There’s a number of things to resell online, from physical products to online digital products. You don’t need to own the things to resell online if you use affiliate products. With affiliate marketing you can resell other people’s products for a share of the profit.
Before I found affiliate marketing though, I resold products I would find on eBay. One little strategy lets you find gold nuggets on eBay for far less than they’re worth. Then, resell them on and get a better price for them! Here’s how it works.
Things To Resell Online – eBay Products
This was a clever idea I picked up from an ebook I bought from eBay – the online auction site. Most people have heard of eBay but don’t know this little hack. The general idea is to find cheap items on eBay which don’t get found. This happens when someone lists an item badly, or misspells the title. The title of an item is what gets them found usually when people are searching for the keyword of the item they want to buy.
So when someone misspells an item, it gets far fewer bids than it otherwise would. You can take advantage of this goldmine by using a misspell search tool. Bargainchecker.com, typobay.com, fatfingers.com and goofbid.com are all misspell tools which let you find these kinds of item.
Here’s an example. I just typed iphone 6 into bargainchecker.com and found these results. Often people misspell things like “Iphone”, “Apple”, “Panasonic”, and other brand names. You can even look for things like diamond, jewellery, briefcase or anything you can think of. The larger an item’s value, the more you can potentially save on the price. Use auctions rather than “buy it nows” to find the best deals – (although you can also find bargains using “Buy it now” listings).
Things To Resell Online – eBay Products
Once you’ve found an item, don’t bid on it straight away, since this can alert other bidders to your presence and push up the price. You can put in the initial bid if there’s no other bids on it. At this point the seller is obliged to wait out the auction, rather than correct, or re-list their item.
Then, wait until the end. Don’t get into a bidding war because you want it at a well discounted price. Wait until the end and use a bid sniper tool. Here’s one I use called auctionsniper.com.
This tool lets you pre-set your maximum bid and the tool will bid incrementally up to your maximum in the last few seconds of the auction. This is the best way to get the price you want. If other bidders push the price beyond where you can profit from an item’s sale, leave it alone and avoid the item.
You can even use the advanced search on eBay to see what other items like yours have sold for. Click on the sold listing box and you’ll get an idea what something is worth before going after it.
Re-listing Your Items
Once you have received your item, or collected it, re-list it with a better title, more pictures and of course no spelling mistakes. I successfully used this little strategy for a few months and made a profit on nearly every item I bought. The only one I didn’t profit on I broke even. That was only because the item arrived and looked more tatty than it had in the images. I re-listed with an honest description, whereas the seller I bought from wasn’t so honest!
Ideally, re-list with a low starting bid too, as this draws more people in to bid against each other. But this will also depend on how popular your product is, and how many buyers it might attract.
For more on this strategy, read my full article on it “how to start a profitable ebay business“. It was a few years ago when I first used this strategy, so it is perhaps more competitive now. But it’s still possible to find items and profit from them using eBay. It also gives you a huge choice of things to resell online.
Things To Resell Online – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is what I found after using the eBay strategy for some time. I knew there had to be a better way to use the internet and automation to make a living online. I was right, but it took me years before I found the best affiliate products to sell online.
If you’ve not heard of affiliate marketing before, it’s basically a strategy which lets you sell other people’s products over the internet by referring people through your own unique affiliate link. (See where to promote affiliate links). Once you join an affiliate program, you can sell any number of affiliate products and earn from between 3% and 100% commissions on sales you generate. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
The best products to resell online are:
- Digital products – because they pay the most, (much more than physical products)
- High ticket affiliate commissions – commissions of over $1000 per sale!
- Recurring commissions – if you sell digital membership and software products you can earn ongoing commissions for each sale you make!
- Products which offer multi-tier commissions – reselling high ticket products within a multi tier commission structure means you can earn from sales made by your referrals. See best two tier affiliate programs with recurring commissions.
But with affiliate marketing you can resell pretty much any product you can find online. So long as it has an affiliate program (or partner program) attached to it, you can resell any product that company offers. Amazon and eBay both offer partner programs and allow their affiliates to earn commissions when they refer sales on the sites.
Reselling Products Online
Of course with eBay you simply list your item to resell products online. But with affiliate marketing, it can be a little more involved. Most affiliates resell their products through building an email list of subscribers and then promote their products to their list. They can also attract customers through building websites, writing articles, publishing videos to YouTube and using social media websites to find their target audience.
The goal of an affiliate is to create ongoing sales which happen even when they are not working. It can take some time to achieve this, and the speed with which you can become successful as an affiliate marketing will depend on a few things:
- Your choice of products you decide to promote
- How you market those products
- The time you can spend on your business every day
- Your own work ethic and rate of learning
See also how difficult is affiliate marketing.
Things To Resell Online – Summary
There’s many things to resell online and you can pretty much resell any item you find online either through buying it cheap yourself, or referring customers to it through the affiliate marketing business model.
Before you go, download both these ebooks by clicking on them!:
If you’ve got something out of this article, please share it! I’d be supremely grateful!
Best wishes,
Tim