The Easiest Things To Sell On eBay For Profit: The Ultimate Guide

easiest items to sell on ebay

Most guides online that look at the easiest things to sell on eBay for a profit set unrealistic expectations by suggesting you buy and sell incredibly expensive and often unwieldy items. The truth is, most of us will not have the kind of disposable income or even storage space to flip large, thousand-dollar items on eBay.

We see things differently and focus on actual achievable results. That’s why when looking at the easiest items to sell on eBay, we take practical considerations such as purchase price, fees, postage, storage, and ability to easily source the items you want to sell. That is in addition of course to eBay items that sell well, sell fast and sell for a profit.

What Makes An Item Easy To Sell for Profit on eBay?

For sourcing items that are easy to sell on eBay, we need to look at a few different factors. For something to be easy to sell, it needs to:

  • Sell well on eBay.
  • Sell quickly on eBay.
  • Be available & easy to buy at a much lower price than it sells for on eBay.
  • Be something that is easy to store while you wait for it to sell.
  • Be easy, and preferably cheap to ship out once purchased.

Further down we’ll suggest specific items that fit these criteria but first, we’ll look at how you can determine if any given item will sell for a quick and easy profit.

How To Tell Which Items Will Sell Well/Easily For Profit On eBay

Rather than just mindlessly searching for items that will sell well, you can use the following strategies to identify profitable items easily.

Understand Your eBay Costs

You may think that we’re jumping ahead here, but understanding where your costs will come from and what they are will help you identify what is a good fit to sell on eBay.

Seller Fees

Depending on the category of your item, eBay will of course take a certain percentage cut of your sale. This typically works out as between 9% and 13%.

You can see the eBay fee structure in their FAQs:

This basic information will show you that even selling an item for 15% more than you bought it for (before fees) is just not profitable enough.

Offering Free Shipping

When Amazon started offering free postage with prime, it created ripples through online eCommerce, resulting in the situation today where most buyers expect free shipping.

This means that in order to secure sales and compete against other sellers you must also offer free shipping.

This is incredibly important when choosing something to buy that is easy to sell on eBay.

You foot the cost of shipping, which eats into your profits. So, logically speaking the easiest items to sell for a profit are those that are small and/or have a low weight – because this reduces the hit to your final profits.

Buy From The Right Place

The “right place” is anywhere you can buy from at rock bottom prices and/or offers additional ways to cut the costs of what you want to buy.

Unsurprisingly, this “right place” is more often than not, Amazon, but can also be wholesalers or sites (or brick and mortar stores) that are offering heavy discounts during a sale.

Buy In Bulk

There are two aspects here. Sites that offer you a percentage discount if you buy multiple of the same item, and sites that items that are already in bulk.

Your cost per item will be reduced, and when you split these items into individual listings on eBay, you’ll get more profit per sale than if you were to buy them individually.

Exclusively Look For Free Shipping

Amazon again folks! Because when you sell your easy-to-sell items on eBay, you’ll be footing shipping charges, you have to ensure that you’re not taking the hit for shipping when buying stock. Amazon is the obvious choice here, but shop around as plenty of other retailers now offer the same.

Buy Small, Lightweight & Flat Items

We’re going to assume that you do not have the storage space at home to hold 500 toasters or 100 vases. We’ll also assume that you don’t want to risk that much expense on larger items. And finally, we’ll assume that you don’t want to pay for large boxes, packaging material, and expensive postage that comes with shipping large items that you sell on eBay.

The truth is that small, lightweight, flat items are by far the easiest things to sell on eBay for a nice profit. They come with the following benefits:

  • You don’t need a large space in your home for storage.
  • You won’t be hit with high packaging & shipping costs when you sell.
  • They are cheap to buy and often available in bulk.
  • You can sell them in multiples, in a lot of cases, without increasing your shipping cost.

That last point is especially important. Let’s say you sell a sheet of stickers. Drop it in an envelope & mail it. And that’s your shipping cost. Now let’s say you want to sell 10 sheets in a bundle – drop it in the same envelope and you pay 10 times less shipping costs than selling one by one.

The Very Easiest Things To Sell For Profit On eBay

Now we understand the concepts and what we’re trying to achieve we can dive into specifically what items are easiest to sell on eBay that give you a nice healthy profit.

Note: In addition to the specific items listed here, use what you’ve learned above to uncover more items that will sell well.

Items That Are Flat & Easily Shippable

Stickers

Stickers are a great money maker as they fit all of the criteria. You can typically buy them in bulk at hundreds or even thousands of sheets at a time. Then when it comes to selling, you split them out into sheets of 5, 10, etc.

Amazon is your best bet here as you can buy stickers in their thousands for a few dollars, or your country equivalent.

Check out our recommended sticker sheets that can be bought cheap, in bulk on Amazon.

The Easiest Things To Sell On eBay For Profit: The Ultimate Guide

Scrabble Tiles

This one may seem strange, but you can buy 1,000 tiles at a low price on Amazon.

Those creating crafts will typically only want certain letters so you can sell in bundles of 10,20, 30, etc. for a huge markup in price on eBay.

Crafts Are Easy To Sell On eBay

Similar to the Scrabble tiles, craft materials are incredibly easy to sell on eBay. This is simply because people go crazy for craft items and will often sell on their creations for a profit themselves. Typically they only want 1 or a few for their project, and that’s where you come in.

Buy the craft materials in bulk, and sell them separately at a large markup per unit. They will sell easily and more importantly rapidly on eBay for a nice profit.

Some of our best picks are items that are flat, low in weight, and are available in bulk:

Buy Video Games In Bulk From eBay & Flip Them Back

As mentioned, Amazon is your best friend in buying bulk items to sell individually, however, for preowned items, eBay, not Amazon leads the way.

Here you’re looking to buy video games in large bulk bundles. We’re talking 50 to hundreds of games.

You don’t want to be paying much per unit (game) and the best way to snag them is usually via auctions rather than buy it nows.

Once you’ve snagged the games, create a variation listing, which will mean only 1 insertion fee, and list each game separately with its own price. You can easily double or treble what you paid for the bundle.

Check eBay Sold Listings For Potential Earnings

The perfect indicator of what sells well, or what is quick and easy to sell on eBay is looking at “Sold Listings”.

eBay sold listings
Check eBay sold listings to gauge potential profits.

Remember, just because someone has listed something, doesn’t mean it will or has sold.

So, run your search as usual on eBay. Then go into filters and choose to show only “Sold Items”. Here you can gauge if the item you’re looking to sell, sells at all, sells well, and typically for what price.

Conclusion

We’ve given some concrete examples of things that you can easily sell on eBay for a profit, but the most important lesson here is why they sell easily/well.

Understanding the rules of how to identify those easily sellable eBay products will ensure you always have options for things to sell. Remember the golden rules:

  • Cheap
  • Small
  • Lightweight
  • Flat
  • Available to buy in bulk
  • Selling proof on eBay (via sold listings)

With that in mind, you should be raking in the profits in no time.

If you’re struggling to save the upfront cash to buy the items that you’ll sell on eBay, check out our huge list of ways to earn from home below.

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