Did you know that a lot of people are making a living with eBay-based businesses? And no, this isn’t a new feature introduced by the auction giant, it’s a simple system that smart vendors have realized can make them a small fortune.
Simply, arbitrage eBay is the method of purchasing an item for sale and then resell it and make a profit in the process. It’s a feature that can be used when a product is utilized by two markets and a price discrepancy lays between those different markets.
The basic definition of what arbitrage means is that there is an opportunity to order at a small price and sell for a profit. It’s a term which is most ofen used in financial markets taking advantage of shares and currency exchanges. But what does this all have to do with eBay?
In auction terms, arbitrage eBay occurs when a seller lists something in the wrong category, misspells a word or provides a bad description for the merchandise they are selling. Because most eBay shoppers simply search for items using a text search, rather than a category search, quite often these bad listings completely miss a vast majority of the demographic they were intended for.
Because of the vast amount of offers that are on eBay at any one time, and the amount of new auctions which are active, there are infinite opportunities for arbitrage eBay seekers – however there is one area which is often overlooked by sellers, and that is buyers who misspell what they are looking for.
If you are looking for something to exploit in arbitrage EBay terms, then looking for these sorts of buyers, rather than sellers is an extremely profitable business to be in.
Perhaps even better than that, is that if you have a deal with drop ship suppliers of different items, your opportunities for leverage are endless.
Let’s say you are able to find wholesale drop ship suppliers that offers a diverse variety of differing goods. You could mess around with listing different misspelled products and see which ones make you sales. For example, your drop ship suppliers might offer licensed Disney items, and in particular Hannah Montana products. If you were to make a listing for Hanna Montana you would see that your listings would get good views, as a lot of people make this spelling mistake with the name.
Of course, this is something that you can pull off with almost any item you want to sell. Perhaps the best thing to do is use a site such as http://www.searchspell.com/typo/ which lists common misspellings of words. That means that you could go through a wide range of products being offered by your drop ship suppliers and create misspelled listings for each.
The beauty of this sort of method is that because all the items are drop shipped, you don’t have to worry about purchasing them up front. That means that if you find that some items don’t sell, you simply don’t relist them, and focus on those which are the more popular arbitrage eBay items instead.
Category: Ecommerce