Thrift Hunting for eBay in 1998

I love watching Thrift Hunters on Spike TV. Brian and Jason are good guys who have been doing this for a very long time. They know their stuff and their years of experience shines through on the show. Give it a watch if you’ve never seen it yet or if you are at this stage of your eCommerce business.  You can learn a lot from these guys to improving your thrift hunting success.

In this episode of eCommerce Story Time, I share how I moved from selling records out of the basement of my house to the next stage of evolution and how I went thrift hunting for items to sell on eBay in 1998 before the term thrift hunting was popular.  I can remember the rush of finding something for a $1 and selling it for over $100.  Much like hitting the lucky 7’s on a slot machine, you’re not sure exactly which item you buy is going to hit it big but you know it’s out there.  Can your marketing savviness make it sell for more?

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Thrift hunting is a great way to learn the buy/sell side of eCommerce.  It’s a low risk high reward business model when it comes to your money.  It does however require a higher time commitment day in and day out to hunt and find the best deals possible and there’s a large learning curve to learn what type of items sell better than others. It’s a time investment to learn and that’s the biggest benefit from this business model in my opinion.  Use this time to learn the economics of supply and demand. Use this time to learn the process of selling, receiving payments, answering emails and shipping product.  Use this time to learn the true costs of selling such as listing fees, selling fees, payment fees and shipping fees.  Learn how much time it takes to list an item and how much time it take to service an order.  These are very valuable lessons to learn early in your eCommerce business career.

==> On the next episode I’ll talk about how I created a process to track profitability very early on and how important this is for you when building your eCommerce business.

Cheers to selling smarter,
Brandon

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