Managing Out of Control Debt by Making Sales on eBay and Amazon
Wednesday October 21, 2009 by Nick Niesen.
There was a time in my life when credit card debt plagued my finances. Anyone who’s been there knows that this can quickly get very out of control. When you are unable to make even your minimum payments you start getting hit with late payment fees and higher interest rates. Not good. So what did I do to get my finances back in control? I started selling on eBay.
For me, it was easy. All I had to do was look around my house (and trust me, I didn’t have to look far). There was literally money everywhere, money in the form of stuff I bought that I no longer needed. Video games, posters, DVD’s, books, clothes, software, electronics, magazines (these things made up the vast majority of my sales).
To get started I had to make one small investment; shipping supplies. U-line boxes (in a number of different sizes (whatever’s appropriate)), packing tape, packing peanuts, large sturdy envelope mailers (for magazines), Jiffylite bubble mailers (for DVD’s and games), a scale to calculate shipping costs and an address stamper (not really required but it’ll save you some time). You can buy most of these things in bulk (and I suggest in order to save money and get the best prices) directly on eBay.
Obviously before ordering any shipping supplies I had to figure out what exactly I needed. So I started setting things into a dedicated “eBay sales” area of my house. This area will be dedicated to storing all of your products and shipping supplies for the next few months (while supplies last so to say). Once you’ve sold out, this area will be generally empty and whatever is left that you might have trouble selling, you can just list on eBay with a starting price of --content--.01 and see what you get for it (you might actually be doing a lot of this).
The next step is to start taking pictures and listing items (I suggest trying
Turbo Lister to aid with product management).
Taking pictures; I won’t go much into this but you can set a backdrop with a black or white sheet to make you listings a bit more professional or sometimes you can save time by finding a suitable picture online.
When you get to the actual listing your item part you will want to do a bit of research. Figure out what similar items are selling for. Use the advanced search tool and check the “Completed Listings” checkbox. This will show you what similar items are selling for. Another advantage to doing this is that sometimes you can snag a quick sale (maybe even in under an hour) buy listing it at the right “Buy It Now” price.
Getting the right price will also save you money on listing fees! Re-listing costs money so you want to be sure your item sells, the first time. You never know what will fetch the highest price for your items but by watching the trends you will have a decent advantage to being able to claim the most for your stuff.
Once you’ve narrowed down how much you can fetch for your item, we’ve got another trick for you. Run a search on
Amazon to see what it is selling for there. Obviously, if the prices are higher on Amazon you will want to list your product there instead. This practice is a sure-fire way to insure that you are getting the most for what you’ve got.
…I think you’re getting the point. There’s money to be made here and you absolutely can make money the same way I did. I became a power seller in a short time on eBay but really, that’s not what it was all about. For me, it was about paying off enough of my debt so I could manage what I had on my current income.
There were a lot of late evenings setting up listings and early mornings hitting up the post office before work, but I made a lot of money on what I had. In fact by bringing Amazon into the mix, you could say I made the most of it.
