My First Online Million

Sourcing Ebay Products at School Flea Markets

2010-06-01T05:28:00.000-07:00

Picture it! You're standing on the other side of a mountain of designer clothing from a trendy rich teenager. She's willing to take peanuts for her valuable garments.

And why not? - she's got to make room in her wardrobe so her parents will buy her new clothes. Plus, she's trying to make money for a charity fundraising event so she can get credit for high school service work!

You pick out 10 choice pieces and offer her 5 bucks, she talks you up to 10. You sell them on Ebay and make a 1000 percent profit! Plus you helped out a charity.

How can you do it? Go to the website of a local private school or public school in a nice area and check their news or events page for upcoming fundraiser markets. Go early, as lots of

the good stuff will quickly disappear.

The items pictured are a couple of the items I bought at my local private prep school (the model is my girlfriend). We paid one dollar each for them. The yellow top is a like-new Abercrombie top.

A quick Ebay search for Buy Now 'Abercrombie top' in 'used' makes me confident that we'll sell it for at least ten dollars. See the ebay search here. We bought bags full of stuff. Have fun.

My "Poor Man's" eBay Photo Studio

2010-04-18T01:06:00.000-07:00

Your photo is the first contact that potential customers have with your product when you're selling on eBay. It is critical to have the best photo you can.

But if you're just testing the waters or starting your eBay business, you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on cameras, lights, and other studio equipment.

Here's how I set up my Poor Man's eBay photo studio. It's an idea I adapted from Starting an eBay Business for Dummies (highly recommended!).

I went out and bought a piece of white cloth and taped it up in the window so that it curved as evenly as possible between the window and the horizontal surface of my bay window. Try to smooth the wrinkles out as much as possible.

This set-up allows my product to be the focus of the picture with no other distractions, such as the background or angles between surfaces, such as floor-wall or floor-window.

I can get away with no lighting because of the natural light of my window. I use a simple Canon digital camera. I either take pictures in the early morning or early evening to take advantage of the subtle conditions. If you don't have a window like this, you could set up a similar situation using a wall and a hard floor. You will need to experiment with lighting and hopefully you will have as much natural light as possible.

Please let us know how your poor man's studio works out or if you have other ideas. Share this article with a friend or subscribe to this blog for more useful updates.

Technorati code post

2010-04-11T01:35:00.000-07:00

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Review of liquidation.com with pictures

2010-04-09T23:02:00.000-07:00

If you are like me, you've browsed many auctions at Liquidation.com and dreamed of buying merchandise at such cheap prices and making a killing reselling it on Ebay.

But also, if you are like me, you are nervous about bidding on the items because many sellers offer few if any pictures and don't even offer a manifest (list of the products being sold). If the items are listed as 'shelf pulls' or 'returns', you have no idea what kind of defects the items might have when they arrive at your doorstep.

Now I can offer some real life experience buying from Liquidation.com, and some practical advice.

I just received my first shipment from Liquidation.com. The lot that I bid on was 15 pairs of shoes in the 'returns' category. I couldn't be more thrilled!! Why? First of all, they arrived in the boxes! Second, they are in excellent condition (I was expecting a lot of wear and tear - being returns. The only blemish I have found so far is a sticky substance on the toe of one shoe - pictured). Finally, my girlfriend loves the shoes and reckons I can sell them for way more than the average $15 per pair that I paid for them.

You might not be as lucky as I was, but here are a few tips for buying on Liquidation.com:

Try to only bid on auctions with detailed manifests (this one had one)
When starting out, only bid on 'new' or 'shelf pulls' (I took a risk on this one)
Assume that any items not pictured are worthless and bid accordingly
The most important seller data is the 'repeat buyer rate' because if customers buy again and again, then the product must be good and resellable

Good luck and I'd love to know your opinion about this.

Should you use ebay sniper software?

2010-04-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

In a word, hell yes! - o.k. sorry, that's two words. There is some debate out there about it, but honestly I don't understand why.

Using an Ebay sniper solves a very important problem for the part time online business person who wants to buy products on Ebay to resell - without a sniper he will spend hours after work and into the morning waiting for auctions to end and trying to outbid others who are doing the same!! My girlfriend and I did this a couple of nights and we only won a couple of things in probably over 10 hours of work!!

This is not a doable business plan!!

Using some version of a sniper program, you can bid (at your leisure) on hundreds of products that will close within a few days. Then while you're sleeping, working, or playing the violin your sniper places your bids in the last few seconds of the auctions. This is a world of difference, eh?!

But I can hear you asking two questions: 1) But if I bid on each auction individually, I can try to get the lowest price, right? and 2) What if I win all of the auctions that I snipe? I don't have the money for that.

Good questions!

To answer the first question about trying to get the lowest price, let me explain a bit about how Ebay auctions work. When you make the current highest bid and win, you don't pay your bid amount, but rather the next increment up from whoever had the previous highest bid. Let me give an example.

If the current high bid on a pair of Levis is 10$ and the bid increment is $1.50, if you come along and bid $20, then the new current high bid will show up as $11.50 and if nobody else comes along that's how much you'll pay. Therefore there is no point in trying to bid a little bit more than the current high bid, because you don't really know who has bid much higher - plus you wasted all evening that you should have spent with your family or violin.

As for the second question you had about winning all the auctions you bid on and going bankrupt, there is a simple feature of a good sniper program that takes care of that - bid groups.

Here's how that works. Let's say you think you want to buy used jeans from people who are selling them in lots (multiple pairs) and then resell them individually. What you do is you create a bid group 'jeans' on your sniper program and you set a limit of how many bids you want to win, say '10'. Then you spend an hour bidding on 50 jeans lots in a relaxed manner, since you don't care if the auction ends in a couple of days.

Then while you're about your daily life your sniper makes your high bid in the last seconds on each auction until you win 10 auctions. Then it stops. You just won ten lots of jeans at the price you wanted (or probably lower due to the concept discussed above) without much hassle at all. Now just have a good time selling them.

There are two types of sniper programs: web based programs and software on your hard disc. I recommend web based solutions because your computer does not need to be on for it to be working. The down side of that is that you will need to give your Ebay username and password out for it to work. Please choose a reputable business partner to work with.

There are several, however one that makes the top of the list for most computer guru types is PowerSnipe, which has been around since 2003 and has made appearances in several publications including the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. I have also had some success with a free program, but it just doesn't have the credentials for me to feel comfortable recommending it at this point.

Psychological barriers to being rich

2010-04-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

Freud would ask about my mother and try to poke around about jealousy of my father. But my problems are no mystery to me; I know exactly what they are - I struggle with them every day.

I'm afraid of taking risk.

Oh, I'm not afraid of thinking about risk. I've read countless books about real estate and the stock market. I've even spent my whole spring vacation learning the ins and outs of options trading. I've visited other countries to check out investment opportunities! But I've never pulled the trigger.

Why? Because I've internalized society's idea of normalcy. People who dream of making it rich are a little eccentric or even a little crazy. I mean just look at the guys on late night infomercials - "No money down!" - "I quit my job after three weeks!" - "Rook at my rife!! Three yachts! Beautiful women!!" No, no, don't think about doing that, and especially don't send them your $119.99! Go to school. Get a good job. Work hard and pay off your mortgage over the next 35 years and you'll have enough cash to pay for a good pair of dentures.

Safe.

Well I've done all that and my life isn't too bad. But you know what? Some people did pay that $119.99 and got rich with no money down. You know that - don't you?

So what's been keeping me from my dreams until now? Well I checked out The Light Brigade website founded by a professor at John's Hopkins (we respect people with lots of education right?), and an article there regarding risk aversion which had some interesting definitions that hit a little too close to home for me. See if this sounds like you:

"framing" - where the frame is the “assumed reality,” which is not necessarily accurate. The frame provides structure but you have 'blind spots' to other aspects of reality.

"selectively seeking evidence" - we then confirm our preconceived notions and beliefs (frame), rather than accepting all evidence, regardless of where it points us.

"Anchoring” - too much to a known (and comfortable) category or pattern. This can be thought of as clinging to the "status quo" rather than having the courage to blaze a new trail.
"Incrementalism" - in which we adjust too little from the anchor, even when new information suggests a bolder move may be more appropriate.

Ring any bells? So in a nutshell, society and individuals team up to 'frame' our realities. Then we spend our lives 'selectively seeking evidence' to confirm our way of thinking (and conversely ignoring evidence to the contrary- like over a million worldwide who make their living on Ebay). We are then 'anchored' to our familiar patterns. Then tragically, when we realize the limitations of our way of living and thinking, we turn to 'incrementalism' which will bring change, but not much before our Bingo days.

So this blog is my proclamation that I am going to take a risk and a create bold and new frame for my life. Yes, I can buy that villa in Bali!

About Me and the Blog

2010-04-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

I plan to get rich enough to buy a villa in Bali! This blog will help you follow me on the path to online wealth - but you could buy your villa in Mexico or something...

I am a school teacher and my longtime partner is a secretary. We both don't mind working hard - well over 50 hours a week both of us. But witnessing our bosses exchange their BMWs in for new ones every couple of years does get a little aggravating. I'm sure you can relate!

But the final straw for us was when we visited Bali and fell in love with the island and especially the traditional architecture. We have dreamed for years of owning a villa and we finally visited a sales agent. We realized that in our current situation, we would need to save for 20 years before we could buy even a tiny villa. And the banks all but laughed when we approached them about a loan. Seems a hard working couple just doesn't rate!

So - fed up but determined - we decided to try to earn enough money to buy a villa in our spare time - using the Internet.

I hope this blog will be for you what I wished I had when I got started. One of the most difficult parts of starting out is getting reliable information. You can read and read about a company or website and still not know if its a scam or a reputable outfit. In the end you have to do your best to limit the risk, and then just try it. When we try new ideas and learn new techniques (or fail), I'll share it all here in detail. I hope your journey will be a little bit smoother after reading about ours.