Arbitrage

When I use to buy a lot of software on eBay I quickly realized that there are many ignorant people out there and there are many mistakes out there when it comes to listing items. Some people have items that they list on eBay without doing research and offer items for under priced Buy It Now prices. They might do it out of ignorance, laziness, or just carelessness. I remember on more than one occasion buying a Photoshop 7 in a Sealed Box for $100 buy it now and immediately relisting it for $399 and selling that the same day.

Then there are people that did their research but not too in-depth. Their items end after midnight or their items end when many other similar items end as well, increasing the supply and generally lowering the price at that given moment. The bottom line is that there is alot of arbitrage on ebay listings, same items sell for different prices. I’m not talking about similar items, or price differences due to sellers feedback, or many other variables that would cause price differentials. If you do your research, you will see that exact items, even sold by the same seller, often sell at different prices.

Now, if you figured out a way to understand these price differentials and realized where they are often present, you can make alot of money. Consider this example with Acrobat 5 that I ran into a couple years ago. Acrobat 7 Pro was the latest release but for some reason many graphic design shops were still using Acrobat 5 and they needed the Mac version. Acrobat 5 generally costs about $100 on ebay but the supply of Acrobat 5 for MAC went through some weird cycles: for a week or two there would be no one selling this software and then for a week there would be a couple listings and then back to no listings. Amazon and other online shops did not carry this software for Macintosh at all because it was so old.

Thus, for a long time I would buy Acrobat 5 for $100 on eBay when there was alot of supply and then when supply dropped, I would list it for $300 and never had a problem selling it at that price. This is just one small example but if you do enough research on eBay you can find many ingenious ways of making money in that fast market. Give it a shot.