Vintage and Antique
I've got to say that I'm pretty excited about building this site. My goal is to make it an extremely useful site that people enjoy and will come back to visit again and again. I think if you read on, you will find that it will serve a couple of different types of people. First, I see it as a great place for people who are searching to find some great vintage collectibles. I'll write more about this in a bit, but suffice to say that I just love to dig up and learn about unusual vintage collectibles and antique items. Next, I believe this site could be a VERY valuable resource for people looking to figure out what the heck they can sell on eBay to make some extra cash. You see, for the past several years, I've spent my time looking for places to buy vintage and antique items at low prices and then sell them on eBay. I was not that good at it in the beginning to be honest. The only understanding I had of how to sell on eBay was what I had seen some friends do and they were not around to help me when I finally decided to get to work learning about "vintage antiques" and the like. As for buying on eBay, well, my experience of that was mostly ordering books. I like to read a lot. Everything had always gone well with my transactions, so I felt like maybe I could make some money selling on eBay even if I was inexperienced.
What happened is that I had a little bit of luck in the beginning of my eBay selling and I went totally garage sale crazy. I started visiting almost every sale listed in our small, local Pennysaver magazine every week. I bought up pretty much everything that I thought might be considered antique or vintage that I could find at garage sale prices. I had seen in my short time selling online, that there were people who collected things I'd never even heard of before. Things that I had NO idea people would ever collect. Totally bizarre vintage stuff. The short version of the story is that I ended up with my garage and game room pretty much looking like a rummage sale. If you have ever seen an episode of Sanford and Son, well, Fred's house looked pretty darn good compared to what I had done to my home. I had boxes of "stuff" everywhere. It was ridiculous how much I bought. I give my wife a lot of credit for putting up with the whole situation. Probably the only thing that kept her from going completely ballistic was the fact that I actually was making some extra money by selling some of the things I bought. Unfortunately, my skills were not too finely tuned and I purchased a lot of stuff that turned out to be just old junk. I never figured out exactly how much I spent buying up other people's old stuff that first year or so, but it was way more than I should have spent.
Anyway, the reason I think this site can be an extremely useful resource for eBay sellers is that I learned a lot over time. Don't worry, this isn't a sales pitch. That is my point. I wanted to make a website to share what I've learned with people who might need some guidance. I haven't been selling as much lately because my schedule has changed, but when I was listing and selling semi-seriously, I did achieve the coveted eBay "powerseller" status completely by accident. I mean, I always did my best to provide high quality service and products (absolutely KEY by the way), but I never had my eyes on the golden prize of the classification. I just got a message one day stating that I had qualified for the honor. I told my wife, she grunted something at me about the boxes in the game room, and I carried on!
One of the hardest things about selling on eBay is figuring out what the heck you are actually going to sell. I think most people start out by listing things that they have sitting around their house. If that goes well, they eventually run out of "products" to list and they are left looking for things to put up for sale. Personally, I played around a lot with selling a little bit of everything. After much trial and error, I came to the conclusion that, for me, selling vintage items was the way to go. I had always like collecting old stuff anyway, so that meant that I would at least be interested as I learned about the old things I dug up at sales. I also found that once I got better at the whole process, buying vintage "winners" became more effortless for me. That doesn't mean that I always hit home runs, but my batting average was getting better as a seller.
One of my goals for this site is to help people who are looking for ideas about what to sell on eBay. There are a lot of people selling this information online. Actually, they are not really selling THIS information. I bought a lot of the packages they offer back when I was trying to grow my business. What many of them actually sell is a list of more lists that you can buy from them. That wasn't actually very helpful to me. I figure that I have done so much research that I might as well share some of the information I've found. I figure that if I point out some item that sells well on eBay, odds are you are not going to be in direct competition with me, trying to find the items in the area where I live. If you are a buyer who has found this site, well, I hope you will find something you like being shown off here, click on it and then go buy it. I'm not the one actually listing the eBay items that might show up in some of my posts, so I can't answer specific questions about them. You will have to check out the eBay items for sale (you can just click on them) and then ask questions of individual sellers. Most are quite helpful.
If you find this site helpful, I hope you will spread the word about it. I plan on growing it as I think of, or dig up more top selling collectibles on eBay. I already have a notebook filled with things I wrote when I was starting out that I think could be quite helpful. Some relatives suggested that I should actually write a book with this information, and I still may. For now though, I just want to enjoy putting what I've learned out there for people. If you have a site of your own, please link to this site. If not, how about bookmarking us? Every little bit of exposure helps!
Note: Per FTC guidelines, it should be noted that if I create a link to a product or service, sometimes I may get paid a commission if you purchase the product or service.