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SEVEN Tips for
Buying eBay Stock at Car Boot Sales and Flea Markets
These are
wonderful places to buy (and sell), if you know what you’re doing.
Flea markets and car boot sales are very similar events with the
main exception that one is usually held indoors, the other outside.
*
Inspect sellers’ stalls, especially
inexperienced sellers at boot sales and flea markets.
You’ll normally spot them from their haphazard approach to selling,
unpriced goods, and hoards of pets running riot and kids fiddling
with the stock! They usually offer the best bargains and will
offer further discounts to ensure they sell out on the day and don’t
take unwanted stock back home
*
Always haggle
with sellers, even for low value, high resale items. A caudle cup,
priced at £5, haggled to £3, resold in Edinburgh recently for many
thousands of pounds.
*
Arrive early
at fairs, swapmeets, markets, before other dealers get first pick of
bargain goods and miracle finds. Say you’re ‘trade’, even if
you’re not, and gain admission long before the doors open to the
public.
* Look for items
now sold individually
which were originally issued in sets: some postcards, cigarette
cards, some books. Find one and chances are the remainder are
lurking alongside. For example, at a northern flea market I
spotted a postcard showing what looked like part of Christ’s face,
followed soon by cards depicting other body parts - feet, hands,
legs. Eventually I found twelve cards which I realised fitted
together, in jigsaw fashion, to form Christ’s body, with each card
focusing on important events in the life of the Messiah. The
cards, costing 20p each, were part of a ‘composite set’, which I
kept, but is definitely worth hundreds of pounds.
* Look for items
that are poor sellers in one area
with high potential demand in another. Santa Claus postcards,
for example, are hugely popular in America but just another postcard
theme in Britain.
*
Learn about most desirable and high price collectable makes and
makers
in your chosen field. Steiff for teddy bears, artists such as
Kirchner and Mucha for glamour postcards and prints, Sutcliffe for
early topographical photographs, Corgi for toys, etc.
*
Look
for goods to buy in bulk which can be dismantled and sold
individually.
Though still presenting competition from fellow dealers at auction
or other selling venue, most collectors or dealers avoid buying in
bulk when just a few items interest them. Postcards and stamps
frequently come in bulk, in albums, as do boxes of books, toys,
ephemera, and such. Likewise job lots, unwanted collections, and so
on. For a recent example, the sale of items belonging to the
late Dame Catherine Cookson featured hundreds of individual pieces,
alongside trays and boxes packed with smaller less valuable goods,
the likes of books, cutlery, small ornaments. For a few pounds
per lot northern dealers acquired boxloads of items belonging to the
north’s most famous and best-loved daughter which were quickly
cleaned, priced, and sold individually at flea markets, boot sales
and from ads. in regional newspapers, not forgetting eBay where my
own purchases sold like hot cakes in America.
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