02.07.06
Buy retail, sell on eBay
Last winter I decided to buy myself a new Braun 8595 electric razor. As it wasn’t sold yet in Canada, and thinking that I would probably find the best price on eBay, this is where I headed first. It cost me about 300 dollars and I received it in the mail a week later. The surprising part was that when I received it, it was in a retail bag with the retailer’s sticker on the box.
This got me thinking…. somebody had a great idea! Back in school I would always have my mind active on finding a way to make a bit of money on the side. One way I found might actually be surprising: buy retail, and sell on eBay. I assumed that I would always find the cheapest price on eBay so I never bothered to check sites like bizrate.com to see if it actually was the cheapest out there. I started to assume that others might also make this mistake!
Sure enough, after a few searches on bizrate and eBay, I was able to find a few items which were about 50-60 dollars less than the current market price on eBay. They weren’t cheap though – the ones I can remember now were a Toshiba A30 laptop, and a Nikon CoolPix 5.1MP digital camera. Once I found a product that I liked and found a decent enough profit margin, it would usually sell after about three days and make a couple bucks in the process.
Why don’t I do this often? Simply because it takes too much time searching bizrate and eBay constantly until you find a large enough margin to make it worthwhile. If I ever had a couple hours to spare (unlikely though) I might try it again…
Loading ...
I’ve heard that many ebay sellers buy at places like Sam’s club and Big Lots, then resell. Of course many of them shoplift stuff too.
I once bought a diabetes meter for cheap and resold it for a few bucks, for what it is worth.