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Hi there, Scavenger community.
My (nick)-name is Ostap & as the title says, i’m from the old continent, to be specific, from Germany.
I found the Ebay Scavengers podcast through accident & i was almost immidiately fascinated by it.
My eBay career is rather short (i started about 2 months ago), but i had a lot of fun and also a good profit so far (about 4700 USD in 8 weeks on/off eBay at a nice 60~70 % profit margin).
The reason behind starting on eBay was that i want have an additional source of income besides my regular job (office clerk).
What i sold so far might be a little bit hilarious to you guys, but i’m not afraid of telling 😉
The bulk of my revenue & profit came so far from a very limited sort of chocolate, which was released at 4/20 for the special event of 4/20, lol.
I sold about 325 chocolate bars with hemp seeds, which were limited (100.000).
Bought them at 2.4 €, sold them around 6.5-7 €.Besides this non-keto-friendly eBay activitiy i sold a lot of old clothes i have “collected” over the years and i was REALLY; REALLY pleased by the money i could get out of them (very BIG thanks to Jay & Ryanne for saving me from losing a decent amount of cash with pointing out the “Buy It Now/Make Best Offer” option).
Recently i tried to sell completely new (never been out of the box, non-used), but very, very special working tools, which i can easily source from my working place (huge company, 200.000+ employees, a lot of misordered, forgotten, written-off technical tools, which never have been used), but this adventure wasn’t / isn’t as successful as what i experienced with chocolate and/or used clothes (maybe some one has an idea ?)
I hope i didn’t bore you guys too much & i’m looking forward to be a part of this forum
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Welcome Ostap! We love hearing from scavengers outside the US.
So it sounds like you have done some retail arbitrage (buying new at retail and selling quick) and then selling items that you own.
I like the idea of selling off unwanted inventory from your work. Why didnt it work? Are those items just not selling quickly? Sometimes it just takes time to find the right buyer.
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Hi Jay!
Thank you for the warm welcome.
Yes, you are right, it was basically arbitrage what i was doing as the first thing.
Payed out quite well, but i also had a bit of luck since the demand for this item went downhill pretty rapidly after 3-4 weeks. (Obviously, i mean, it’s summer time, chococolate isn’t such a big seller during the hot days, no matter how special)Well, i’m a bit too quick with saying it didn’t work since the equipment sits on my shelves for approx. 3 weeks right now, I’ll see how this story will evolve (as an example: i bought an exotic piece of equipment for about 230 €, put it on eBay for about 1699 € with Make Best Offer, retail price is 1999 €), but i think i got classic long tail items and they have to sit there for another few months.
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We’ve played around with retail arbitrage, but it’s a lot of work to keep finding good deals to resell. And sometimes people dont want the item s we buy so you can be left with a large amount of unsold items.
If you can buy a tool for 230, and resell for even 1000….that’s incredible profit. Even if it takes six months to sell. How many of those tools can you purchase from work?
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Well, we are moving into corporate/legal looney land right now, so I’m not 100 % sure if what i post right now is 100 % legit, BUT i try to give my best explanation:
If you have a financial advantage of not more than 44 € per month you don’t have to declare this to our version of the IRS (so you could pick equipment with an value of about ~500 € per year).
If I remember our corporate guidelines correctly I’m allowed to pick goods & services from my employer for a value of about 1080 € per year.
The thing with these tools, machines etc. is that they are basically written off in the books of the accounting department (=max. 1 € “Buchwert” = symbolic value).
Every year or so the unused/used power tools, etc. will be sold off in an official auction, but meanwhile the guy who is responsible for the warehouse can sell stuff (up to a certain value, ofc) to employees through an official channel.Please forgive me in case i couldn’t explain it properly, but it’s pretty complicated to explain in my native tongue, another language doesn’t make it easier 🙂
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Well, taxes would be one issue + i don’t want to be too much in the focus of my employer for profiting of his equipment.
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Ah. Well, if your employer sells unwanted items, it shouldn’t matter them what happens afterwards. You said they sell the tools at auction anyway.
Good news is that there are probably other places to scavenge. I bet even in the land of German Engineering and efficiency, there must be waste!
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