People often wonder if it is really possible to make money with sites such as eBay. I suppose there is a lot of hype out there, but yes you can make a reasonable amount of money, and it will correlate with your talents and time you put into it. Here is a question I recently replied to:
I am in desperate need of money so I am looking into selling a lot of my items that I don’t even use anymore. Mostly books. But do you really make a profit selling items on the internet?
Is there other alternatives to making a little bit of money?
The truth is, yes, you can make money on both places. eBay is a little bit better for most things, but you can use amazon.com to sell stuff as well. It all depends on what you want to sell.
On ebay and amazon, you generally end up giving them about a 12-15% cut. So you sell something for $100, and they take about $10-15. That is the only downside to it. However, there are lots of people on there, and you can usually sell it fairly easily if you price it well.
To get an idea of how much you can get out of the items you are selling, go to ebay.com, login, and click the “advanced search” link. Then type in the keywords, and check the “completed items” box. You can then search and see (in green bold) the final selling prices of the keyword (example: ipod) that you typed in. That way you can get an idea of how much the stuff is selling on there.
General books don’t do so well usually, but again, check them out. School books do the best, and you can usually make most of your money back on those. general electronics (ipods, cameras, etc.) do pretty well also.
A free alternative is the Craigslist.com site, which is best if you live in a larger city. But that is up to you.