If you’ve followed us through this series about how to become a bulk reseller, you’ve now learned how to cost out bulk, figured out where to store your merchandise, created an inventory management system and have a detailed plan in place to pack and ship your items. Now comes the finale: where and how to sell your procured items using the online auction marketplace.

We’ve chosen online auctions as the focus of this entry because of their ease of use, widespread availability and simple setup. Of course, there are other ways to sell your bulk reseller items (both online and off), but that’s beyond the scope of this particular article.

First, find a couple of auction sites and browse to see which you enjoy using more. Although eBay is still the top online auction site, weigh your options carefully before settling on one: look at the listing fees (the cost to just place an item up for auction), end of auction fees (normally a percentage of the final auction sale amount), payment fees (to accept checks, credit cards or other online payment methods such as PayPal), and any other incidental fees that will drive up your costs. Many of the smaller auction sites may not have as much traffic, but they can save you a pretty penny in fees.

Next, take some high-quality pictures of your wholesale items. You’ll be able to reuse these pictures with every auction, so the more angles, colors and sizes you have, the better. Then store the photos on a freebie storage site (Xdrive offers a free trial and 5GB of space, whereas PhotoBucket is completely free but has file limitations) to save yourself more auction fees.

Next, do a search on the online auction site to see if anyone else is selling the exact same item as you. If so, wait until their auction is finished before you start one of your own. You can also look at the seller’s history to see if they’ve sold these items before, and what price point they’ve sold for previously.

Once your wholesale item(s) have sold, email the top bidder(s) promptly thanking them for their business and to arrange payment. (Note: many auction management programs do this for you, which is extremely helpful if you have a lot of online auctions running at the same time).

Of course, I’ve offered only a simplified version of how to sell your wholesale items by online auction. A complete explanation would take up a lot more space than what I have available here.

Jim Staley is the is the CEO for WholesaleGopher (http://www.wholesalegopher.com/), one of the most trusted dealer and distributor directories on the Internet, offering visitors wholesale items, import and export goods, surplus and closeouts from true wholesale sources. Read more about wholesaling in general in his free, bi-weekly blog (http://wholesalegopher.com/blog/).

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