Deciding what to actually sell can be a big hurdle, just the same as the challenge you might have choosing a niche for your adsense site or whatever else, unfortunately there is not really any short cut, but once you have found some decent products you will soon get into the swing of things. Here are a few tips for choosing what to buy/sell:

Niche down
Pick a niche and stick to it, get to know it well so that you know what things are worth. It takes a lot of work at first, but you will soon get to know which items make you the best profits.

Pick an efficient category
You want to be able to guarantee your selling price, and you want items to sell first time – so pick a category which gets a lot of bids. If you’re items are too obscure you risk losing money due to volatile prices.

Value density
Ideally you want to sell high value items which can be shipped cheaply, since shipping costs can eat up your margins. For example: Ipod – high value density, Bike – low value density.

Avoid risky markets
I once picked up-market handbags as a good product to sell – but I soon found out that this category is full of fake items and dodgy goods. This can quickly backfire and lose you money.

This is what it comes down to then. If you can crack this bit then you can make money – completely location independently. Cool huh? Here’s how you can find items which are undervalued.

Mispellings:
This is an old favourite; unfortunately a lot of people have caught on to this, so it’s not as easy to do as it used to be. There are still bargains to be had in some niches though. For example “Carleton Sheets” (a popular realstate investment writer) is easily mispelled as “carlton sheets”.

No image / Poor image:
A lack of an image can seriously put off buyers. It’s crazy but even just a stock image can increase the final value substantially. So if you see a listing for an Ipod without an image, you can guarantee that if you relisted it exactly the same with a stock image you would improve it’s value.

No feedback:
Understandably, someone with zero feedback will get less for a listing than someone with excellent, high feedback. In reality though, 99% of new sellers are perfectly honest and decent – so if you buy up their listings and re-sell them under your own high quality feedback you will probably get more.

Mixed Lots:
People often just lump their stuff together because they can’t be bothered to sell it individually. I recently bought a job lot of 20 items of clothing for about $60, and found that just one of the items was worth $40. I ended up making back my money on just 2 of the top selling items and the rest was pure profit. There were inevitably a few items which I was unable to sell (these went to the charity shop) – but I still made a really healthy margin.

Ask for other items:
Similar to the strategy above – if you find someone selling say, a DVD, a collectible train, a pair of shoes etc. Why not send a message offering to buy anything else similar they have lying around. You will save them a lot of effort and listing fees, so you might well pick up a bargain.

Early offers:
If people list auctions for 99c they often just want rid of them and don’t really care about the value. If you can jump in on a new auction and make an offer, it will sometimes be accepted and you can then pick up a bargain deal.

Buy it now:
Similar to the above. People will sometimes list buy it now listings for less than they are worth. This isn’t common, but it does happen in some categories more than others. Once you know your niche well you will be able to spot these deals. Make sure you check items by recently listed often to snap up these great deals before someone else does.