Buying & Reselling Cell Phones on eBay for Profit!

Are you looking to buy and resell items for profit but don’t really know how to do it? Well this guide will teach you how to do just that in the cell phone field! I buy and resell cell phones for side cash all the time, and this is a 10 Step – Step-By-Step Guide on how I do it! It is easy to follow and if done right will make you  a very nice hunk of chump change! Here we go…

1. Open eBay and hover your mouse over the “Categories” link at the top left; Then click “Cell Phones & PDAs“.
2. Click the “Cell Phones & Smartphones” link.
3. Once at this page there will be three steps you want to follow every time…
   • Top Left       – Click “Auctions” (Because we want to find low starting prices rather then Buy It Nows which are usually high).
   • Top Right     – Click the “Sort By” drop-down menu & choose “Ending Soonest” (To see which cell phones are low priced and ending NOW)
   • Middle Left  – Find technology and choose the technology you wish. (I Choose GSM (AT&T/Cingular/T-Mobile etc…) because I find they resell better).

4. Once all this is complete, look to the right of the auctions listings and you will see a “Time Left” column.
5. Scroll down while looking at the “Time Left” column and you will notice it increases very fast from minutes to hours to days.

6. When at the bottom, click page 2 and continue scrolling down. Continue this process to page 3, or even 4 if you need.
7. Usually on page 3 you will start to notice that the auction goes from “Time Left: 6 Days” to “Time Left: 1 minute”
   • What this does is bypass all the promoted auctions that the majority of users will see.
     
   • This gives you more of a chance to find lower priced auctions for sale that aren’t spiced up with the promoted listing tools.
     
   • Not everyone realizes that the promoted auctions are the first several pages so they won’t bother looking beyond it.

8. Scroll down until you see a low priced item that you’re interested in. Take note of the items name (Example: Palm Treo 650).
   • Open the “Advanced Search” option into another window or tab.
   • Copy the name of the item you’re interested in into the “Search Box” (In this example: Treo 650 is what we are interested in).
   • Click the Check Box that says “Completed Listings Only“, Then hit Search.
     • What this does is shows you all the ENDED auctions for that item (Palm Treo 650 in our example) and gives you an idea of what the price range for that item goes for.
   • I did a quick search just now and noticed that in the past few days it sold for:  LOWEST  $47.00 and HIGHEST $150.00

9. Now we want to try and bid as close to the lowest price as we possibly can. It doesn’t have to be right on that lowest price because that might have been a very rare auction, which is why you should look at a good amount of ended auctions to get an idea of what a great deal is.
10. When bidding, I wait until the last 8 – 12 seconds (Depending on Internet Speed), then I place my bid with the maximum amount of money I want to spend.(This is called Sniping).
    • You don’t want to spend more then the average price that item sells for or else you won’t make a profit when reselling.
    • Keep in mind that you want to be as close to the lower price of that item as possible. The closer you are the better chance of making resale profit.

And there you have it! See? That wasn’t so bad. Now get out there and find yourself some phones!