River of Stuff, Part 1

Not long after my first successful sales of some items I had listed on eBay, the question I began to wonder about pretty regularly was, where was I going to be able to find more stuff I could sell?   At one point, I was considering becoming an eBay seller of vintage marbles, but as I thought about it further, I found that there are a couple of problems with that idea.   First, as a collector of vintage marbles, from time to time I expect that undoubtedly I would have a hard time letting go of some of the inventory I had purchased to sell, and it's hard to make much of a profit selling anything, if you keep siphoning off all the best of it and keeping it for yourself.  Next, it also occurred to me to observe that there are rather a lot of other folks who are trying to make some money by becoming an eBay marble seller, and the niche of eBay marble buyers does not seem to be all that large, compared to, say, fashion clothing or something like that.  There is a lot of competition from other sellers for not too many buyers -- a very tough market for someone new to try and get into.  And then there's marblealan.  He's been selling marbles on eBay for long enough to have developed a good reputation for being accurate in his identification, unflinchingly honest about the condition, and he has a good base of loyal customers.   He gets some spectacularly astonishing prices, sometimes, for the auction style listings. Most of the rest of the marble listings don't even start to approach that same level, unless there are some fairly spectacular marbles included in the listing.  Heck...  at the time, I would have been happy to even FIND some of those fairly spectacular marbles at a price I could afford to pay, and selling them off again would have been out of the question.  Without the need for too much further reflection,  I realized that I was unlikely to become an eBay marble vendor of any renown, and I certainly wasn't going to be able to start out on a shoestring budget, in any case.

So, what was it I was going to sell, instead?

My Laurel Burch earrings had done well (bought for 50 cents at a yard sale, they sold for around $80, as I recall.  Finding more of them to purchase turned out to be next to impossible.  Despite combing as many as possible of the yard sales, flea markets, estate sales and thrift stores in the area for some time afterward, I never did find any that were priced that well, and scarcely any for sale at all.

And so it went on.  For any one thing that I had been successful at selling for a good price, it seemed unlikely that I'd be able to duplicate that sale, and the price yield, reliably even once, let alone make a business out of it.  As I thought through the categories I had used to list my items, not one of them stood out as a "that's IT!" revelation.  So, even though online sales success wisdom of the day was (and still is) specialize, specialize, specialize, a.k.a. find and fill a niche market of some kind,  I had at this point in the process already made a decision that I was not going to specialize or get comfy in a niche, my niche was going to be the kind of junk that I liked well enough to bother listing it.  Things that inspire me, for whatever reason.  Things that stand out and say to me "Someone, somewhere, is going to want me", although I'm happy to report that they're not saying this in actual words, just in my imagination.  So, I've made my small success to date by selling different kinds of things in several different categories, because that's what I had available as raw material, inventory, stuff to buy.   I've even done fairly well selling marbles, and have some listed as of the date of this post.  (My collection had grown and was getting out of hand, what can I say!)