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My Ebay Arbitrage Experiment – Part 3

Last week I posted Part 2 of my Ebay Arbitrage Experiment. You can find Part 1 here if you missed that one. So here is Part 3.

So I had listed that I had 4 stereos for sale on eBay with a Buy It Now style listing. I listed each stereo with shipping included and I would still make money by buying the stereo from Amazon and selling it (shipping included) on Ebay. I felt comfortable using Amazon as my drop shipper so-to-speak because I have received such excellent service from them with everything that I ever bought. I knew how much Ebay and PayPal was going to charge me per ad and per item sold and I knew I would still make money if people would buy. That was the question. Would people buy from me? There were about 12 other ads up on Ebay for the same exact stereo all at different price points. Would people pick me to buy from if they did buy?

Well I was surprised to find out that the same night I listed the ad for the stereo someone bought one. Nice! My first sale. It felt great. I went onto Amazon. I bought the stereo and had it shipped to the address of the person that bought the stereo from me on eBay. Pretty easy! So now what? Well……the first sale happened so fast I was willing to wait and see what happened next. I would check my prices on Amazon to make sure they remained the same. Before I knew it…BAM! Next sale the very next day. And then another sale the next day. I was responding to my eBay customers as soon as I received their order. I sent them the tracking number as soon as I received it from Amazon. Things were going smoothly. I was selling about 5 of these stereos per week……until…….

I guess I bought too many from Amazon because their price went up overnight pretty significantly. This caused me to raise my price on eBay making me one of the most expensive sellers of this stereo. Uh oh. Now what? Will people still buy from me? Since I had nothing to lose except the 35 cents it cost me to place the ad on eBay I decided to find out.

Folks did end up buying a few more stereos from me but it was no where near 5 per week. I did find the stereo cheaper on other websites but I was not confident that they could provide the drop shipping service that Amazon could. I decided that this experiment taught me a lot about eBay arbitrage so I was ready to close up shop. I got some good positive feedback from my eBay customers and everyone was happy. I made some extra money in the process of learning so it was all good.

This experiment taught me that it is possible to make some extra cash by seeking out the best price for products and offering them for sale to others who may not care about the best price. For these customers, convenience outweighs the best price. This could be a great way to make some extra money for other investments or to pay off some of that debt!