Success!

Success!

Today I surpassed my goal of $1000 with the sale of a webcam picked up from a thrift store for less than $10 that sold for $34.

My total as of the 27th is now $1020.60.  It ended up taking me just 24 days to surpass my goal.

End of 30 Days

With my last sell for today, a Turbo Grafx 16 game called Tiger Road, my total is now $1,372.00.

I'd call this experiment a success!

First Slow Week

This week sales seemed to slow a little as I stopped listing to wait for the new month (and 50 new free listing opportunities) to roll around.  At the end of the week though, I finally got a few eBay sales.

GameCube game bought for $6, sold for $36.48.  

GameCube I'd forgotten about. Found in my old storage unit, $25.74.  

Two Super Nintendo games, $19.97.  I actually bought these on eBay to resell.  I paid $20.05 for a 20 game lot, so I had about two dollars invested in these.  With my first sale I'm 8 cents from making my money back.  I wasn't sure if buying lots on eBay to resell as individual items would be very profitable, but apparently it can be.

Total eBay sales this week $155.75

End of July - 17 Days Later

Well here are my numbers for July.  I started selling on the 3rd of July and by the 20th these were the results:

I decided to upgrade to a Basic eBay store for $15 a month to see if having similar items on my own listings yields any benefits.  If nothing else I guess it'll provide some extra tools with some interesting data.

First eBay Listings

If you're not aware, eBay offers 50 free auction-style listings per month.  Take advantage of this.  There are fees for listing on eBay and final-value fees based on your sell price, but you can post 50 things a month that discount half of that.

For the first round of eBay listings, things I needed to get rid of anyway could go.  I filled a box with potential items, checked selling prices on eBay, then made a few listings.  I listed four shirts and a video game.  Two days later, I've sold the game and a shirt for about $33 (of which about $6 was spent on shipping).

First Trip to a Thrift Store

After a few sales, this week I felt I had a little income on the way in to justify looking for a little more inventory.  When thinking of a route to buy low and sell high, the thrift store seemed like a pretty good bet.  I've picked up some great deals for personal use at them before, and if I looked a little more thoroughly I decided I'd probably be able to find things of value.  It was even easier than I expected.

What makes things so easy and straightforward now is the speed and usefulness of smartphones.  On my iPhone I can fire up the eBay app and search for an item I see in the thrift store that I'm curious about.  The book "The Kite Runner" for example was in good condition and sold from the thrift store for 25 cents. After searching eBay's "Completed Listings" I can know that it will sell for about $5.  I had my phone out the entire time I was thrifting.

I spent about $30 at a couple of thrift stores buying an HD-5000 webcam, a Sega Dreamcast, and a couple of VHS tapes which were a quarter each.

 Edit 7/27/2012:

All but one of those VHS tapes has sold for a total of $99.98 before fees.