Who else has every sold something on eBay?

I attempted to sell a car on the ebay.

instead I met lots of new scammers....

Yeah, lots of people putting cars up on ebay seem to have the same problem. I have recently been selling Lego on eBay. You'd be suprised about how many people would pay a decent price for it.

I've sold on Ebay for years, mostly small antiques, first edition books and artwork. If you have the right items you can make very good money. The trick is to research the market first, some items that were once hard to find are now abundant on Ebay, or there is just no interest to make it worth the effort. If I see there is little on-line demand I can put the item in a local, live auction. Anything that even looks old tends to sell at country auctions for decent prices. I've never sold anything as high priced as a car. Most of my items have gone for between $25-$1,000, a very realistic price range for Ebay.

I've made about £400 on Lego that I bought from a bootsale for around £30 I think. I sell mountain bike parts aswell sometimes

Toys are one of the best things to sell - or anything that triggers nostalgia. I have a friend who claims to have put her son through his first year of college by selling her My Little Pony collection.

I've never personally sold anything on eBay but I have shipped/mailed out items my friend had sold on eBay so I guess I have indirectly sold things on eBay.

I used to think buying a car on ebay was really a dumb idea because it seemed so risky. But, my husband felt differently. He proved me wrong. He bought a 2004 Dodge Viper for 43,500. Gorgeous car that just had a 10k paint job done on it. The man he bought it from had two Vipers but had to sell them because of a circulation problem. I think if you are really careful and don't rush into it you can find some really good deals. He never would have been able to afford a Viper off the lot.

I have an adversion to packing and shipping large items. For some reason it stresses me out.
I mentioned to rockhead just the other day that I'm learning the ins and outs of ebay.

I'm planning on targeting small items that can be easily mailed. Plus, small items means small shipping costs. Maybe it's me, but when I see something I like, but see it's going to cost me quite a bit in shipping, I get turned off.

I noticed that people even sell things like coupons on ebay, so, to get my feet wet, I auctioned off this Victoria's Secret coupon worth $10 bucks plus a free tank top. I'd never set up a pay pal account before, for it was all for the learning experience.
I think I sold it for $3.
I got my first positive rating, which is a start.

On a 2nd similar item I just mailed to someone today, I noticed I had attracted a couple of Watchers, which is also good.

Last week, I went on a website where I personally have purchased a lot of clothes, and went over their clearance section. I bought items that were marked down 70 to 80%, which were all summer things. Things like bracelets, earrings, cosmetic bags, fashionable flip-flops, etc. I got free shipping and an extra 25% off, so I actually spent very little. As I was buying the items, I saved the images of them in my new Ebay folder, so there will be good pictures of them when I try to sell them.
I went back and looked the next day, and already a few of the items I bought were already sold out. By the Spring I'm pretty sure they will all be off that website.
I'll see how that goes when the weather starts to get nice, and women start looking for those cute little accessories for the season.

I think it would be fun to find a niche.

Make sure to put up all your items at the same time. People who find one item they like will usually see if you have other similar items available. I'm amazed how often I sell two items to the same person at the same time. You're right about large items and shipping, it's expensive and turns people off- plus it's a lot more work to deal with the packing. Take good pictures, pack it up, mark it, weigh it and then put it up on Ebay. When your lot sells you slap on the address labels and do a bulk drive to the post office.

GW, thanks for the tip on boxing it up, weighing and marking it. One less thing. I really appreciate your input.

Yeah re similar items.

For instance, these sandals I'm getting in several summer colors are a perfect match to wear with some of the bracelets and earrings.

I didn't want to go overboard, but if this stuff sells, I'll know I can buy a bunch of sets of something, and just keep a little Chai store in the corner of house.

Through the years, I've had people drag me to flea markets, "zzzzzzz" since I'm not that interested in shopping. However, being a numbers person, my mind would be clicking figuring out how much some of these people where making selling stuff they bought wholesale.
Only problem was that I had less than zero interest in sitting out in a parking lot selling stuff on a Saturday, in the hot sun, to a bunch of people I really didn't want to be communicating with.

Enter.....the interweb......

I package and label all the stuff i'm selling before it's sold. Then all thats needed to be done is to print the labels with the buyers adress and send. And always be careful with expensive items to go into detail on the condition. I sold a mountain bike on ebay, and the person said there where scratches on the frame and gave me negative feedback. I had just overlooked this as I though it was fairly unimportant. I shall never make that mistake again. And at the time I hadn't sold much so the negative feedback affected my percentage badly. But luckily I persuaded them to revise the feedback.

At one point I purchased 5 thousands or so vacuum tubes from work for 900 hundreds dollars that was found to be too noises for my company high ends needs and then sold them on eBay over a year or so making many thousands of dollars.

Did it take a long time to sell all of them?

A little over a year at a hundreds or so tubes at a time but then I met a Canadian tube dealer on ebay and sold a large a percents of my tubes outside of the ebay system in bulk to him.

Kind of regret doing so as if would had taken far longer but it would had yield more profit to keep selling them in small lots on ebay.

Yeah definatley. People expect a discount when buying many of one thing. and some people just buy items without researching them at all and pay much more than they need to. But on the other hand if you had sold them in small quantities it would have taken a long time.

Question re posting images of what you are selling on ebay...

I can't find this specific answer in the help section on ebay, or if it's there, I'm not understanding the verbage.

Is it ok to save an image of an item you bought on a website as a jpg, then use that saved image in your posting?

The image of the product is of course much better than if one takes a picture of it at home (unless you're boomerang or shewolf of course), plus, for me personally, it's a lot faster an easier to save the online image of where you bought something.

I've seen it done, especially with book covers. You should say in your ad that it's a stock image, indicating that what they are looking at is not a picture of the exact item that they will be getting. It's possible if an image has a copyright that you could receive an order to remove it, but I think the odds of that are small. Someone from the website where you took the image would have to notice it first. Those most likely to look for such things are high-end companies like Tiffany, Gucci, Ralph Lauren etc. They often search for fakes and I'm not sure how they would feel if you took one of their photos to sell one of their genuine items. You might want to just invest in a good digital camera and a camera stand to take steady, close photos.

I have a $100 camera that takes really good quality pictures. it sees better than me.

I think you would do better in the long run to just shoot your own ads...

Thanks GW & Rocky.

I have a digital camera, frankly, I just don't enjoy taking pictures, especially if I have access to an excellent image of the object right from the website. A lot less work to rightclick save as than to display, light, etc.

I mean, come on, I'm not about to try to recreate this...



....on my own, when the works already been done for me.

I suspected as much GW, that they don't go looking for it, but if they see it, they might as you to stop.

Better to ask forgiveness than persmission I say.