If you are having difficulty in locating items cheap enough to sell for a good profit on your eBay auctions, then you need to look a bit further afield and think a little bit out of the box. Below is a list of various places where you can possibly get bargain items to sell on and make a profit on your eBay sales.
1. Markets.
If there is a regular market in your area, then go there and look around for anything suitable and above-all profitable. You could buy it there and then if it's cheap enough, or possibly try to make friends with the market traders and find out who their suppliers are, although this may lead to having to bulk buy with minimum order quantities..
2. Pawn shops/2nd hand shops.
With the recession still biting, pawn shops have made a bit of a resurgence and unless it's jewellery of course, they don't usually know what to do with the items they accumulate. Generally, they seem put their stock out on the shelves haphazardly, hoping that someday someone with a little money will just happen to come by, search around for a bit and buy wildly obscure things. Make them am offer on their items and even request a discount for bulk buys.
3. Real auctions/sales rooms.
Before you decide to buy at an auction, visit a couple of times to see how it works. The objecy being to get a grasp on how much items are going for at auction then to determine if you can resell things on eBay for more than they will sell them at the local auction. After all, they only have a hundred or so people in that room - you have a few million people to sell to!
4. Local newspapers/Free-ads papers.
Place an ad in the local paper or free-ads papers that reads "I pay cash for [your item type]" and emphasise the word CASH. Also include your phone number. If you can afford it, make it a big display ad, so that it stands out and it'll be noticed.
5. Supermarket Customer Ad boards.
Place a card/ad in your local supermarkets (they are free!!) or shop window stating the wording as per the above ad for newspapers. You may need to do this regularly as the cards are removed after a while.
6. Friends/relatives.
Ask your friends if they have anything they'd like to sell you (or even give to you for free), and ask them to spread the word to their friends. There can be no cheaper method of advertising than this
7. Become known.
Give out business cards and mention to people what you do, you'll be surprised (and sometimes disapponted) at what you will be offered. The chances are that you'll come across someone who'll say "Oh, really? I've got a load of [item] I don't want, you can have it".
8. Shops.
This might be a little surprising, but some real shops can sell things even more cheaply than the items sell on eBay. Take a look round your local deep discounter( e.g. in the UK, Poundland, Home Bargains, etc..), and pay special attention to any shop that takes trade-ins from customers. The chances are they may take a loss on trade-ins as a promotion, and are dying to get rid of that stock.
9. Charity shops.
As stated above, you could let charity shops know the type of items you are wanting to trade in. Leave a contact number or business card and they will notify you of anything suitable that may come in to the shop.
10. Wholesalers Lists / ex-catalogue returns.
You will have to do a bit of work either online or via telephone to be a Customer - register as a business and there may be minimum order quantities (either by value or actual quantity of items). An easy way to find wholesalers is via existing Customers, i.e market traders,or retailers or actually buying lists of wholesalers from eBay itself - they are readily available at low prices. You can also obtain ex-catalogue returns for a fraction of the price of the retail costs of the items, but the quality of the items can sometimes be patchy and they are normally delivered on a pallet - so may be difficult to handle.
PLUS: eBay itself.
If you research what and how much items sell for on eBay via the COMPLETED ITEMS search, you'll notice the massive range of prices that items can sell for on eBay. Try taking the highest-priced item and searching for it on its own, then sort by lowest price first: I can almost guarantee that you'll see an auction for the same item where it sold for a lot less than it was worth, perhaps almost nothing. The trick is to find these flawed auctions before they close, win them using a bid sniping service, and then turn around and resell the item. With a view to buying cheap items on eBay, see the above paragraph about Wholesale Lists.
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