As I so often tell my readers, one of the best ways to buy really good products with potentially very high mark up is to buy those items in bulk, usually at auction, but also from flea markets, boot sales, even on eBay itself.

I want you to know right up front, this is the easiest way possible to make money on eBay and, by following today’s tips, you will always make a profit and never fall prey to one or two very common mistakes.

What we’re looking at here are ways to buy highly resalable products in bulk, usually at a fraction of the money you’ll make reselling those items individually on eBay. So you might be buying complete business contents, from book dealers, or record sellers, either from eBay listings or from liquidation and other offline auction sales.

The end result is usually lots of time and work spent reselling those items alongside tons of money going into your bank account when the job is done.

And that’s where the real beauty of this business lies, namely in rewarding those of us who are prepared to work hard at the expense of those who are not prepared to put time, effort and energy into making an incredible income on eBay.

But wait, we’re not talking back-breaking effort here, and you don’t have to buy entire business stock to make this idea work, nor do you have to travel miles every day to source your big profit bundles. You can in fact buy goods on eBay, to resell on eBay, without ever leaving home.

As an example, last week I bought two hundred plus trade cards from an eBay seller who listed them as ‘Ephemera Collection’ and which cost me £24 (about $40 equivalent at the time). That lot was badly described, the title did not respond to search engines for the main content of the package, namely valuable Victorian trade cards, and the illustrations were dark and out of focus. At least ten, and maybe many more of those trade cards are worth ten or twenty pounds each.

And that makes eBay a very good place to start looking for bundles, job lots, collections – call them what you will – which other people want to sell fast and who don’t know how to attract bidders and make good profits from their listings.

These sellers are plentiful and I regularly buy two or more big bundle packages a day on eBay which I resell as individual items on eBay or at weekend flea markets and collectors’ fairs.

The trick is simply to trawl though listings about to end for the kind of products you’d like to sell and which currently have few or no bids. Here’s a tip: study the collectibles category and key ‘collection’ into the search engine, then sort by listings ending soonest. This will allow you to buy many more high profit goods than you’ll ever find time to relist on eBay!

Now let me tell you why big bundles of valuable individual items are so prevalent at flea markets, boot sales, offline auction houses, even on eBay itself:

Some sellers are lazy, in fact I’d say the majority of sellers are lazy, on eBay and elsewhere. Many also lack initiative, they want money fast, and they can’t or won’t spend time learning how to get the best price for whatever they are selling. When they do take time to study the market they usually do so by asking sellers at flea markets or antiques fairs, and getting anything but good advice! That’s because most traders at flea markets and antiques fairs give prices they want to pay for those items, and those prices are way below market value.

* Another reason for receiving bad advice: the experts know how much those items are worth and where best to sell them, but for some reason they don’t make it clear on the day.

You can see proof of this in action from television programmes like Flog It! where items presenters say will sell like hot cakes end up going unsold. Their excuse will go something like this: “Obviously there were no silver (book, porcelain, whatever) buyers here on the day. If that item had gone into a specialist sale it would definitely have made a fortune.” My question each time is:

Why did those presenters advise the vendor to place the product in a small off the beaten track auction saleroom? Why did they not tell the vendor to take it to a specialist saleroom in the first place, and get the best price for their product, even if that means waiting a few months for the next suitable sale to take place?

The answer is it makes good television viewing.

Just think about it, you wouldn’t try selling a Renoir in a back street auction house, would you, with no web site, no telephone bidding on the day, no advertisements in the press? No, you’d take it to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, or some other major saleroom and expect to make millions from your painting compared to a couple of thousand pounds from a small auction house with inexperienced staff and low budget bidders. So the moral is don’t take what television presenters say as ‘Gospel’: don’t ever ask advice from someone wanting to buy your product to resell at an inflated price once you leave the building. The only way to know what your items are worth is by researching their resale value on eBay and from sales results posted on most auction company web sites.

* Items are often sold as bundles at auction, also at flea markets and boot sales, to save time and space and cut overheads, compared to selling products individually. This is especially so at smaller auction salerooms where you’ll find ten or twenty or sometimes thousands of items offered on tea trays or in several huge containers. Auction companies earn around fifteen to seventeen percent of the hammer price of most things they sell, in units or large lots, and they’ll usually end up making much the same amount of money from selling thousands of individual lots as from selling those items in bundles. So it’s not in auction companies’ best interests to list three or four thousand lots in one catalogue, costing more to print and post; and it isn’t a good idea to sell those items individually over three or four days, with extra staff costs and operating overheads, compared to selling bundled lots in one sale lasting five or six hours.

So it all sounds very good, doesn’t it, and very easy too! Which it is! However, as a newcomer to this very profitable business there are certain things you need to know to prevent you from buying products in bulk which don’t actually sell at a profit.

This is what you need to know before you rush to buy a transit van to get your goodies home each day:

* Some lots represent pure rubbish the seller has tried for months to sell which means, if those items did not sell for him, they’re unlikely to sell for you either. The exception is where the current owner is lazy, unimaginative, and has targeted a purely local audience. With a little work, a bit of imagination, and reaching a whole world of potential buyers you could make a killing from selling bundled items individually on eBay. So you must try quizzing the seller, unobtrusively, about how long he has had the items, does he visit fairs often, has he discovered the magic of eBay, and so on. You’re not interested in the seller, of course, but answers to those questions will give you a good idea of what market remains for you to target. But you must stop probing when the seller gets suspicious or he may remove the bundle from sale.

* Some big bundles contain unidentified items, such as watercolours without signatures, photographs without place names, unrecognisable autographs, and so on. And those items are probably being sold as a bundle only after the current owner has tried very hard to identify signatures, places, names, and failed! If you research skills are better than average, this is another great time to buy those bundles. You can learn more about such items selling on eBay by downloading the seller’s image and looking closely at various features of the package. Try increasing the image size, for example, or zoom in on a specific area, and look for clues to help you turn an otherwise unidentifiable item into a high demand product.

* Some lots include items requiring specialist knowledge or expertise, even legal approval, such as guns and ivory, and the seller, usually at boot sale, rarely at auction, has already faced problems with the authorities for those items. Similarly, some lots represent fakes or stolen goods, so again you need to be careful and avoid buying from people you may never meet again. Boot sales are the worst places to buy from, except where traders are required to register with the organisers before being allowed to sell on the day and which gives you some chance of recourse if items you buy are subsequently confiscated by the police.

And there you have it, an easy business, one with immense profit potential, and just a few safety checks to make along the way.

Good luck!