Posted on 30 January 2006 by Gary H
“Good For” advertising pocket mirrors aren’t something you will find on a regular basis, but when you come across one there’s a good chance you will be able to pick up an easy $200 or more.
Pocket mirrors were a popular advertising/promotional give-away item in the early to 1900s and have a wide collector following. Most dealers realize their value and most advertising pocket mirrors you see in shops or at shows are priced two or three times what they would bring on eBay.
The good news is that, for some reason, most dealers seem to think that “Good For” advertising pocket mirrors are much less valuable than other advertising mirrors and price them significantly lower providing you the opportunity to make a nice profit when you come across one. I’ve bought several for between $4 and $30.
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Posted on 29 January 2006 by Gary H
Yesterday in Finding A Profitable Collectible/Antique eBay Niche - Part II we researched a potentially profitable eBay niche by looking at what was available in antique shops, antique malls and flea markets. We chose stereoview cards because they fit the criteria we’d set out in Finding A Profitable Collectible/Antiques eBay Niche - Part I.
Today, in Part III, we will head over to eBay and see how well stereoview cards fit the remaining five criteria for a profitable eBay niche. Lets get started.
We will begin our research at eBay’s Completed Listing page by typing “stereoview” into the search box at the top of the page, making sure you check the “search completed items” box, and then sorting our results by “price: highest first.”
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Posted on 28 January 2006 by Gary H
In Part I of this series I explained how I go about finding profitable niches within the antiques/collectibles categories on eBay. In part II of this series we are going to look at one specific niche and see if it meets the criteria I set to further research it’s profit potential on eBay.
The niche I’ve chosen to explore is stereoview cards. For those who don’t know what these are here’s a picture of the front and back of one.
A stereoview card is usually a piece of thing cardboard that measures approx. 8″ x 4″ and has two identical, but separate, images imprinted side by side on it. When viewed through a stereoscope viewer the image appears three dimensional to the viewer. These were extremely popular with consumers between the mid 1800s and the 1920s.
Now let’s see how they stack up against the first five criteria we’ve established for a potentially profitable eBay niche.
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Posted on 27 January 2006 by Gary H
Yesterday I received an email from a woman, who had just read a post I made on an auction forum three years ago finding profitable eBay niches in the antique/collectible categories, wanting to know if I still considered the information to be valid. My response was that basically, three years later, I’m still using the same methods to come up with new eBay niches and sub-niches to target.
Since the original post was made on a forum inside a paid subscription site with a limited subscriber base, and since it’s three years old, I thought I’d post it here again because it gives an accurate description of how you can go about finding these eBay niches. Then, since I’ve been researching one of these sub-niches and am about to dive into it, over the next week or two I’ll show how I found this niche, how I researched it, how I plan to exploit it, and how you should be able to also.
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Posted on 18 January 2006 by Gary H
The last week to ten days has been pretty quite on The Auction Rebel. Both Arlene and I have been busy dealing with problems some of her family have had and a trip for a birthday party for my youngest granddaughter.
I’d originally planned to leave from the birthday party on a buying trip into Iowa for a week, but the problems with Arlene’s family extended into this week and the trip never got off the ground.
Things are pretty much back to normal now and I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning for a shorter buying trip. The trip will be shorter than originally planned because I need to be back in town Sunday, so I’ll be driving down to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, staying with my oldest son, and visiting a lot of shops in the suburbs and outlying area of the cities.
I’ll be reporting my finds each evening while I’m gone, so if you’re interested in what I’m buying you will be updated each night.
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Posted on 18 January 2006 by Gary H
The big auction Saturday I wrote about a little over a week ago turned into a giant disappointment.
Arlene was outbid on every item of interest at the auction she went to in Bagley. The auction in Moorhead turned out to have only one item I was interested in (an early furniture catalog from a company in Grand Rapids, Michigan) and the bid I left with the auctioneer there wasn’t high enough to win the catalog.
The auction in Kindred may have had all kinds of great things in it, but I never had a chance to find out. The attendance of the sale was way underestimated by the auction company holding the sale. It was held inside Kindred’s Community Center and by the time I got there about a half hour before the sale began, the building was so packed with people it was impossible to get inside. They were literally saying “we’re sorry” and turning people away.
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Posted on 08 January 2006 by Gary H
Today’s issue of Auctionbytes Newsletter has a good article titled Blogs As eBay Marketing Tools by Kelvin Cook.
Kelvin does an excellent job of laying out how tying one or more blogs into your eBay marketing plan can help increase your sales. Kelvin’s own blog - Fitzmugs - is a good example of what he talks about put into practice.
I’ve used an auction preview site in the past to allow potential bidders to see higher priced items one or two weeks before they were actually listed on eBay. One of the things I never liked about that format was that buyers interested in advertising items were subjected to pottery and other things they had no interest in.
Using Google’s Blogspot free service as Kelvin does, in conjunction with a RSS feed, would allow you to provide potential buyers only with information about items they were interested in. And, the RSS feed would be much more reliable method than email to notify them when you had new items they were interested in.
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Posted on 06 January 2006 by Gary H
Everything is pretty much in “winter mode” in this area of the country and nowhere is that more obvious than in the auction listings of the local papers. The Friday supplement of one paper that has fifteen to twenty pages of auction listings in the summer has two pages of listings today.
That’s not much to pick from, but within those two pages are, what look like, three excellent auctions tomorrow. All three start at 10 in the morning, are between 70 and 100 miles from Grand Forks, and pretty spread out.
I’ll be leaving Grand Forks about 7 tomorrow morning for the 75 mile trip to the first one, which is for the estate of a long-time collector, in Moorhead, MN.
From the auction bill it looks as though there will be plenty of advertising tins, old magazines, books (many about Mn. & ND history), some nice pottery, and other misc. advertising items.
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Posted on 05 January 2006 by Gary H
It’s nearly a week into the New Year so everyone has their eBay goals for 2006 written down and placed somewhere you see them every day, right?
You know what you want to accomplish on eBay by years end and how you want to go about it, right?
Now comes the hard part. Actually getting started and taking the first steps down the road to accomplishing it.
Here are 60 tips to help you get started and on your way.
Actually the 60 tips are all the same. Each is one minute and 60 of them equal one hour.
Make a commitment right now to devote one hour a day to building your eBay business and by the end of 2006 you have an excellent chance of reaching your eBay goals.
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Posted on 04 January 2006 by Gary H
Plenty of eBay auction activity today and most of it revolved around more packing and seeing that all the boxes and envelopes ended up at the post office and on their way to their new homes.
Marketworks still hasn’t recovered any of my photos. Fortunately, the photos for everything except the re-lists were still on the disc for the camera so I was able to simply upload them to MarketWorks and they automatically appeared. I did have to take new photos for the re-lists.
I decided that rather than end everything early and start them over I’d just let them run their course. In reality that probably wasn’t the wisest decision as they probably would have eventually brought more money if I’d had them up for a full seven days with photos.
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