"How to Source High Value Products Locally for Your eBay Business" 

© Avril Harper, Chartered MCIPD, Dip PM

Today I want to tell you about what I personally consider one of the most effective, easiest, also least expensive ways possible to source products to resell at incredibly high mark ups on eBay.

And all you need to make this idea work is a copy of today’s local daily newspaper; the evening edition is usually best.

You’re looking for the classified columns in your local daily, in particular ‘Items for Sale’ and ‘Items Wanted’, but it’s the first that’s most important to anyone who has never tried this simple product sourcing method before.

Before you take a look at the ‘Items for Sale’ columns, let me tell you why this particular section of your local rag is so important and so immensely profitable for you.

It has to do with how most people dispose of valuable items to raise money to pay an imminent major bill!

Because the bill is imminent, like ‘pay within seven days or have your electricity cut off’ imminent, that leaves insufficient time to take and sell valuable items through local auctioneers and way too little time to sell them one by one at boot sales or on eBay.

That’s one reason many people with valuables they have to sell fast will do so through the ‘Items for Sale’ section of their local newspaper.  The reality is, an ad. that appears tonight can attract telephone enquiries and sometimes find a buyer just hours after publication!  Now that really is fast and about the only way I know to turn valuable items into fast cash to pay that life-threatening bill!

But there’s another reason a majority of people wanting to liquidate valuables fast choose to advertise this way, and it’s because they don’t know how to sell at boot sales or on eBay or they don’t want to work quite so hard. 

‘Hard’, did I hear myself say selling on eBay is ‘Hard’?  Yes I did say that, but I was referring to lazy people, not people like me and my readers who know selling on eBay is not only easy but can be immensely profitable also - but let us keep that to ourselves for the time being! 

Back to those people who advertise their valuables - usually at low, low prices - in local newspapers.

You’ll usually find those people, usually lacking knowledge about eBay and needing cash fast, have little idea how much their items are worth and they’ll sometimes ask a derisory  price with a John Lennon attachment thrown in  to guarantee a certain sale. 

‘ONO’ - Or Nearest Offer -  means you can buy products even lower than their already heavily discounted asking price - as long as you’re first on the scene of course!

And being first on the scene is what this easy, high profit, low cost product sourcing idea is all about.

You see, you’ll find a great many goodies advertised at low prices in the ‘Items for Sale’ category but you need to jump in fast with your money or you’ll be beaten to the post.  That’s because once the local paper makes its way through letterboxes I guarantee virtually every high discount valuable will already have a new owner and you can bet that new owner is already on route to view other low price items from the same newspaper.

I learned this many years ago when I sold at fairs and flea markets full-time, and I met several people whose stock was entirely sourced through local daily classified ads.  - items for sale as well as items wanted - who admitted to standing outside their local newspaper’s head office to grab the evening paper hot off the press before newsagents received their copies. 

Now that was before eBay or the Internet became household names, before mobile phones were the norm, and generally my acquaintances would rush to the nearest telephone box to book appointments with advertisers and begin bagging goodies one by one.  By the time people like me, also most of you got home from work the best goods had already been taken.

But there was a lot of risk involved in those days for people rushing round to get first pick from the classified columns, namely where goods that looked good in the ads. turned out to be worth much less than their advertised price or which ultimately failed to sell at boot sales, flea markets or antiques fairs.

Today that risk is all but gone and you can check possible resale values on eBay before rushing to get first pick of goods from local classified columns.  And that means, as well as being one of the first people to study the classified columns you need also to do an advanced search to check how much items similar to those advertised today have fetched recently on eBay.  To cut time that also means having some hand held Internet device or an Internet café close to the newspaper printing works you’ll visit each day.

Okay, no, I don’t really think you should stand in a queue for the first paper to fall off the press but I do think you should ask your local newsagent about delivery times for those papers and be waiting at the shop for them to arrive.  Yes, really I do!

And if your local newsagent is also a friend or can be bribed into letting you access eBay on his shop computer, you stand a good chance of being first in the queue for the day’s most profitable advertised goods while also knowing exactly how much those items might later fetch on eBay!

Go on then, off you go, by the time this eLetter gets delivered your local paper will be close to print time and it’s time for you to pay your newsagent buddy a call!

But wait, before you do that you should know I once ran a hugely profitable business selling vintage postcards at local flea markets and collectors’ fairs; I could make several hundred pounds a week even thirty years ago, and all the stock I ever sold was obtained through local newspapers.  But not from advertisements placed by people with postcards they had to sell fast to pay their bills; in this case my stock came through advertisements I placed in the ‘Items wanted’ sections of my local newspapers.

And because the ‘Items Wanted’ section is as profitable, if not more profitable than buying through the ‘Items for Sale’ section I’m going to dedicate next week’s eLetter to showing you exactly how it works!