Fire at Will

In this last installment of my 4 part series I will guide you through a journey.  A journey of an item I bought cheap and sold for profit on eBay.  This will help all that are new to selling on eBay understand truly how this can come together, and help create extra income easily.

I went to a local thrift store and noticed this interesting little guy sitting on a shelf among other rather plain coffee cups.  I passed by it at first since I know nothing about mugs, but my curiosity was peaked.  After a moment I decided to grab it.  With a price tag of .25 I thought it was a risk I could afford.  Once home I did some research on it and found out it was made by Dega.  Dega is famous for making Tiki mugs, but I found nothing about them making this meat grinder, fire hydrant, or what ever it was.  It wasn’t until a fellow employee, and eBay enthusiast did some research on his own that I found out it was a mug of a model airplane engine.  It was made in the 70’s  exclusively for a company that makes only model airplane engines.  That was when I realized it was rare.  I also realized it had at least 3 points of “collectability”.  It was a coffee mug, was made by Dega, and would appeal to those interested in airplanes.

I listed the mug on eBay active auction for .95 (because that price is more appealing than $1.00, and people would perceive it as a better deal).  I added none of the bells and whistles mentioned in my previous blogs, because I was still unsure if this would even sell.

I listed it for 7 days, and to my amazement over 300 people had viewed the item (high interest), 21 people were watching it (there was a bidding war), and it sold for $51.00 (including the profit I made from the shipping fees)!  Better yet the person that bought it was in New Zealand which proves my point – what sells for .25 here may sell for $51.00 in another country.

I made $50.75 profit for about an hours worth of work.  Hypothetically if this could be replicated each time ($50.75 an hr)…that would be $97,440 a year.  Even if you don’t reach that amount, you can see the potential of easily making a decent second income in your spare time.

Model airplane engine mug

Tags: auction, beacon, ebay, how to, money

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under JUST BECAUSE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.