These are some of my personal experiences with certain product types while selling on eBay for quite a few years. You might have a totally different opinion and experience to what I had. Most products can make money, on eBay or otherwise, it really depends on what price you pay for them.
Over the years of selling on eBay I became a power seller numerous times. My product line was mostly children's footwear. This is a great product line if you can source them cheap enough. Branded footwear is an excellent seller on eBay. Also with children's footwear you don't have to pay any tax, which was another bonus. I was lucky enough to have a great link to very cheap children's branded footwear. Sadly my source ran dry and I slowly moved away from being a full time seller on eBay. I still sell items now and again, but not like I once did. When I was selling children's footwear I still used to look for new products that I could add to my stock line.
Sometimes I would do some research to see what was selling well on eBay and then find some online cheap enough so that there was a profit to be made and then buy some and see how it goes. My criteria for new products was that they had to be small, in demand, and also cheap and easy to post. Some of the products I looked into were gold, silver, watches, mobile phones, and digital scales.
I have experimented with them all. Gold and silver, unless you have a very good source it's pretty hard to make a good profit on top. People want top dollar for their gold and silver at the moment due to it's huge increase in price. And thanks to the massive television and Internet campaigns everyone is aware of the demand. You don't have to look far to see a "Cash for gold" advert somewhere.
The online sources that I found for buying silver and gold at wholesale prices didn't leave enough room for a worth while profit. Real auction houses can have potential. I have been to a few looking to buy gold and every time I took £500 with me. It's not much to buy gold with but I didn't want to go over board and end up losing money. Taking a set amount gave me a spending limit and you can only spend what you have with you. That's the way I played it anyway. Play it safe.
Each time I went with the intention of buying gold I did end up buying some gold. On the rare occasion that gold made me a few hundred pounds profit on eBay. But most of the time I just about clawed my money back. At many of the auctions that are auctioning off big lots of gold you get representatives from high street gold company's in attendance.
These representatives have close to an unlimited budget, and all the big gold lots that come up for auction the representatives for the high street gold shops will just bid everyone out of the water. You don't stand a chance unless you've took at least 4k with you. And even then you have to be careful because these gold company's can pay more money then you can for the gold and still make a profit because all they will do is melt the gold down to make gold bullion, which is then sold off for much more then what they paid.
How do you think they make a profit when your average Joe walks into a high street gold shop and sells them his gold. Yes, they gave him a decent price but they are also making a good profit on top. But for me and maybe you, the small reseller looking to throw the gold bought at auction straight on to eBay the profit margins have to be examined very carefully before bidding up to 5 or 10 grand on a big consignment of gold.
You can of course bid for single gold items like I usually did and you do stand a chance of winning items at decent prices. But a decent price and selling on eBay for a profit are two different things. Specially with the increase in eBay fees. With single gold items you have other small resellers like myself, and also end users to deal with that just love the look of that gold ring and will bid more then it's worth just so they end up owning it. Sometimes you just go with your instinct and take the risk. Sometimes it pays off sometimes it doesn't. And don't forget to take into account the auction house fee's (commission) which is generally around 10% - 15%.
Watches can be good product lines and there are many websites to purchase watches at wholesale prices, but in my experience they were very slow sellers. I have bought job lots of brand names watches many times. My intention has always been to sell them off individually on eBay. But upon listing them individually for sale I was always left disappointed in how they just never sold. I would have to relist them time and time again. In the end I would lower the price so much to make a sale that I sold them just to get the money back that I paid for them. With lack of sales, money tied up in stock that isn't selling fast enough, and with eBay fee's mounting up from each relist, I always ended up relisting all the watches together as a joblot because I just wanted to get rid of them.
Mobile phones have always been good sellers. A good method for buying mobile phones cheap is looking through newspaper classified ads. Places like the Bargain Pages, Friday Ad (In the UK) etc. Also online classified websites like Gumtree, Craigslist, Friday Ad, Pre-loved, Swapz, etc. Even eBay itself can be a good source for buying mobile phones and reselling them back on eBay. If you use some of these sources for buying mobile phones never dismiss broken phones, specially the latest phones. Some people will sell their latest phone that has a silly fault, like scratches, cracked screen, or no charger for a very low price. Mostly the seller has had a new phone upgrade and doesn't mind selling their "old" phone cheap because it now has no use to them.
Buyers on eBay will pay far more money for the phone in it's current "broken" condition. Most people see the word broken or spares or repairs and there off looking at another ad in less then a second. But there are a few resellers taking advantage of this and making decent money out of it. All they do is scan their local classifieds everyday, hunt out the broken but highly sought after phones, do the research on eBay to see what their selling for, and then phone up the seller of the mobile phone to arrange a time to pop over and have a look / buy the phone etc. Some buyers will try their luck and say "I can come down and buy it today but what's the cheapest price your willing to let it go for". When the seller hears that they might have the phone sold today with no messing about they are likely to drop the price a little in order to get a quick sale.
To be honest, I never went down this route to buy mobile phones, I actually started importing mobile phones in small quantity's from China. Things went fine for a while. I was buying mobile phones and selling them for a price that gave me a decent profit on each one. I wasn't buying the latest phones, I went for the old but classic, nostalgic models like the Nokia 8910i and the Nokia 8855. I done the research and seen that they were the best phones to buy in terms of price paid Vs profit. People loved them and they sold really well. It wasn't until I tried to import larger quantity's that I had problems.
One week I was waiting for my stock to arrive from China and the phone rang. It was customs telling me they had my parcels seized and they were not going to be allowed into the country until proper testing confirmed everything about them was OK. Customs also told me that one of the phones would be sent to Nokia and I would have to wait until those results came back. I was furious.
After a few weeks the results came back and customs informed me that I would be losing all my stock. They explained to me that the mobile phones had been opened up and checked by a certified Nokia engineer and some of the micro chips on the circuit boards were found to have not been originally built by Nokia! So a word of warning, if your going to buy any electronic products in bulk from China make sure they are unbranded. Needless to say, don't buy Nokia, or any other branded mobile phones from China. You got this information at my expense. How much? Don't ask. I should add, this was a few years ago now. These days more people are aware of this from browsing online wholesale forums.
Digital scales were decent sellers in my experience. One draw back is that there is a lot of competition for digital scales on eBay. But hey, what decent selling items don't have competition these days. Consistency can also be a problem with digital scales, sometimes they would sell very fast and other times they sold very slowly. Definitely a good back up stock line to have along side other product lines that sell well and consistent all year round, like branded footwear, branded clothing, electrical goods etc. A good company that I used to deal with for digital scales was
http://www.dalman.com/. They are a UK based company. If your interested in buying digital scales in bulk give them a look. Send them a nice email and ask for a price list.
You might not think it but
Amazon
is another great source that eBay sellers are using to buy stock to resell. If your not aware of this do a little research and I bet you'll be able to find a heavily discounted product being sold on Amazon that's going for twice as much on eBay. And selling on eBay like hotcakes..
One more tip if your in the UK.
http://www.halfcost.co.uk is also a very good source for buying cheap stock. Many eBay sellers are using this webiste to buy their stock. Huge discounts apply. The more you spend the more discount you get. I always used halfcost when I was a seller. Always a very good service.
Goodluck!
After hearing good things about Toshiba drives, I went ahead and bough a Toshiba 2 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive
. What a difference to the Seagate. So far It's been faultless, solid, reliable, effortless to set up, and fast as lightening at transferring files! I presume the USB 3.0 is the reason behind it's super fast speeds. Sometimes the Seagate would have read / error issues where occasionally I would have to turn it off and turn it back on again, but the Toshiba has never had any trouble like that at all. Everything just works as it should. This Toshiba hard drive and external casing have been built to a high standard. It's also very quiet too.
The size I bought was the 1TB's big brother, 2TB. This is more then enough space to store an old 1980's video shop collection and still have room for much more. It's shows that Toshiba have confidence in this product because this drive comes with a 3 year warranty. They know they have built a good unit here. However, if it dies I have the warranty to fall back on. Most other external hard drives only offer a 1 year warranty, so the Toshiba is a really good choice for peace of mind.
, or a 
. And be totally brand new with a warranty. Do people actually realise how cheap a brand new mountain bike is? By the response my old Scott got, maybe not. Personally I would go for the brand new bike rather then a completely battered Scott that will take a fair amount of money to fix up. Right now, In this day and age, a bicycle certainly makes sense from a financial point of view, not to mention the health benefits of say, riding your bike to work and back. But are you going to give up your car if you don't need to? I thought not. Me either.
