I decided recently to get rid of some “stuff.” Now it’s odd that I should have stuff only a few months after moving, considering how much “stuff” I got rid off. However, in an attempt to un-clutter our lives a bit, I have loosed my definition a bit of what I would define as stuff. For example, I recently purchased an Xbox 360 (which I plan to return this weekend, but that’s another post). In doing so, I realized it would be very unlikely I would play many of my old Gamecube or Playstation 2 games. So I decided to sell them.

This also coincided nicely with my attempt to investigate eBay as a means for a side income. Nearly every eBay guide and book I skimmed recommended selling your own items first, so that’s what I did. I wasn’t completely new to eBay – I had sold and bought about 15 items over the past few years – but I had really approached it as a method of income before.

I started with collecting the ten games, and creating an auction for each. This was a bit more time intensive than I originally anticipated. Even though you can put in the game’s name (or ISBN) and have eBay add all the game details, you still have to put in all the various fields such as game condition, price, shipping, and of course the actual auction details. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more of a way to automate this, but I couldn’t find it initially.

I also had to spend a bit of time researching the average price for the games, as some sold for $4 while others were $25. Anything that constantly sold other $5 didn’t seem worth the effort to me. Also, I wonder if I had started all the auctions at $4.99 if they would have eventually reached their market value naturally through bidding.

In any case, after three days my auctions ended and I had winning bids on eight out of the ten games. Now I had to package, label, and ship all of these! I had charged $5 for shipping, which was the average for games and also what I guessed the priority shipping would be.

One of the best benefits I found to shipping priority via USPS is that you can get the boxes for free. This may not sound all that special, but the cheapest envelopes I could find to ship games in that would adequately protect them were about $0.60 each. Using free shipping supplies therefore saved me $5 on my auctions.

When it came to actually mailing them, I first mailed one game “manually” by going to the post office and getting a receipt to find out the approximate weight of the game. Then I went home and used Paypal to print out multiple layouts. I have to say I was amazed with how quickly I was able to pay for and print eight labels. This whole process, including packaging the games, took about twenty minutes.

I was also able to go into the post office at 5:00 the next evening, stroll gleefully past the twenty person line, and drop my packages off at the front desk.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. I got rid of clutter and was paid about $100 to do so. I did realize how much effort goes into selling though. I also ended up paying a fair amount of fees in one form or another (Paypal, eBay listing, eBay final value), but I couldn’t see any way to make as much money as I did for the same amount of effort.

Inspired, I decided to pull out my plastic and sign up for a trial of Salehoo. Salehoo is a website which provides tools to research wholesale product providers. A large amount of auctions on eBay are from people who buy large quantities of items from a wholesaler and sell them marked up on eBay to make a profit. I did about an hour or two of research on ways to find these wholesalers, and found Salehoo to be one of the most often recommended sites. They had an 8 week money back guarantee trial, so I figured I would give it a shot.

So far, I have to admit I am a bit pessimistic about the whole thing. I spent, again, about two hours researching for products to sell. I tried maybe twenty, ranging from iPhone cases to tennis rackets to small porcelain dolls. I not often usually found the exact same item from the wholesaler, but it was selling for the same price as well! Meaning the seller either had a better wholesaler, or was making their profit through shipping.

I didn’t expect this to be an easy, get rich quick deal, but I hoped to find at least one product hopeful in a couple hours of searching around. I may try a bit more, but right now I am more inclined to cancel the trial and instead focus on other income alternatives.