Online selling

CEBU, Philippines – I'm finding that virtually anything can sell online. It's really amazing what people will buy. I do a lot of surfing and skimming to see what other people are selling, and I talk to a lot of other different sellers; it's a pretty close-knit community. Sometimes my mind boggles when I see what other people are selling.

I tell a lot of people about what I'm doing, but not everyone jumps into it. A friend of mine really got into selling online. He lives in a very small town, in the middle of nowhere, and he started going to garage sales. He bought a bunch of dishes and glasses for a dime a dish, and ended up selling several of them for a good price. The first thing he did was send me an expensive bottle of liquor to thank me. He said, "I had no idea that this would be so much fun."

Why does this concept work? Well, the sellers at garage sales and thrift stores don't really care about the price of the items they're selling to you. And if you get the right two people bidding on an item online, you'll get what the market will bear. Of course, the very next week, the items that you just sold for P200, might sell for P50 or less.

It's really a dynamic market system at work - supply and demand moving action on a day-to-day basis - all depending on how many of these items are up for auction, what auction sites they're on, what the prices are, and who's willing to buy them. I just had a video that closed out a few thousands, when my cost on videos ranges from a few hundreds to a thousand. I had no idea that it would close out that high.

- From Fast Forward by Alfred C. Sikes with Ellen Pearlman (Morrow) (FREEMAN)