Ask HN: Has anyone on HN ever successfully arbitraged eBay? - peter_d_sherman
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mchannon
There are two proven ways to do this.

One is to pick a very frothy market. For instance, about 10 years ago I
acquired a preorder for four Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miners shortly before they
were to ship (months behind schedule but with the queue starting to ship).
About a month later, received them. Sold them. Made a nice tidy profit. This
was definitely speculation, but market timing worked in my favor. It could as
easily have not.

Second is one of my side projects I call "grains of rice". Everyone's pretty
familiar with the cost of a sack of rice, but consider if your customer wanted
just one grain. One grain total. Not interested in extras, no room for 'em.
Just want the one. That grain of rice suddenly gets pretty expensive, as in
hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars per pound shipped.

There's additional packaging involved, and the frictional cost of shipping,
and additional handling and listing costs involved, but it's pretty easy to
buy things for $5 a dozen and sell them for $0.99 a pop. You can get an
additional leg up by warehousing and shipping closer and faster than your
source, meaning your customers paying your premium only wait the 3 days
instead of the 3 weeks it took you to get it.

That's not pure arbitrage, as you are adding value by wholesaling, splitting
things up, and repackaging, but it's not uncommon to have eBay on one or both
ends of a successful corresponding transaction.

~~~
frou_dh
A classic example of that grain of rice strategy is splitting up replacement
keyboards. Joe just needed a 'N' so he paid you $5 for 1% of a $20 keyboard.

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chatmasta
In about 2010 I was selling refurbished Brookstone foot massagers on eBay. I
could buy them in the outlet mall by my house (one of two in the country) for
$200 and sell them for $300 on eBay. It was amazing how quickly the market
adjusted; eventually, we were buying foot massagers by the pallet from the
Brookstone outlet. Sometimes we couldn't buy any because someone else already
bought the pallet! Eventually Brookstone raised their prices. :)

A year later I did a similar thing with "anti-snoring mouthpieces". The
product was effectively a mouthguard, a popsicle sticks, and instructions for
molding it. A few branded companies were selling this product for $80. I
imported the _exact same_ product from Alibaba for $3 each and sold them on
eBay for $15 each. I had a box of 300 of them and every day I would put one or
two envelopes in the mail until the box was empty.

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brudgers
When shopping for the things I shop for on eBay, there's a non-trivial
arbitrage based on delivery time. Items from Chinese suppliers are marked up
when shipping from US warehouses based on <= 1 week delivery within the US
versus ~2-6 weeks typical for delivery from China.

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peter_d_sherman
...That is, has anyone here on HN ever bought an item on eBay, and sold the
same item on eBay for a profit?

If so, that leads to such sub-questions as:

How did you know/learn that you could make a profit on that item?

What kind of profit did you make?

How long did you have to wait to sell the item, that is, what was the turn-
around time, etc.

(Inquiring minds want to know! :-))

~~~
frou_dh
Done it a few times after 'organically' researching some fairly high-value
item that I actually wanted.

After I've secured one for myself to keep, there's a short-ish period of time
during which I feel like an expert on the market for that item, and my "Saved
Search" with email notification remains enabled. Sometimes obviously
underpriced listings(s) then show up. Not much more to it than that.

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peter_d_sherman
Interesting! Thanks a whole lot for your responses!

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Domark
Desperately trying to buy and resell at a higher price? That would require
some poor third party sap to pay more, right?

Sounds sad.

~~~
peter_d_sherman
Let's say hypothetically that I asked someone to buy a coin on eBay, and hold
it for a year. The goal of that exercise would be to pick the coin that
appreciates in value the most over that year.

So given those parameters, which coin would someone pick, and why? See, that's
a form of arbitrage, because you're buying something on eBay and selling it
back on eBay.

The idea that "some poor third party sap" is paying more is not correct,
because the second buyer of the coin is presumably paying _MARKET VALUE_ for
the coin, and presumably can sell it again at market value (no loss), and can
possibly even wait some time for the coin to appreciate again.

In a free market people exchange goods for however much money they value the
goods at. The prices (price = what people value something at) of some of those
items are in constant flux, thus there become opportunities for arbitrage.
People in the financial community already know this, although they don't apply
those principles to eBay.

No single person is a sap, people just a) Value (assign price to) things
differently and b) Have different abilities to pay, i.e., Bill Gates could pay
a whole lot more for something than say, someone living in a third-world
country...

