Trading on Craigslist

There are several good ways an online retailer can utilize Craiglist.  Whether you are buying things to resell on other sites or selling your own wares, Craigslist has a bustling community of buyers and sellers and is almost always free.

For those of you not familiar with craigslist, it is a site with on line classified ads.  It is set up so you can search just in your local area (or in any other local area.)   To get to your own local area on the site, select your country, your state and then your town or the nearest town listed. 

You will then find the site broken down into several sections.  There are sections on housing, jobs, personals, and my favorite--"for sale."  You can browse this section by catagory and find things you may be able to resell for a profit on eBay.  Do your own research or use my favorite eBay selling tool, Terapeak, to see what the market value is before you buy.

Craigslist is also a great place to sell.  I use it mostly to see bulky or hard to ship items.  When we remodeled our kitchen, I sold our oven for $250.  Not bad--and it was wonderful not having to pay selling or listing fees, the sales price was total profit.

Craigslist is also where many folks are going to advertise their garage sales.  Use a combination of your local paper and craigslist to learn about all the sales.  There is even a section on craislist where people give stuff away--this is a section you want to check often because the good stuff moves quick.