Tricks in ready supply, from wholesalers or on dropship can be listed 'Buy It Now' on eBay at just a few pounds profit apiece and still make cumulatively very good profits. The secret is to buy a few tricks individually from wholesalers or dropshippers (preferably wholesalers because you'll get a discount on bulk buys later) and test the money making potential of those items. You should estimate price potential by auctioning your test products over a few different auctions (regular and Buy It Now), then check what prices are achieved and how many Second Chance Offers are possible.
Having finished testing, you then need to decide whether to stick to auction format or use 'Buy It Now' coupled with multiple product listings. You can check what other magic tricks sellers are doing for the same or similar products by sorting through eBay's magic trick categories. Tricks old and new usually go under 'Collectibles > Fantasy / Myth / Magic > Trick' in both the USA and the UK. Note that 'Collectibles' USA style (the correct spelling), is spelled 'Collectables' on ebay.co.uk. Check out current and completed listings to get a feel for starting prices, listing types, finishing results from tricks similar to those you propose selling.
MORE TRICKS TO HELP YOU MAKE MONEY FROM MAGIC ON EBAY
* Once you have a winning product, at auction or 'Buy It Now', keep listing that product every seven or ten days and always in your shop, and begin buying in bulk from wholesalers where the more you buy the bigger the discounts usually become. Be sure always to buy in sufficient quantity to fulfill sales for a few weeks ahead based on orders placed in recent weeks.
* Be very careful and do not overstock on any product you sell which is not your own creation or otherwise available only from you. This is because, once you have a winning product, you'll find copycats arriving to take advantage of all your hard work and that might mean a drop in your market share. Note, however, copycats rarely prosper, they don't like hard work, and many are short lived and not a major threat to experienced eBay sellers like you and me.
* Be on constant lookout for new tricks to test and estimate profit potential. Continuously add to your range of tricks and aim to sell hundreds, better still thousands of low to high profit tricks every month, as do eBay shop owners like: Troll and Toad (24,891 magic related listings), Hocus Jokus (4,994 magic listings), Phat Dog Magic (555 Listings), Magic by Mail (396 items). Troll and Toad, for example, sold over 5,000 magic items last month, at prices ranging from 1 cent (almost certainly to grow a mailing list for back end and outside of eBay selling) to several thousand dollars for rare antique magic books and games. Of thousands of items on sale, Troll and Toad have just 37 auction listings, a good indication of the power of using just a few standard auction listings to drive traffic from eBay's main listings to the seller's eBay store. All those shop listed items cost around one quarter the price of individual auction listings, meaning low overheads and higher unit profits per sale. But there's a problem for eBayers using mainly shop listings as the next paragraph shows.
* Except for eBayers choosing higher price shop subscriptions or generating traffic themselves to their shop listings, shop listed products are disregarded by eBay's search engines, especially for high demand items with countless eager sellers. This means if someone keys words into eBay's search facility to describe products similar to those you are selling in an eBay shop, it's very unlikely your listings will show in eBay's search results which overwhelmingly favour auction listings. This makes it a very good idea to always have a few auction listings each week and to use those listings to direct traffic to your eBay Shop. In doing so, you will find some people visiting your auction listings will find their own way into your shop. But that's hitty-missy and definitely not recommended. Far better to be creative and use auction listings not just to sell your product but most importantly to attract buyers to your shop.
* Be sure to use words in your titles that potential buyers actually use to locate products such as you are selling. Otherwise all your listings will go unnoticed. Mistakes and oversights are easy as I found while researching this feature for which I subsequently found the answer in an article I've included later, by Sally Neill.
I had thought everyone would consider 'magic' the most important word in the title for any magic trick selling on eBay, which in the majority of cases it was. But having researched 'magic trick', I began looking for specific tricks, using coins and playing cards, for example, and I spotted a great many listed as 'coin trick', 'card trick', 'card sleight of hand', without 'magic' in the title. Anyone looking for 'coin magic' as I would have done would not see hundreds of titles missing that vital word 'magic'.
It transpired that 'magic' is a popular keyword and, I found that coin and card tricks, for example, with 'magic' in the title sold on average twice as well as listings without 'magic'. There are other words, also, used in your title, that determine whether your listing will respond - or not - to eBay's search engines.
For more information about popular and prolific keywords and phrases used to find magic tricks on eBay, go to eBay's Pulse Pages where you'll find lots of information to help you choose the most appropriate category and words to describe and list your products.
These are the most frequently used key words and phrases used in the UK to find magic tricks:
magic tricks
magic the gathering (an incredibly popular and profitable computer game, not much connected with magic tricks)
magic cards
magic illusion
magic dvd
magic set
magic kit
stage magic
magic coins
magic stuff
magic illusions
magic trading cards
Avril Harper is an eBay PowerSeller and author of BANK BIG PROFITS SELLING VINTAGE TOPOGRAPHICAL VIEW POSTCARDS ON EBAY which you can read about at: www.sellpostcardsonebay.com and MAKE MONEY TEARING UP OLD BOOKS AND MAGAZINES AND SELLING THEM ON EBAY which you can read about at: www.magstoriches.com
She has produced a free guide - 103 POWERSELLER TIPS - which you can download with REGULAR FREE EBAY PROFIT REPORTS at www.powersellerprofitreports.com
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