to Google Base (go to the google website to find out more). Your items will show up when people search and look at the results on Google Products (formerly called Froogle). You don't have to understand the technical aspect of how this works, but know that it does work and it is an important marketing method that should not be overlooked. Make sure that you are optimizing your items for search engines by using excellent keywords in your store description and in your listing titles.

3. Blogs or other web posts. If you have a blog, or if you ever leave a comment on a blog or if you post on an online forum, put your store link in your signature line if that's allowed. People really do click through on those. The nice thing about having a store is that you have a specific web address. I also recommend that you consider purchasing a domain name that you can use to forward to your store link, something easy for people to remember. In my case, my52cents.com is much easier to remember than http://stores.ebay.com/my52cents. Make yours an appropriate and memorable name. Include it with every blog comment or forum post. Post often, but don't spam post; that's just tacky.

Those are just a few examples. Marketing your eBay store is an important part of having an eBay store. You can depend on the store being found via your auctions, of course, but why not take a few minutes and notch it up a level? All of the methods I mentioned, aside from purchasing the domain name ($10 or less at godaddy.com) are free and easy to accomplish.

By the way, you can track how people find your store by looking at your traffic reports on your "manage my store" page. If you haven't looked at that, you may be very surprised to see where your store traffic is coming from.

These are just a few suggestions and you can find more on eBay, who actually wants your store to succeed, so don't overlook the eBay help section when you're seeking good eBay store marketing advice.

About the Author:

Susan Deppner is a writer and editor, as well as a businessperson with perhaps too many exciting ventures online and off, most notably those involving eBay and Squidoo. You can find her My52cents on eBay - Auction Tips blog at target="_new" href="http://my52cents.blogspot.com">http://my52cents.blogspot.com and her Squidoo lenses at http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/Susan52

Copyright 2007 - Susan B. Deppner - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Click Here To Read This Article