Selling Replenishables – Health & Beauty.

If its a rare but popular item then you may have found a unicorn 🙂

Why not just lost on eBay with a string price and see what happens? Some sellers play the game where they list one by one to act as if it’s limited. We just list with the quantity we have and let them sell.

i have a huge stash of nailpolish (that we mentioned when we bought it a couple years ago) and i’ve listed it as 1,4,6 and 10. a handful of times, i’ve sold in multiples. 99% of people just want one. your item might be different, nailpolish tends to last a long time, but if you have something that might run out faster and used daily like lip or eye stuff, you might want to try a couple listings of quantity.

Foreigners will buy everyday items – I’ve sold stuff I can pick up at any grocery store in Canada internationally because it’s only available in Canada.

Ryanne – my wife buys nail polish all the time off eBay – probably one of your buyers! She also buys various other cosmetics that are not available in Canada or are discontinued.

I personally buy stuff on eBay most Americans may laugh at – one thing is Kool-Aid. They changed the format to these liquid drops in Canada – I like the old packets/tubs that you can only get in the U.S., and like oddball flavors like Sharkleberry that were never released here. I’ve also bought Nestle Crunch bars, York Peppermint Patties, and LA Looks Hair Gel.

For any Canadians on the forum, I use to sell Kraft Peanut Butter, Lays Chips (Canadian ones like Ketchup, All Dressed, Swiss Chalet), Post Shreddies, Kraft Dinner, and any Coke/Pepsi promo cans/bottles for things like Star Wars or comic book movies. Not too profitable, but you don’t have to carry inventory on some of the items – just run out and buy it when you get a sale.

You can use camelcamelcamel.com to check the sales history of items on ebay.

Basically every “bump” in the sales rank chart is a sale. It is not an exact science, but gives you an idea of how often an item sells. If the sales chart doesn’t populate that means the item pretty much never sells.

We had the exact same thing. Got a ton of high-end makeup, listed it at 10x what we bought it for and it flew. It was pretty awesome. We listed all of it at once. Or at least as fast as we could. There were days when we had several orders for various quantities of the same item. I wouldn’t bother with listing limited quantities because it can really become a hassle. Depending on what it is, I would list in quantities of 1 and let buyers decide if they want more than one. And with eBay’s new volume pricing options, it could be pretty easy to encourage multi-quantity sales.

In contrast, we also got some nail polish and tried selling it in pre-defined sets. I don’t think that sold nearly as well. But it is also not as popular or high-end as the makeup we sold.

I would try listing Amazon merchant fulfilled too. If you’re anything like me, sales will still mostly be on ebay but every so often somebody on amazon buys for 2x your price.