The auctions for the final week of February’s The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge ended Monday night. During the fourth week of the Challenge, I had sixteen thrift shop items listed on eBay. Of the sixteen, eleven sold.

Here’s what my gross sales, expenses, and net profit look like for the fourth week and the tentative totals for the month. All the third week’s items have now been paid for, and all figures through the first three weeks are final. There are still two items that ended last night that haven’t been paid for. If both of them are paid for through PayPal, it will be necessary to deduct $1.53 from the total for the month.

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The first opportunity of the year to go to garage sales occurred last Saturday, with four sales in Grand Forks. None of them were very large and the only thing I bought was a large, four foot tall, bag of packing peanuts for $2.

One of the sales had a lengthy inclined driveway leading to the garage and freezing rain had fallen the night before which made for some rather amusing body language as about twenty-five people scrambled out of their cars when the garage doors opened. Then, just so that the garage sale fanatics in town wouldn’t get their hopes up too high for the new season, mother nature provided us with 8″ of fresh snow Saturday evening and Sunday.

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I’ve been talking on and off with one of the regular readers of The Auction Rebel over the last couple months about researching small antique/collectible sub-niches on eBay. During the course of our conversations he has sent me the user IDs of a few eBay sellers who are doing some different things and asking what I think of their approach.

For a number of reasons, two of the user IDs he directed me to caught my attention and I’ve been looking more closely at what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

While their individual approaches are slightly different, basically what they are both doing is buying vintage magazines, dismantling them, and selling the individual advertisements, articles, stories, and illustrations individually. While selling individual full page ads from magazines is nothing new and there are many people doing it, selling the articles, stories, and illustrations is an approach not often seen. It’s also one that some of you may be interested in exploring.

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Here are 10 tips to guarantee you will fail on eBay. And, the great thing is you don’t need to devote time to all then. Concentrate on just two or three and you will do just fine.

1. Never set goals - Having clear, well thought out goals in place is a total waste of your time. If by chance you should bother to set a goal or two, don’t bother to create a plan to reach them. And, if you get caught up in all the hoopla and do create a plan, there’s still hope. Just make sure you never implement it.

2. Don’t take PayPal - PayPal’s fees are astronomical and there’s no reason you should pay them. Besides that, think of all those buyers who won’t even consider bidding unless they can pay with PayPal. If you had to deal with all those people, you wouldn’t be able to spend hours on various eBay forums whining about people not bidding on your items; how low your items that did sell went for; and how you can’t make eBay work.

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I’ve been asked a few times how I go about deciding whether to list a book on Amazon, as an eBay auction, or put it in my eBay store. What follows are some general guidelines that I use when making a decision regarding where I will place a book I’ve just purchased.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll be talking only about single books and not those I might buy to sell as a lot. I’ll also be talking only about non-fiction because 99% of the books I buy fall into that category. Additionally, as a general rule, I’m willing to spend $1.00 or less for any book that appears to have the potential of selling for $20.00 or more, unless there’s a valid reason not to.

The process actually begins before I actually buy a book and by the time I’ve paid for the book I often already have a pretty good idea of where I’m going to place it, although that may change by the time I list it.

If I’m at a venue where the competition for books is heavy, such as a FOL or AAUW book sale, I don’t use ScoutPal. I buy based upon the $1.00/20.00 rule mentioned above. In a slower paced environment such as a thrift shop, if a book I’m interested in has an ISBN it gets checked via ScoutPal. If the lowest used price is $20.00 or more, I buy the book. If there is no ISBN, I apply the $1.00/20.00 rule. At this point, based upon the subject of the book, and whether it has an ISBN or not, I pretty much know where it will end up, but each book will be re-assessed before listing it.

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The Carnival Of eBay Sellers # 14 is now available on line. Once again, this week’s carnival has a good selection of submissions, with some excellent reading for anyone who sells, or is thinking about selling, on eBay. It can be found at the eBay Business Opportunities Weblog. Be sure to check it out.

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The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge originally came about when I wrote “or most people, it shouldn’t be that difficult to make a $1000 a month profit from eBay.”

Perhaps I should have qualified that because if you live in a town of only a few hundred people with no good sized towns within 75 or a 100 miles, getting the results I get wouldn’t be that likely. With that in mind, I thought I would provide some idea about the location I’m doing this in.

Grand Forks is a city of a little more than 50,000 people. There are seven thrift shops of varying sizes in town. Here’s some information about each of them along with my observations about each.

Success Unlimited - This is a very small shop that primarily puts out women’s clothing and decorating stuff. They also have one small room for housewares and another for books, videos, and craft items. This is the kind of shop you swear is a total waste of time to visit. Then, just before you decide you’re never going back again, you walk in one day, spend $3 for something, and end up selling it for $100.

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The auctions for the third week of February’s The $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge ended Monday night. During the third week of the Challenge I had thirteen thrift shop items listed on eBay. Of the thirteen, nine sold. One of the unsold items was re-listed this week, The remaining three were put in my ebay store.

Here’s what my gross sales, expenses, and net profit look like after three weeks. Once again, not all the items have been paid for yet, so it may be necessary to make some minor adjustments to the PayPal fees entry. All items from the first two weeks have been paid for so PayPal fees shown for the first two weeks are now accurate.

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In yesterday’s AuctionBytes newsletter there was a link to an article written by Trevor Ginn titled Fourteen Tips to Reduce eBay Fees . While most of the ideas presented have been around for a while, Trevor does a pretty good job of consolidating them into one article.

One of them however, brings to mind a question that comes to mind every time I see it. Tip # 8 says:

“Open An Ecommerce Store

Potentially the best strategy of all is to expand your business beyond eBay. By setting up your own ecommerce store you can up-sell to customers you have acquired through eBay, and pay no fees at all. Channel Management software such as eSellerPro, Marketworks and ChannelAdvisor enable eBay sellers to run an ecommerce store off the same inventory as their eBay sales.

Potential saving: You pay no eBay fees on items sold off eBay, though you will pay for using the channel-management software.“

Although Trevor doesn’t talk about it here, usually when you see this advice in the context of using a small number of eBay auctions to drive traffic to your About Me page to drive potential customers to your off-eBay web site to both avoid eBay’s fee structure and to generate more sales. This idea always get a lot of discussion every time eBay fiddles around with their fee structure. It’s also one that is recommended in many of the “how to succeed on eBay” products being sold. In fact, one of the most often recommended eBay books is pretty much centered around just this concept.

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Thinking outside the box when deciding what to sell on eBay doesn’t have to involve an entirely different product than others are selling. It can be something as simple as doing what many others are doing but doing it with a different focus or a different approach. Sometimes that’s all it takes to allow you to stand out from the crowd and become the darling of an already established niche.

A good example of standing out from the crowd in an established niche by simply taking a different approach to what others are already doing can be found at the eBay store called Period Paper.

Period Paper primarily sells old photographs, vintage posters, and vintage magazine advertisements. That, in and of itself, is not unusual. Hundreds of other eBay sellers offer the same kind of things. What sets Period Paper apart is that they are able to sell these items for five, ten, or more times what other sellers realize for them, simply by taking a different approach than everyone else does.

Using vintage magazine advertisements let’s look at how Period Paper has done this.

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