Ever since Ebay took off there are a lot of places promising to increase your auction profit, make you an Ebay millionaire, and so on. Ebay is a powerful tool for selling but it’s not all roses like they seem to infer on those TV commercials and auction web sites.

First off, you can reach a lot of people on auctions but Ebay shoppers are like the first people to show up at a garage sale, they are bargain hunters. If anyone is promising you huge auction profits, they better show you products that you can buy or have drop shipped that will cost you a lot less than what that item sells for at Walmart. Nobody is going to order something, pay shipping and risk that you might not ship it to them at all when they can go down to a discount store and get it for the same price.

There are some items where you can turn a good auction profit however. One example would be unlocked cellular phones which can be used on any carrier with their SIM card. If you had the ability to buy these at wholesale and unlock them yourself, then you’d have a product that can’t be bought locally as all cell phone carriers only sell ones that must be used on their particular network.

To really make a good auction profit, research auctions that have closed already for similar items. Are they selling for less than you can buy them for? Then forget it. If any auction profit program is promising you a specific (and often outrageous dollar amount like make $15,000 on an auction) then run far and fast.

In a nutshell, I would find a good drop ship company that sells at a significant discount and possibly offers more discounts if you sell more of their products at business picks up. If it’s a small item you can buy and inventory you may make more profit, but some items that are bulky may not be practical to inventory. Do your research on the products, suppliers, and selling prices before jumping into one of those auction profit programs as they often have their own interests at stake, not yours.