Finding Products To Sell on eBay

September 7th, 2007 by

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At some point in every auction sellers career there comes a time when he or she has exhausted their supply of sellable items that they had scrounged from around the house. This is a point where many potential auction business people give up and quit. The majority of the people in the world do not think like business people. They don’t know what to do after they sell everything there is to sell in their house, they might think of buying items from a company and then reselling them on eBay, but they don’t know where or how to find where to look for these companies. Upon reaching this point about 50% of the potential sellers quit. They fail before they ever even give their auction business a fighting chance.

Obviously, you do not want to be one of the above 50% who quit, you want to be part of the 50% who stick it out and learn how to find good products to sell. Here in the Sourcing Product section you will learn how to do just that. Find great products at low prices and resell them for a large profit.

In my humble opinion, finding quality products to sell is probably the most difficult part of running a successful auction business. If you are a product locating genius then your business will be even simpler. If you are like most however locating sources for product can seem complicated and even a little scary. For those of you that feel that way, take heart, while locating products is not easy, it is rather simple once you learn how, and its also not hard to do, but it will take time, effort and some hard work.

So cheer up and read through the rest of this article and you will learn all you need to know about finding products sell in your online auctions.

Getting started

The first, and easiest, way to begin your Internet auction career is to sell goods
that you already own. This is how most people begin and I certainly
recommend this way for the novice. This also a good way to learn how eBay selling works and if you think it could be right for you. In addition you may find a hot niche market right off the bat that you can specialize in.

You know that garage sale you have every year? Cancel it! Why would you want to sit out in the hot sun all weekend and be happy if a hundred people come and toss some quarters and dimes at you, when you could list those very same garage sale items on eBay and reach millions of targeted customers who will more than likely pay you much more for your treasures? What sounds better to you?

After you have exhausted your supply of items from around your house, then it is time to consider where to find your next batch of products.

Auction Selling Strategy

There are really only two strategies for sellers who want to make big money with online auctions.

1. Sell many lower priced items for a moderate profit on each item.
2. Sell a few high-ticket items for a large profit on each item.

Both of these strategies have their strengths and weaknesses. For example if your goal is to make a $1000.00 profit this month, then with strategy one if you made a $10.00 profit on each item, you would have to sell 100 items to make a thousand dollars. But with strategy two you may only have to sell one item to make several thousand dollars profit.

Strategy one is a lot more work than strategy two, as you are listing many auctions and you have to keep track of them all. However sellers who use strategy one have a much larger group of potential customers. I mean how many people do you know who can afford to buy a Ferrari? But almost everybody can afford to buy a $20 or $30 dollar widget.

A major drawback of selling high-ticket items is the investment you must make in order to try and sell that item. If you buy a $15.00 gizmo and it doesn’t sell, no big deal, but if you buy a $15000.00 piece of equipment and it doesn’t sell, well then you have a problem, you have just tied up fifteen thousand dollars that may take you along time to get back. There are ways to get around this and we will discuss a few later on in this section.

If you are new to selling on eBay auctions, then strategy one is where you need to start. If you are unknown on eBay then buyers are not going to be comfortable buying expensive items from you. Would you buy a Ferrari from a seller with zero feedback? I wouldn’t. Start off with less expensive items and build your online credibility and then start moving up into the higher priced items.

The bottom line, you can make enormous amounts of money with either of the above strategies. You can pick one strategy and stick with it or you can switch back and forth between the two or you could do what I do and create your own combination of strategy one and strategy two and sell a little of both types of items.

Locating Quality Products

After you have decided on your selling strategy, you next step is locating sources for quality items that you can resell at a profit. Sound complicated? Well its not, and thanks to technology and the World Wide Web, locating items for resale is getting easier every day. Just go to Google and type in “Wholesale” and you will get about a zillion matches.

But how do you find what you’re looking for in that mess? Well this is where the time consuming part of locating products comes in. You must browse through sites that have what your looking for and compare prices and quality. The problem with this approach is it takes a really long time and can often be very frustrating.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being frustrated or wasting hours searching for a product and coming up empty-handed. Luckily the is a partial solution to this problem, there are people out there who have compiled huge lists of wholesale and dropship sources that will aid you in finding items to sell.

Sounds great right? I thought so too, that is until I purchased several of the lists and found that many of the companies on the list were not in business any more, even more still had the wrong phone number listed. One of the list I bought had over 2,000 wholesale companies listed, but not did not have a single bit of contact information for any of the 2,000+ companies, How was I supposed to get in touch with the companies? My point is be very careful about purchasing these wholesale lists, 90% of the time you will not get what you pay for.

Yet not all of the lists are bad, I stumbled on one a while back that is 100% worth its weight in gold. I admit when I found it I was a bit leery after losing money on the previous lists, but I gave it a try anyway and was completely surprised. It was packed with thousands of wholesale and dropship companies with complete and up-to-date contact information, over 90% of them even had websites where you could view and purchase their products. Learn more about this awesome dropship and wholesale resource.

One of my favorite places to find a great deal on products for resale is Liquidation.com. Here you will find a auction style website where wholesale sellers liquidate large quantities of merchandise and buyers can often pick these items up for an incredibly low price. I have found some of my most profitable batches of items on this website. Go check it out for yourself!

Other Good Ideas for locating Items to Sell