Auctions are a great way to make money online with some investment

Online auctions have incredible potential to make money online. The most popular of course is eBay. But there are others you might not be aware of such as Amazon.com Auctions, Yahoo! Auctions, uBid, and eBid. Since most of my experience is with eBay, but I could write a whole other article about it, I'll briefly talk about it.


Many people have made their fortunes on eBay. There was actually an article in this month's Entrepreneur featuring success stories and eBay tips from successful eBayers. I would link you the article but it doesn't seem to be online. There is, however, an article with 51 eBay tips from PowerSellers and eBay instructors. A tip that isn't included in either article is one that is very useful not just for auctions, but when researching niches in general. You can find out all the latest, hottest items out there in any category on eBay. First and foremost, there's eBay Pulse. It shows you the most popular searches on eBay. There is also a monthly report called "Hot Categories Report" and it comes as a pdf file. It has all the hottest items in each category all laid out for you. Copy and paste it: http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf


I'll get into more detail on how you can use this in more ways than one another time because I don't want to turn this into a 5000-word eBay article. So how do these guys make money? Some of them go wholesale. Some use dropshippers. Finding good wholesalers is difficult, though, because many are just "middle men." Middle men in the context of wholesaling are companies that buy items from a real wholesaler or the manufacturers, then raise the prices a bit and pretend they're a wholesaler. The result is diminished margins on your end. You can also use dropshippers. When I used eBay I loved dropshipping. If you don't know, dropshippers have the item you're selling and when you make a sale, they ship it for you on-demand. No need to fill your garage with boxes of Bluetooth headsets! If you've ever bought an electronic item like an mp3 player or a headset or similar item and it unexpectedly came with a manual written in Cantonese or Mandarin, your seller probably used a dropshipper! Anyway, there are many places you can go to find cheap items to sell. Two good places are Overstock and Liquidation. If you want to get into finding manufacturers, a good place to start is Alibaba.