Lynn’s eBay Ezine Volume IV, Issue Number 13

Most of the consumer electronics being sold on eBay are new or refurbished. Many eBay sellers have worked out deals with large manufacturers to buy their returns and restocks. Another place to buy these new or refurbished items is in one of the categories above, Wholesale Lots. These lots are sold on eBay by many manufacturers and jobbers. When a store like Circuit City gets a pallet of returns they may sell them to a jobber who in turn puts the palette up for sale on eBay. I just checked completed auctions on eBay for wholesale lots in the consumer electronics category. You could have bought five Apple iPod 1 GB shuffles for $275.50 plus $10 s/h (or about $57 per iPod).  The buyers of these lots will typically then break these items out and sell them individually on eBay.

By buying on eBay in wholesale lots you can get great merchandise to sell at a decent price. You will save time by buying in quantity. As an example, the lot of five Apple iPods that sold for $57.10 each were probably broken out and sold individually. There were three blue and two silver brand new 1-GBs in that lot. The selling price on eBay for those colors averages about $83.55.  The seller made about $26.45 per unit without ever leaving his or her house!  But that is before eBay’s listing and selling fees, or any fees paid to PayPal.

The margins are typically lower than average in this category and the risk of returns is high. As an example, in the lot of five iPods mentioned above, the seller may have had to take back one unit as damaged. The seller would have been able to sell the damaged unit on eBay as defective, noting the condition as “As Is” and may have gotten $30 for it. This would lower his profit quite substantially, from $26.45 to $15.74 per unit. You must know what you are doing to sell profitably in this category.

You may also do well in this category by buying new rights from the retail chains when a new electronic item comes out that is so hot that everyone wants it and will pay a premium. Do you remember how hot the Nintendo Wii Game Systems were for Christmas of 2006?  They were so in demand that people were paying double the original retail price. My brother actually waited in line for four hours at Circuit City to get his!  It may have been worth his while to just buy it on eBay at double the suggested price. Watch the news, read consumer electronics magazines, and be ready to hit your Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target to purchase some of the newest trends before everyone knows about them. Education is money.

This category tends to attract a lot of new eBay buyers with big zeros by their names who just signed up yesterday and will bid your items up very high. You may want to say that you will only accept bids from eBay bidders with a feedback score of ten or more to protect yourself from non-paying bidders. We will discuss non-paying bidders in Step #5 on your way to eBay Success!

Don’t pass up used electronics at the garage and estate sales. Just make sure you know what you are doing and have researched the marketplace. Old eight-track tape players, vintage amps, and 1950s to 1970s calculators are bringing in the big bucks! This is what is known as the millennium effect. Everything seems older now that we are in the 2000’s. Because technology progresses so rapidly, things invented or popular in the 1950s to even 1990 seem ancient.

I just did a completed auction search for vintage calculators and I found a vintage HP (Hewlett Packard) 34 C Calculator that sold for $355.  This looks just like the one my grandma used to keep on her dining room table! Don’t you have one in an old desk drawer somewhere?