Easy Ways to Double Your eBay Profits in 2017 and Beyond

Most of us accept that just a tiny change to how we run our eBay ventures can have a staggering effect on our profits ….. and always on an upward trend.  The more important little changes you make, the more changes you test for profitability before making them a permanent feature of your business, the more money you’re likely to bank.

That is the power of numbers!

Before the ideas begin flowing let me reveal just two ways I personally use the numbers game to always, get that ‘always’, increase my profits by several hundred pounds every month, and sometimes a good deal more.

#1 - The first half hour of each working day is always spent uploading one or several bundled items that will almost certainly make me £30 easy profit, and sometimes more, such as a bundle of postcards that failed to sell individually but are worth much more than £30 in bulk.  Or I might bundle previously unsold lots of sheet music or paperweights, bus tickets or virtually any other kind of small collectible. 

Readers not quite so passionate about collectibles as I am might combine two or three fairly common or mass produced items, such as several CDs, two or three bars of soap in an attractive basket, ten bottles of nail varnish bought in a massive job lot at a bankruptcy sale.   If each makes ten pounds and you list and sell three such bundles each day, that’s £30 pure profit you should make daily.

You get the picture, I hope. 

#2 - There’s a specific antiquarian book I buy which is packed with engravings of small towns and villages in the late 1800s.  I could buy this book every day at less than a tenner a time and make at least one thousand pounds pure profit per copy.    

How?

Well this particular book, and thousands like it, is perfect for removing illustrations which are subsequently hand coloured and mounted and will sell all day long at £14.99 a throw.  Actually some fetch more, especially at auction where two or more people are keen to become the new owner. 

Incredibly, I can colour and mount ten illustrations in less than three hours and sell at least eight from a seven day auction.  Eight sales at almost £15 a time is £120, leaving about £100 pure profit after overheads.  Just two or three of those prints fetching £100 or more, yes it happens, and I’m guaranteed to make more money in a couple of hours than most people make all day.

With more time on my hands or someone available to help me locate, colour and mount prints from just one title, I’d easily make hundreds or even thousands of pounds weekly on eBay.  That’s the numbers game at play once again.

If you’re unsure about colouring vintage illustrations or you think it’s a job best left to experts, think again, because I learned all I know about colouring prints, which isn’t a great deal, from studying hand coloured prints from 17^th and 18^th century publications. 

You don’t have to buy those books to see how little paint and even less artistic ability went into producing some of those hand coloured prints hundreds of years ago and which frequently fetch fifty or sixty pounds each on eBay today.  Find out for yourself by visiting google.com, then click on ‘Images’ top of the screen, then on the following page key something like this into the search box:

‘hand coloured print 1800s’

‘h/c print’ where ‘h/c’ stand for ‘hand coloured’

There will be thousands of images to choose from and all you have to do is pick one resembling your own print, such as depicting lots of trees or a beach scene, mountains, people, park or playing field, and so on.   Click on the image to increase its size and save it to desktop.  Then use the image as inspiration for colouring your own print.

Footnote: Before someone asks, I am sorry I can’t tell you which books contain my most profitable prints.  That’s because right now I seem to be the sole buyer of these books on eBay, also in local auction salerooms and I don’t want to encourage competition.  But the truth is there are thousands of very early books containing valuable prints just crying out to be removed and sold ‘as is’ or with a few spots of colour added to increase their appearance and prices.

Do I have other ideas for exploding my profits by introducing quick and easy changes to my business?  You bet I do and I will be uploading them to this blog so please call back to read them soon.

eBay - Xenophobic With a Capital Z

Not long back I listed some early Persian postage stamps on eBay and promptly had my listings removed due to Iran being one of eBay’s banned product countries.

Persia and Iran.  Now what in the world do early Persia and modern day Iran have in common?  Apart from occupying the same land space, that is.  Early Persia was nothing like Iran, it had a different administration, different attitudes to other countries, and its leader, the Shah, was a good friend of the American people who sheltered and befriended the exiled Shah and his family.

So why the U-turn?  Why are stamps portraying the Shah of Persia, a man the Americans presumably once held in high esteem, now banned from sale on eBay?  And what on earth does any of this have to do with sellers outside of America whose countries don’t punish their citizens for collecting and selling items produced many years ago?

More specifically, why ban my Persian stamps from selling on eBay when hundreds of similar listings were left to run?

It makes me wonder: what about Persian carpets, can they be sold at the site or does eBay take issue with them too?