By Megan

Everyone likes to shop, right? Shopping for profit sounds even better! Many people have been doing this and have been super successful, and you can too. More specifically, I mean by shopping at garage sales, and turning around and re-selling the items you bought – either at your local consignment shop or by setting up an online store, through venues such as eBay, Craigslist, or even Amazon.com.

Garage sale shopping for profit can happen in three easy steps:

Search

• If you intend to sell items you find at garage sales, you have to do some prior homework. This will make your job easier when it comes to hunting through the sales. First, you need to figure out what you want to sell. You can do this by checking out local thrift stores to see what they’re selling or performing searches on websites such as eBay to find out what types of items people are looking for. Online marketplaces are also a good place to find out what price items are going for so that you can go to your garage sales with an idea of how much you want to pay for items if you should find them.
• Another great idea is to bring your laptop/iPhone or other device with internet access to the garage sale itself. This way you can do a search for items on the spot to help you decide whether or not you want to purchase them.
• Do your research to find out where and when garage sales are being held in your area. This way, you can hit as many sales as possible without spending unnecessary time and money for travel.
• The better prepared you are, the more successful you’ll be at finding items and reselling them.

 Shop

• Now for the fun part! Experts suggest going with $100 – $200 in all forms of currency – lots of quarters, $1 and $5 bills. Get to the sales as early as possible – that way you get your prime pick of items. Good types of items to begin looking for are clothing, books or music, purses and other accessories, or electronics. Keep your eyes peeled for bargain prices, and be prepared to offer the seller a lower price, and to leave your contact information if a seller doesn’t like your offer – they may change their minds later!

Sell!

• After you’ve organized all of your newfound treasures, the next step is to figure out where you’d like to sell your items.
• If you’d rather not get into the online selling world, you can take your items to a local consignment shop and put them up for sale there. This is always good because you can have face-to-face interactions with people. If you’re not sure where the consignment shops are in your neck of the woods, www.consignmentshops.com is a good directory that lists consignment shops, resale shops, thrift stores and antique shops across the nation, along with their contact information.
• If you do decide to sell your stuff online, there are many sites you can choose from. Some, like GarageSaleSally, are sites where you simply display your items, and they handle the transaction for you with a direct sale, instead of an auction. It seems people have found the most success with eBay. Its very easy to set up a store of your own and set up auctions, and there’s a lot of help available too. If you have a Mac, there is even a program out there that helps you edit, track, and manage all of the auctions on your eBay store. Can’t get much simpler than that!
• Amazon.com is another good online marketplace to use, especially if you’ve found books or music during your garage sale hunting.

It will take some practice to figure out what items are worth searching for and purchasing at garage sales, and what method of resale works best for you. But this is another business idea that allows you to have some fun (retail therapy!) while potentially making a decent profit.

Here are a few other good sites that have tips and success stories on buying and reselling from garage sales:

• How to Find Garage Sale Gold
• Reselling Garage Sale Items
• Top Ten Garage Sale Items to Resell on eBay

Happy Hunting!

image credits: ppelisek, annablume