B0ne’s Home

Ebay Arbitrage is a pretty wide open area these days. If you want the Dictionary.com version of it, here it is:

“The simultaneous purchase and sale of the same securities, commodities, or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices.”

Basically, you are profiting on the mistakes of others or being a middle-man. There are a number of schemes.

One of them involves spelling. You search for poor souls that misspelled “iPod Video” and put their precious box up in the “aPud Veedeeoh” section with a No Reserve auction type. You swoop in and buy the thing for a buck. Turn around and sell it and profit a thousand-fold. OK maybe a hundred… There are a multitude of tools out there looking for misspelled keywords. I’ve tried this with a PalmPilot. Unfortunately the misspelling wasn’t as blatent as my example and so I lost out. I think if I made it my business, I probably could have found one like that. Try out FatFingers and see if your luck is better than mine.

Another scheme is the drop ship. There are wholesalers out there that are willing to be the middleman in your wheel and deal. This eliminates having a bunch of product in your home which may or may not cause the IRS to come a knocking on your new Get-Rich-Quick plan. The beauty and the problem in this is that you never see the actual item being bid on. You also don’t deal with returns and such. Of course, if you get hooked up with a fly by night drop shipper, both you and your customer will be hung out to dry.

The Jedi Drop Ship scheme would be to bid on an item with misspelled keywords and immediately put it up for bid right after you win it. You then tell the person you bought it from to send it to your winning bidder. A very slick scheme indeed.

I’m not brave enough on these strategies to risk my precious ebay rating. I’m thinking about a relatively safe item to try a drop ship though. I’ll let you know how it went. If you want to try your hand at this, I’d suggest looking at Emergency Cash Generators. You can get the guide or register for some free information about arbitrage. Go for it!

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