Make Money with Craigslist and eBay

There are a number of ways to make money with eBay, but my favourite and most profitable is to use Craigslist.  I’m going to outline for you a simple way to find items on Craigslist and then sell them on eBay to make a nice profit.

If you haven’t heard of Craigslist before, don’t worry because it’s very easy to navigate and become familiar with.  The site first launched as a local San Francisco buy and sell portal, but soon developed into a much bigger venture and now it caters to many U.S. and Canadian cities and territories.  First of all, choose your province/state under your ‘Country’ header.  Second, scroll down towards the middle of the page until you see the “For Sale” section.  For the purpose of this demonstration, I’m going to be talking about the electronics category shown on the right.  What you’re going to do is look for items that are of interest to bidders on eBay.  To make sure you don’t waste your money by buying something that won’t sell, use the ‘Advanced Search’ function on eBay and check the ‘completed listings’ field as shown below.

This will give you an idea of what similar items have sold for in the past.  If there’s not a large enough profit margin for you to make money when you sell the item on eBay, it’s probably not worth your time or effort to purchase the item from Craigslist. 

So let’s say I see a cell phone on Craigslist for $75.  I’ll take a look on eBay using the ‘completed listings’ search function and find that the same cell phone previously sold for $125.  I have the opportunity to make a $50 profit for doing a small amount of work.

Tool you’ll need to do this:

• Craigslist knowledge (minimal – as long as you know how to find items)
• eBay account (necessary)
• PayPal account (preferably – if you want to accept credit card payments)

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