I started selling on eBay back in 2020 when I found a brand new Cisco Firepower router at a small, local, in-person auction for very cheap. I then listed it on ebay to sell. Once it sold for over twice what I paid for it, I really liked that feeling of seeing my efforts pay off so I turned to selling more along what I knew better and something I've been doing for a very long time, just not in any real quantity - Computers. I bought several older, but still very decent office computers that were incomplete... They would be missing ram, hard drives, or disc drives. I would refurbish them, replace the parts and clean them up real nice...Buy a cheap Windows 10 OEM licence or digital license, then sell them. This went great, quickly selling close to 100 PCs in maybe 3 months.
From there I decided I'd start building some gaming PCs (more along the lines of what I was used to doing anyway) and then things really took off. I opened a store account to help with fees and to create a storefront. I was selling left and right, building PCs of all kinds of performance levels and price points along with refurbs, even upgrading some refurbs to low level gaming PCs...I had never dreamed I could make enough doing this, something i enjoyed, to do it full time making a living. I was buying parts wherever i could find the best deals, sometimes from individuals, sometimes brand new from retailers, local auctions, local recycling centers, just wherever. I was also networking, finding new items to sell, some new, some used, but all were related to PCs/Tech in some way.
Silicon shortage hits and really hurts my business....Difficult to find parts, mostly graphics cards, at anywhere near cheap enough to turn a profit. I still found some things here and there to limp along for a while, but the longer the shortage went on the worse it got. After a year of only a few sales every month here and there, I got lucky again and found some nice SSDs at a local auction, brand new in the box, high capacity enterprise/DC level SSDs. I immediately list them once I get home and the first 9 I listed sold immediately at $1060 a pop. I was thinking I may be back on track, maybe I could do something similar...Finding items locally or wherever to resell as profit. Before I could put too much thought in to it, though, ebay restricts my account, sending me this MC011 asking for 'invoices from my supplier" which I don't have a supplier, just found them at a local auction. I contact ebay support, get transfered up the chain to acount management teams to where each and everyone seemingly ignored everything I said, copying and pastin gthe same requests from the MC011 over and over even though I told them it was an item I won at auction. I sent a picture of the actual invoice where I paid for them, but that wasn't good enough and so after a few weeks of back and forth, I just gave up. It seems like nothing I say or do will get the account back, just pay me and I'll be on my way. They said they will hold the money for up to 72 days...fine whatever. So i decided to check out some other platforms, something i would have never done previously and well...Lets just say I've made a lot more while paying little to no fees. So thanks ebay and MC011! You inadvertently helped me get back to reselling making enough money where I may be able to focus on it alone.
