My 365 Day Ebay Challenge Day 12 - Stock at last!

It has been a very frustrating few days for me.... until today that is, but more of that later in this post.

I had identified about ten decent lots for sale on Ebay in the last week or so that would have been ideal to resell at a profit but just had no luck whatsoever at winning the damned auctions despite employing my best tactics, honed from past experience.

My usual strategy is as follows....

1. I set myself a maximum price I am prepared to pay for a particular lot.

2. I monitor the auction closely.

3. During the last five minutes of the auction, I prepare my bid ready, but do not confirm it.

4. When the countdown gets to one minute to go (or sometimes less, if I am feeling brave!) , I
then finally confirm my bid.

The only downside of using this tactic is that there is usually insufficient time left to increase your bid if someone else outbids you at the last knockings.

This has been my problem on a number of occasions this week. I narrowly missed out on two very nice photo albums containing pictures of vintage ocean liners.

To add insult to injury, this morning I missed the opportunity to pick up a lot of three vintage Airfix kits due to a problem with my PC. I was as sick as a parrot as they sold for a measly £ 13 and I know for sure that I could have resold one of the kits alone for £ 15 - £ 20 if not more.

Anyway, as I mentioned at the start of this post, I have finally managed to secure my first items for resale.

This afternoon I successfully bid on two bulk lots of assorted postcards. In total 1000 postcards which will need to be carefully sorted before they can be resold as separate smaller job lots or even individual cards.

This is a bit of a punt although having said that, some sets of postcards have been selling particularly well on Ebay over the last couple of weeks. I did do quite well on a lot of of black and white postcards of old racing cars a couple of years ago. Some of the individual cards sold for up to £ 10 each.

I'm not expecting to earn fortunes on the two lots I have purchased today but I only paid a total of £ 62.16 - just over six pence per card.

Another bonus is the fact that the seller is only located a couple of miles from home so I will be picking the cards up myself over the weekend. This will save around £ 10 - £ 15 in postage costs.
Ebay tip - if you are looking for a particular item, you can specify a search within a certain distance from your home.

This is a particularly useful feature if you are looking for a bulky item such as a pushchair which would cost a fortune to send by post.

I will post up some pictures of the postcards once I have picked them up from the buyer.