02.07.06

Buy retail, sell on eBay

Posted in eBay at 1:16 am by admin

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…

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