Determine a vintage niche for selling online or ebay

Have you figured out what type of vintage items you want to sell.   

 Determining what your niche is may take time for some.  If you are having trouble deciding, I have some tips to help you get started.

Tips:
1. Start by going to yard sales. 

• The Early Birds get the worm, is so true for yardsaling. 
• Buy the local newspaper, write down or add them to your GPS and make note of the time they start.
• You need to try and get to the sales as soon as they start.
• Look for anything that looks vintage, inspect it for any missing or broken areas.  I wouldn't pay any more than $5 for anything you don't know about.  Don't worry to much about how much you are going to make on the item.  If your only paying a $1 or 2, your not losing much if it doesn't have much value.  I consider these loses as expense of educating myself.

2.  Cleaning

• Do not polish, remove tarnish or do anything to your items except for maybe dusting it unless it's really dirty.  Just keep in mind, if you brought something valuable, it can quickly lose it value by removing tarnish or patina.

3.  Research

• Start with ebay, see what others are selling your item for.  Check the completed listing for what they actually sold for. 
• Next go to the web and search.  Just because items sold on ebay, it may not be the true value.  The selling maybe new and didn't know how to list it correctly or they started their item out to low and only 1 person placed a bid. 
• Do as much research as possible especially for things you can not find.

4. List your item, describe accurately and don't forget to cover your cost for shipping.

5.  Item sells, pack it safely, and pay your fees. 

6.  Determine your profits, minus shipping cost, paypal fees, ebays fees, shipping supplies, ink etc.

7.  Repeat the process, over and over again.

8.  Once you do this several times, you will quickly learn what you like selling.

You may find that you dislike packing and shipping glass, or you dislike researching toys.  For me, I really dislike listing books.  It was so boring, you have to give a detail description of the outside covers condition, the page condition, does it have any dog ears or pencil marks, who wrote it, the copyright, etc..  I really despised listing them.   But I found that I loved buying lighting, I enjoyed doing the research and looking at thousands of different vintage lights.  I enjoyed cleaning them, fixing them, taking pictures and writing my descriptions. 

Take your time and enjoy the experience.  It's a lot of fun, going on the hunt, for your favorite vintage items to sell.