Types of ebay businesses..The Scrapper

In the last post, I spoke about eBay in general. To create a successful eBay business a person first needs a product to sell.

Now there are two classes of people who sell on eBay and they are:

1) Those who are their own merchandisers.

2) Those who get a commission based on selling items for other people.

In formulating a product offering, we are only going to concentrate on people who merchandise their own products. How do people become merchandisers? Lets paint a story first of someone who has a specialized knowledge.

Dennis is a machinist and has been in the machining trade for over 20 years. He has a wide knowledge of many different types of industrial machines as well as their usage in industry. He frequents auctions, company and government surplus stores, and classified ads and craigslist to buy equipment for his home shop.

Lets stop the story for a moment and observe a couple of things. Dennis has a specialized knowledge which is machinery that is used by machinists. He also has a source to buy these items.

Dennis has accumulated a lot of machinery as well as odds and ends. He decides to start using eBay to buy more things. While browsing through eBay, he sees that the things that he buys sell for quite a bit more than he pays. He thinks to himself, "Why don't I start selling the stuff that I buy on eBay?"

He starts selling on eBay and finds out that he can make a better living as a merchant than he can as a machinist. He starts a business buying and selling used machinery.

Now this story may sound far fetched to those who are not familiar with industrial surplus (also known as scrapping). In Seattle, there is company surplus store called Boeing Surplus. They sell their surplus items machinery, computers, office products, scrap metal, etc. There are people who turned over a million dollars of merchandise per year on eBay just based on the surplus of Boeing.

Before you start jumping on this band wagon, remember what I said in the beginning of the post........Dennis has a specialized knowledge in the field of machinery. If you don't have this knowledge, you will not know what is used and what has value in a particular industry which in our example was industrial machinery.

So I am going to set some guidelines for what I will term scrapping (buying used items and reselling them):

1) A person must have a specialized knowledge in the area that they want to merchandise. It does not need to be industrial machinery. It could be books, clothes, automobiles, office equipment, home appliances, antiques, etc.

2) A person must have a source to buy this merchandise.

3) A person must be able to sell this merchandise for an amount higher than they bought.

Before the internet there were people who would go to garage sales and many different types of auctions and buy items in which they could resell at a profit. So this was a valid merchandising effort long before eBay came on the scene.

This is one way to start an eBay business that will make money. Just remember that your key to being successful in this type of venture is that you must have the knowledge of the value of the items that you buy.

Now this type of eBay business is not for everyone but there are other types of eBay business that can be started to make a person money.

I wish everyone success.