Sourcing Cheap Products On Ebay

One way to either make or save money is to source cheap products on eBay, either to sell on through your business or to save yourself some personal money. EBay has thousands of different listings and is an amazing resource for practically anything you want to buy. A few ideas for heavily discounted products on eBay include the following:

Over-the-counter medication

We all know that medication from a drugstore is expensive, and if you buy something on a regular basis the costs mount up. But if you buy from eBay, it can be significantly cheaper, especially if you go for generic brands.

An idea for a business selling over-the-counter medication is to set up a website selling mail-order products for those embarrassing conditions that people hate to go to a drugstore for in person. How about hemorrhoid cream, medication for itching in embarrassing places, solutions for parasites such as worms or fleas and, of course condoms? This is a pretty niche market and as well as advertising on the Internet, you could sell via classified adverts in local and national newspapers and magazines.

Postage stamps

Yes, amazingly you can buy postage stamps at discount prices on eBay, they are usually sold by companies who buy stamps for mass mailing and end up with a surplus. The USPS don’t buy stamps back, so eBay is a good way to dispose of them. You could get between 80 and 90 percent off the price of stamps, especially if you buy in quantity.

These can be used for your own direct mailings, or how about contacting local businesses and selling stamps to them at a profit. You only need to undercut the full price by about 10 percent to get people to buy from you rather than the Postal Service.

Business supplies

EBay is a great resource for business supplies such as padded envelopes, bubble sheets, labels, boxes, carrier bags and all sorts of packaging materials. Again, great to use for your own business needs but you could also supply small businesses who haven’t yet realized they can get their supplies from eBay.

Gift cards

EBay lists gift certificates in lots of different categories and you can get 70 to 90 percent off the face value. If you shop regularly at a certain store, you could save a lot of money by buying gift certificates on eBay for your own use, or to give to friends and family as gifts.

Another idea is to buy gift cards to use as incentives for people to buy your products and services. It looks like you are giving away a lot of money, but in fact you have saved up to 90 percent on the face value. Incentives are a great way to promote your own business and reward your loyal customers.

Magazine subscriptions

Another category on eBay where you can save and make money is with Magazine subscriptions. Most magazines make money by selling advertising space and they can charge a lot more for their adverts if they have more subscribers. This means that they will sell subscriptions to brokers for low prices — some of these brokers will sell on eBay at heavily discounted prices. You can enjoy these Magazine subscriptions yourself, give them away as gifts, or even use them to reward your loyal customers.

Food

Food is a huge category on eBay and you can get an amazing variety of different foods that you can’t find in the shops. There are bound to be several niche markets for specialty foods such as favorite candies, cookies and deserts for overseas visitors — for example you could supply Brits with Cadbury’s chocolate, English tea and Marmite. There is always a market for food and it is usually an impulse buy.

Think of all the unusual products, not available in the shops that you could sell and you could have the basis of a very profitable new business.