How I deal with listing questionable items on ebay

Guide to selling questionable items on ebay​

Well lets face it, this is blackhatworld. No need to pussyfoot around it lets get down to the issue at hand!

you have this nice new ebay account, you may have spend a few $$ getting it going. Now you want to make a return on that investment. In fact you may have been perusing DHgate or Tradetang and you found something that you KNOW will sell well.

well before you list it, STOP

Products on those sites are very well known and highly suspect to be counterfeit or fradulent. I am certainly not going to say that you cannot sell these products, because I supported myself on it for 5 years. However you must be careful when listing.

And the best way to be careful is to watch others fail at what you hope to do!

when I find a product I like, the first thing I do is take an ebay search on .com, .ca and .co.uk sites to see all current sellers listing those products. Then I watch all the listings to build a list of current sellers. Go through and check their feedback. Do they have any negs? what for? If so.. can you garantee you won't run into those issues? if you see negs becaues the product is shoddy.. ditch it.

Now you can do a completed listings search to get an idea of what kind of price you are going to get. Check the history of all of these sellers and see if they have any neg feedback.

This will give you a good idea of any issues you might face with the product you have selected. Now the final step is to HAVE PATIENCE!

you want to keep an eye on all current sellers of this product. Do they stick around and keep selling? That is what you want to see.. it means that they are not having issues that caused them to quit. The other thing you want to look for is auctions getting pulled by ebay. You should get an alert of this if you are watching them all.

Actually listing the items:

When you go to list, there are a couple of tricks you can employ:

For branded items with active VERO members, you can list late on friday night and pull them sunday afternoon. But this doesn't work for all vero members, Microsoft is especially bad about this.

I also like to list my items and buy it now OBO. Most people will give you an offer first, and this gives you a chance to look at the buyers transaction history and see if they are your average buyer if if they are a secret shopper for the brand you are selling. You do a search by bidder and see all the itmes they are bidding on.

Some items you might have a detail that you dont want ebay to see. Well, since the robots just scan the text you can place an image in the auction and they won't necessarily see it. This technique will fail a manual review, but it should keep you listing in the short term.

The most important technique of all? Never stick to one product for too long.. if you have had a good run EASE OFF for a few months. Take a break. Always have 2 products on the go, 1 product that is your money maker, 1 testing product and keep a list as long as possible of products which you THINK you might be able to sell.

That is the technique I used to support myself on ebay for 5 years, however as of today I am retiring my grey hat techniques and sticking to the legit ebay business I have built for myself.

That's some pretty good info OP. Since you're giving up your greyhat techniques would you care to share any decent places to find those kind of products. Outside of burning my own disks, (which opens the account up to a lot more problems) or being able to buy in VERY LARGE quantities I'm rarely able to find any good source. My biggest problem most of the time is the best sources I'm able to find to get the products myself usually cost about the same as what they're being sold on ebay for. So there isn't much profit available if any at all, a lot of times the ebay prices are even cheaper than most of the wholesalers.

Those are some interesting tips. I used to sell some VERO items on Ebay until I got a threatening letter from the makers of P90X. It's easy money, but you have to be careful.

I sourced most of my items from TaoBao with the help of DHgate. DHgate is a popular site however a huge number of users are just reselling items from TaoBao which is entirely in chinese.

Google translate can help you find items, but one trick I use is to find an item I like on DHgate and search it on taobao. Most sellers have been happy to work with me.

If you are dealing with a supplier that has large Min order, I would send a few emails back and forth about details of the item and express interest in a large order, then ask to buy a few samples at a slight price increase. They usually obliged. With software vendors I could get 5 or 6 different pieces of software for a pretty good price (I find its better to sell a variety on ebay anyway rather then multiples of the same product) and if you are dealing with an item that comes in different sizes or colors its even easier.

A seller cannot really expect you to order 100 pcs without seeing the product first!

Finally, one other trick is to find an ebay seller who is dropshipping the item you want. Order one from them, then take the address that it was mailed from and contact that company directly. It is rarely sent from the factory, but there will be somebody at that address who always knows where to find the product (they just shipped you one!)

again, often I would have to act like I wanted a larger order then do a few samples. If you need more I would just claim that they allowed me a small order before and say that I would not buy if they couldn't allow me a small order, it worked about 50% of the time.

vero?

greentitanium said:

vero?

Click to expand...

@greentitanium - this is from the ebay faq
Hope that helps.

I tried using tao bao . com but you need an Alipay account (Chinese version of paypal) and the account also has to be verified with a Chinese bank. Any ways around this?

Well you have two options:

1) contact the buyer and request another payment method. Most prefer bank transfer
2) Find a contact in china to buy for you and reship for a small fee. This is usually the easiest for small purchase

Well you have two options:

1) contact the buyer and request another payment method. Most prefer bank transfer
2) Find a contact in china to buy for you and reship for a small fee. This is usually the easiest for small purchase

Thanks for the tips, it's great that you shared them.

Its been my pleasure

Thanks for your wisdom.