Here's a money making idea that would work great for the spring and summer months. Now, I love to find a good bargain. I get a huge thrill when I do. It's like some kind of adrenaline rush that I have become addicted to. Because of that past time, I like to check out local thrift stores and yard sales.By frequenting the thrift stores in my area, I'm able to determine which days of the week and which months of the year are better for finding the best bargains. I know that in my area, a lot of the department stores and furniture stores will donate brand new merchandise to the thrift stores right around the end of the year. I also know that you can find the best bargains on off season merchandise at any store. Using that knowledge, I can acquire brand new items for a ridiculously low price time after time.
You'll need to do a little bit of research before you go on your shopping spree. Make a plan to determine where you want to resell your items for profit. A very good tool for conducting your research is Ebay. By looking on Ebay at various auction items, it will be relatively easy to determine which items are selling and at what price. Using that information you can determine whether or not the items that you plan to buy will be profitable and/or currently in demand. Once you are armed with this vital information, it's time to go shopping!
You have a couple of options once you find your items at a rock bottom price. You can resell your items using Ebay, UPillar, or Craigslist. You can even open up your own storefront using sites like Yahoo, but I would discourage doing something like that until you have a proven track record for profitability. The reason is that sites like Yahoo do have monthly fees for utilizing their storefront software and those fees can cut severely into your profitability, especially at first.
Another option for reselling your items is to send them to local consignment shops. You'll first need to find out their policy on payment percentage and on how long they will keep the merchandise. Most consignment stores will keep your item 60-90 days. You'll want to make sure that you can pick up your merchandise after that time period if they do not sell. If this will be your sales strategy, I recommend visiting consignment stores in your area and inquiring in person about their policies and about what items they need. They'll have a very good idea of what items are selling and what items aren't. Again, useful, free information for you.
In my area, there are several home decor-type consignment stores popping up all over. Yard sales and craigslist would be great places to pick up some great bargains to resell at those types of consignment shops. Once you get the hang of this, you'll see that that possibilities are absolutely endless. I actually had a neighbor come tell me the other day that she had visited one of the home decor consignment shops in our neighborhood and she saw a baby carriage she had sold at a yard sale a few months earlier. She sold the carriage for $5 at the yard sale and the consignment shop had a $40 price tag on it. Somebody could potentially make a 300% profit on that one item if the consignment shop splits the money with the owner. Not too shabby in my book!
