I’ve always maintained that the easiest side business to create multiple income streams has been selling online for income. It also happened to be my first side business that I really took seriously as a business.
I started when I was about 18 years old, and I was moving for the first time. I had a ton of “junk” that I was unsure what to do with. I had an old Super Nintendo System with a bunch of games, so CDs and DVDs, and a bunch of other stuff. I decided that I would give eBay a try.
My first listings were pretty crappy, but they got the job done. It felt incredible to make a little extra money on the side for stuff I would have most likely donated instead of moved. However, after I had sold all of my junk, there wasn’t much left to sell to continue this income stream, so it went on the back burner for a while.
Buying to Resell
After giving up on eBay for a while, I had stumbled upon a new source of goods to sell: garage and estate sales. It was the ultimate arbitrage ploy: I would buy stuff for really cheap at garage and estate sales, and I would resell them online to true collectors of the product. A company was born.
I really kicked up my eBay selling into high gear. Every Thursday-Sunday, I would hit up as many estate and garage sales as possible to find goods to sell. And there were plenty. I could get old rare hardcover books for $1, and resell them online for $20 a piece. I was making money! Times were good.
I continue this for a while and really focused on the customer service experience. On eBay, this means maintaining a 100% seller rating, and making all of your terms and conditions easy to see. I really focused on making a good policy that was easy to read and understand. I also saved it as a template to make my listings easier.
I included links to detailed payment and shipping policies, which were on my About Me page. This really gave my business credibility.
What I was really going for was credibility as a business, even though it was just me in my pajamas running it out of my house. My customers didn’t need to know this, but they needed the trust.
Like I said, business was booming, but supply was running out. With the advent of smart phones, people could easily do research on products while at garage and estate sales, and random individuals started doing the same thing. I needed a ploy to get ahead of the competition.
Starting a Website
To take my business’s legitimacy to the next level, I created a website for it. This was my first website ever, and it is still around (if you are really curious, it is SD Estate Sales). Although the website is not the prettiest and most amazing site you have ever seen, it got the job done.
Even though I knew nothing about website development or SEO, my site started getting hits. People were searching for estate sales in my market, and they would find my site and contact me. I would get access to these individual’s items before they were even for sale.
You may wonder how this would be more profitable than buying cheap and selling high. Now, I essentially got first dibs on the items, and I could make offers to these individuals for entire estates, instead of piece by piece. This was big-time though. Instead of $1 per book, I was now going to be spending $1000s per collection or house.
My first deal was for a collection of pottery a lady contacted me about. Upon arriving, I inspected the collection and offered her an amount. We ended up settling on $1,200 for about 30 pieces of Roseville pottery. I ended up selling the entire collection for almost $3,000. I knew the strategy would work going forward.
Optimizing the Business
My continued search to maximizing revenue led me to affiliate marketing. You may ask yourself how this would apply to estate sales, but it does. I discovered that eBay had an affiliate marketing program, where you get paid 20% of the proceeds from items you sell through your link.
I thought to myself, why don’t I link to my own items through my site, and get paid for selling my own stuff (in reality, it would cover eBay’s commissions, but it was something, right?). So, I added the needed code to my site, and presto! I started making even more money.
I also turns out that eBay’s ad code is very SEO optimized, so my site started showing up in searches for items that I was selling. Thus, people would click through my link to buy my stuff, and times were good.
The Hardest Part of eBay Businesses
The hardest part of this business model is that it does require time. As my life has changed, I have had less and less time to run this business. As a result, I am down to selling a few items a year. Last year I netted about $5,000 from selling online, and I doubt I will get close to that this year. However, all of my tools are still there should I find the time to start again. I have an eBay profile with 700 positive feedback that is also a ‘PowerSeller’ and ‘Top-Rated Seller’, so the trust of the community will remain.
Readers, have you launched an eBay business or sold things online? What has your experience been?
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I’ve dabbled with having an eBay business a couple of times but had difficulty finding products with a high enough margin to make it worth my time. I like your estate sale idea.
Ebay is definitely one of my favorite ways to earn side money especially around the holidays. I like to hit up the Black Friday sales and then resell those items.
One year I went around buying Fisher Price Digital Cameras that were sold out in most towns. I must have bought 100 of them and sold them on Ebay for $20 over retail price.