Posted on 10 March 2007 by Gary H
Send me to the grocery store for milk, eggs, and bread without a list and I’m in trouble. You’d better be near a phone so I can call and ask, “what was I supposed to get?”
Yet, if I walk into a booth at a flea market and see something good that I either saw a picture of, or read about, 10 years ago, a small voice in my head starts talking to me. Much of the time, I don’t know what it’s worth. I may not even know what it is. But I hear the voice, and when I do, I’ve learned to at least slow down and pay some serious attention to what I’m looking at.
Sometimes the voice is wrong. Sometimes I choose not to listen to it. But, over the years, I’ve learned that the voice knows what it’s talking about the majority of the time.
It doesn’t matter whether you look for things to sell on eBay at flea markets, antique malls, auction sales, thrift shops, book sales, garage sales, etc., having your own little voice traveling with you can make you a lot of money over time.
If you already have a little voice of your own, you know what I mean. If you don’t, here’s how to go about developing one of your own.
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Popularity: 16% [?]
Posted on 19 April 2006 by Gary H
Have you ever heard the term “Northern Soul“?
If you have, you’re a step or two ahead of me, because I’d never heard the term until less than twenty-four hours ago when an I ran into an acquaintance who sells part-time on eBay. She asked me the same question - “have you ever heard the term Northern Soul?” When I replied no I hadn’t, she just got a smile on her face and said I should check it out when I got the chance.
It turns out that Northern Soul is a genre of the 60’s & 70’s music business that currently has a huge world-wide following, but particularly in the United Kingdom where it all began.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 29 March 2006 by Gary H
Over the years milk has been packaged in a wide variety of different types of milk bottles. While nearly all of them are collected to some extent, there is one specific sub-niche that attracts the most collector interest and that sub-niche is 1 quart pyro milk bottles with diary, town, and state names on them.
Pyro refers to the method by which colored graphics were applied to the bottles. Pyro bottles are found with various colored graphics, but mostly in red, green, blue, orange, and black. They were made in several sizes and shapes but our focus here will be on a very narrow sub-niche of these bottles.
The only ones you should initially consider will have ALL the following characteristics:
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Popularity: 20% [?]
Posted on 21 March 2006 by Gary H
Here’s an eBay sub-niche for the garage sale addicts.
Remember all those cutesy Kleenex box covers everyone seemed to have 15 or 20 years ago? Well, many of the people who made those are still merrily weaving yarn through hundreds of little holes in pieces of plastic and there’s money to be made in this eBay sub-niche if you go about it right. Here’s some ideas about how to tap into this eBay sub-niche.
What am I talking about? The thousands of plastic canvas pattern booklets and magazines that are floating around out there. If you look on eBay, at first glance, this doesn’t appear to be an attractive eBay sub-niche, but done properly, this can be a profitable little niche.
First I want to say that there are very few items in this sub-niche that will bring $35 or more on their own. However, by packaging selected items into lots it’s not all that hard to get into the $35 to $50 range and some times higher.
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Popularity: 20% [?]
Posted on 20 March 2006 by Gary H
While you won’t find boxes full of these magazines every week, they do show up at garage sales, flea markets, and antique shops and when they do I recommend you grab them. What magazines am I talking about?
Vintage magazines from the 1960s and earlier that deal with period hair styles and the hair styling industry.
These magazines originally sold by subscription and at newsstands to women of the time. Each issue was well illustrated with period hair styles for the young woman along with articles for creating many of the styles. When found today, single issues from the 1960s regularly bring between $35 and $50 on eBay.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 13 March 2006 by Gary H
Audio books are an eBay niche worth exploring. You can frequently find audio books at garage sales, thrift shops, and FOL or AAUW book sales. But, like so many other eBay niches, there are thousands of audio books listed on eBay at any given time with many of them selling for only a dollar or two or not at all.
Fortunately, there’s a sub-niche of this larger eBay niche that can be very profitable if you know what to look for. Here’s what you need to know to get you started.
Audio books are published in two basic versions - unabridged and abridged. Unabridged versions are usually made up of a half dozen or more CDs or cassette tapes and contain the full, word-for-word, content of the original book. Abridged versions usually consist of one to four CDs or cassettes and are an edited, shortened, version of the original book.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 12 March 2006 by Gary H
Currently one of the most popular series of books for adults is the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins. If you look on eBay you will find thousands of books in this series listed at any given time. While it may appear these books are a glut on the market, there is an opportunity here for the astute seller.
While individual books in the series don’t sell well, if you pick them up when you find them, build a complete set of all twelve titles in the series, and sell them all as one lot you have a very good chance of making a nice profit.
The books in this series have been released in hardback, soft cover, and audio book format and we will look at the potential for each of these formats individually in a moment.
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Popularity: 13% [?]
Posted on 11 March 2006 by Gary H
Vintage telephone books or directories can be a lucrative eBay sub-niche if you know which ones offer the most profit potential. For our purposes, we are going to break them down into three smaller ebay niches.
The first group includes telephone books from 1970 to date. For the most part, these have no real collector base,and have little or no value.
The second group are those telephone books from prior to 1950. These have had a collector following for several years and, because of this, it’s difficult to find them at a price that allows you to make a decent profit.
When you find them at flea markets it’s likely the dealer is knowledgeable enough to know what they are worth. At auction sales, there are likely at least one or two knowledgeable dealers present who will drive the final price up. When one does show up at a garage sale it’s usually either quickly snapped up by one of the first people into the garage or it has a hefty price on it because it “looks old”.
The telephone books we are interested in are those that fall in between these two groups. Those from the mid 1950s to the mid to late 1960s.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 10 March 2006 by Gary H
One of the keys to successfully buying eBay inventory at garage sales and flea markets is having a knowledge database of many different profitable eBay sub-niches. Your chances of finding something that you can profit from expand as your awareness of these eBay sub-niches expands.
Put another way, if you walk into a garage sale looking for Weller pottery, the chances you’ll find something you can make money from aren’t very high. But if, in addition to Weller pottery, you were also looking for 20, 30, or 40 other items, your chances of making a profitable purchase would increase dramatically.
In about a month the garage sale and flea market season will be starting in this part of the country as it will in many parts of the country. Over the course of the next three to four weeks I’m going to be writing about several profitable eBay sub-niches that contain items you can reasonably expect to find at garage sales and flea markets.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
