PLUS: Quick and easy profits from cross-market arbitrage

A ‘call to action’ is a device used by top copywriters to create a sense of urgency for potential customers to request more information about a product, or to buy it right away.

Although many sellers shy away from asking for money or an immediate order, it remains the best way to maximise profits in the shortest possible time.

eBay: Phenomenal ways to ask for money and generate immediate orders!

Asking doesn’t have to be rude, or intrusive, and it can be accomplished with a single phrase in your listing, or in its title or sub-title, such as:
Buy Now While Discounts Last
Buy Now While Stocks Last
Buy Today and Get Another One Free
Bid Now Before Someone Else Beats You To It
Only Two Left
Buy Now and Get [XXXX] Free (Try to make that free add-on something people are keen to buy in its own right but can’t because it’s only available as a freebie.)
Additionally, put your product on auction for ten days at the same price the product is available from your eBay shop. Inside the listing, before you even mention the product, say: ‘Click HERE to visit my shop and buy at the same price right now, without having to wait for the auction to end and risk losing out to higher paying bidders’.

Sell Buy It Now, but only for products you’ve tested and know the optimum price of (the price most commonly achieved at previous auction test-listings for the item).

Buy It Now is a great way to generate impulse buys and can be offered independently or alongside the auction option. When I had trouble selling my cufflinks at auction, for instance, at a starting price of £9.99, I uploaded them as Buy It Now for £9.99. I don’t know the reason why, but those cufflinks quickly sold out and attracted orders from day one, compared to my having to endure order-free days while waiting for auctions to end.

A visitor who finds your product isn’t quite what he wants right now might be interested in other items you already have or which you might obtain later.

How do you stop that person moving away and looking elsewhere to buy? Simple: you add something like this to your descriptions: ‘If this isn’t what you are looking for, email me with your requirements and I’ll see if we have suitable items in stock. If we don’t have suitable items right now, we’ll look for items to suit your exact requirements. No obligation to buy!’

Quick and easy profits from cross-market arbitrage

Cross-market arbitrage is where something is bought in one marketplace to re-sell in another, usually different, marketplace. I have even seen items bought in one marketplace, usually an auction saleroom, being sold in the very same saleroom a few weeks down the line.

As an example, cross-auction arbitrage is very common at offline salerooms in the northeast of England, where visitors are few and products often go below market value.

Those items are subsequently carted off for higher prices from bigger auction salerooms in major towns and cities, including London auction houses like Sotheby’s and Phillips.

The reason this idea works so well is because most city and big-town auctions advertise extensively and attract many more national and international bidders than their small-town or village counterparts.

Additionally, major town and city salerooms typically attract more affluent bidders than provincial salerooms and most online auction sites, with the possible exception of eBay.

eBay is the biggest and most successful online auction site, with buyers and sellers, products and prices towering way above hundreds of other online marketplaces, including those such as Bonanza.com, Amazon.com or .co.uk, preloved.co.uk, craigslist.com and gumtree.com. And that is why items bought from those non-eBay sites can attract much higher prices on eBay.

For just one workable example, this is how I would personally look to buy books on Amazon to re-sell on eBay…

First off, I’d look for best-selling titles on eBay, using the advanced search option at the top-right of most eBay pages. On the next page, with ‘Find Items’ showing at the top-left, I’d key something generic like ‘a’ or ‘the’ into the search box, then choose the ‘Books, Comics, & Magazines’ category. Then I’d mark the box to return sold listings only and click to search.

On the next page I’d choose ‘Price: Highest First’ from the drop-down menu at the right side of the screen. Today it returns more than 173,000 recent completed listings over all sub-categories, including children’s books, textbooks, and antiquarian books. I need to narrow it down a bit, so I choose ‘non-fiction’, then on the next page ‘sports’. That gives me more than 2,000 recently sold sports titles to study.

Sticking with the ‘Price: Highest First’ option, I find that four of the top ten recent highest-priced books are about fishing, specifically carp fishing. All but one of the remaining top ten highest-priced items are about motor racing.

Note that my research took less than five minutes and already I know carp fishing and motor racing are subjects I should keep in mind at offline book sales, as well as on Amazon and other online marketplaces.

At Amazon UK I found almost 100 books relating to carp fishing, not all rare books but including numerous decent quality items at lower prices than similar titles selling on eBay. Much the same happened when I searched for books about motor racing.

Now let me reveal my own secret buying location for just one book that regularly fetches £100 on eBay (and sometimes much more), on my favourite subject: dogs. I can’t reveal the actual book I buy (my PowerSeller daughter would disown me), but I will tell you where I look for second-hand booksellers charging incredibly low prices for high resale value books on eBay.

It’s AbeBooks – abebooks.co.uk – where today I searched for ‘carp fishing’ and found several priced much lower than similar items fetched recently on eBay.

Have a look yourself…