EBay Arbitrage Idea

[Nicholasp27]

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ebay is too efficient, you'd get killed by transaction fees.

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not even close to accurate, in my experiences

i believe u can look at ANY category in ebay for a few weeks and find arbitrage options

the fact is, it's very inefficient...there are various levels of seller skill and that affects prices wildly

additionally, there are always people putting up buy-it-now prices that are FAR less than the average selling price is

if u made a bot that collected average selling prices for hundreds of items and then searched for buy-it-nows for those items that were 50% of ave selling price, u'd find lots of auctions every week that did that

at one point i was looking to buy a rare cd that averaged $60 on ebay; i monitored for a few days to try to get good price and found a buy-it-now of $25; i jumped on it and resold for $60

i then proceeded to do that about 5 times in a week or 2


i've bought megatouch machines for $400 that average $800 SEVERAL TIMES


some things that lower price below average:

- no picture
- too low buy-it-now
- bad end time (certain days are better and hours of day)
- sold when influx of stock (ie after rebate items that flood ebay for a week then go back up the next week after everyone sold them)
- bad description
- bad title
- placed in wrong category


there are many many others

ebay is an AMAZING place for arbitrage


2 key points for people who may decide to do some:

1) go for easy/cheap to ship items that aren't fragile...i learned that the hard way with megatouches; too big and too expensive to ship and ups likes to break them...go for dvds/cds/clothes/other things that can be shipped in a priority mail box for $4-8

2) obviously the margin needs to be high enough to cover the hassle and the ebay fees and your time


i'd do $25 for $60 cds all day long; they are easy and quick to ship and that's still >$20 each after fees and everything; if u can find a big stock of those, great

even better are >$100 that aren't big/fragile electronics

[Nicholasp27]

btw, u make ur money when u buy, not sell

i would do buy-it-now for the average selling price and be happy with a quick sale that way; no risk of it going for less than i paid for it and they always sold because it was a good price as well and i had good listings/categories/pictures/etc

one thing u can do is look at what auctions got the highest bids for the item and see what they did differently (title/body/shipping options/etc)

i always said same-day shipping via priority mail so u get in 2-3 days with cds/dvds...since all i had to do was print out the label from paypal and then go to the postoffice and tape it onto a box and put it on the counter (not even wait in line), it was no big deal

[Nicholasp27]

another way i used to make money on ebay

go to dvdtalk.com->forums->dvd clubs and look at the columbia house enrollment codes thread sticky

u can usually get the dvds from ch for about $7.50 average...they also have a list in a post of the 'premium' dvds that u can get free when u join and i'd run all those on ebay to find what was selling for $20+ and get those as my free ones and then random ones going for $12ish from the 2 u have to buy; it worked out to 8 dvds for about 60 shipped...6 of them would sell for 20 each and 2 of them for 12 each...u can have 2 accounts at one time; as soon as u get ur dvds u can cancel on the website and repeat immediately

u can only do so many at a time cause too much supply will lower the price on the premium dvds, but i made quite a lot that way; sometimes i'd buy the 2 dvds that i like and keep those for free...still got 120 for my 80 and 2 free dvds

afaik u could still do this

[Nicholasp27]

http://cms.andale.com/research/price....html?foo=9192

looks like this will be your bot to find average selling price for $8/month


then u just gotta find/make software to find items selling 50% less than average price or spend a few hours a day searching ebay manually for those items

[NewUser2006]

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http://cms.andale.com/research/price....html?foo=9192

looks like this will be your bot to find average selling price for $8/month


then u just gotta find/make software to find items selling 50% less than average price or spend a few hours a day searching ebay manually for those items

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looks like someone beat me to the punch!

luckily the 2nd part of the bot is the easier one

[Ineedaride2]

Seems like this would be a difficult task.

Most items that are a great deal below the average selling price are either used and in relatively poor condition, or not the item you want. How is a computer program supposed to judge quality of the item? I'm not saying it can't (because I don't know what's possible), but I will say it's a lot more complicated than "Find all items named <whatever> at 25% or less of average selling price, and BUY IT NOW!

A lot of the best deals on ebay are misspelled or mis-catagorized items. If you're looking for Titleist irons, for example, one way to find bargains would be to search for mispellings of the item in question. Tilteist, Titliest, Titliess, etc.

If I were going to put effort into a sifting program, this is the angle I think I would take.


Unfortunately, I don't even know HTML.

[Vlorg]

I highly agree with everything that Nicholas said except this part:
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i would do buy-it-now for the average selling price and be happy with a quick sale that way; no risk of it going for less than i paid for it and they always sold because it was a good price as well and i had good listings/categories/pictures/etc


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I have sold a wide variety of items and had great success starting every single one of my listings for .99 or $1 no matter what the item normally sells for. I was also a big fan of the 10 day auction listing. You can time this so that your listing is up through two weekends. I found for most items I sold that Sunday evening was the best time to end auctions although this was different for various markets. Almost all of my auctions sold for greater than the average selling price with most of them in the top 20 percentile.

Vlorg

[NewUser2006]

[ QUOTE ]
A lot of the best deals on ebay are misspelled or mis-catagorized items. If you're looking for Titleist irons, for example, one way to find bargains would be to search for mispellings of the item in question. Tilteist, Titliest, Titliess, etc.


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Good idea, I already have a module that checks for misspellings of names, so that would be an easy addition.

[ItalianFX]

I like this idea, in fact, it reminded me of something that happened only a few months ago. It didn't work out, but it was actually what this thread was all about.

One of the guys in my police academy was a financial advisor and he went on Ebay and found a brand new Polaris Ranger for $2300. They normally sell for around $8000. He was going to buy it and resell it. Well, it turned out to be a scam and it never went through, but I thought it was a neat story anyways.

So my question to anyone who wants to answer, what would be some good items to look into? I know Nicholas named a few, but how about others - in all areas of Ebay?

[Nicholasp27]

the answer is that all areas have items

what constitutes a 'good' item?


a) easy to handle and ship
b) not fragile/breakable in shipping
c) good profit margin
d) not a scam


the polaris is difficult to buy and resell due to its size and the maintenance/condition of the unit, etc

things that are NEW are always good, as the condition isn't a factor



how do I find items?

in the past it's always been something i want to buy:

i wanted to buy the rare cd, so i monitored the items for a week and found an opportunity

i wanted to buy the megatouch, so same thing (but learned to not do heavy (90lbs!) items that ups likes to break)


how to find your own items?

use software like discussed in OP would be a great way to scour all of ebay without a lot of manual time; the website i linked will help u find the average price, but then u need to find other software, write ur own, or manually search to find the underpriced items

one way to do that with the existing software is to search average price of an item and then average price of a misspelled same item (ie dell inspiron 7000 laptop vs dell inspiron 7000 labtop)...if u see a good margin and it's a product that fits the above criteria, then just set a watch on that item(labtop) in ebay...rinse, repeat

i dunno that people will have an item to mention (ie godfather dvd trilogy) to tell u exactly what to look into...so the best we can do is try to find/use tools to help and try to get items that ease our pain by not breaking and being cheaper/easier to ship and are less 'big ticket' items that are more likely to be scams