Friday, July 31, 2009

Keep Your Money Friday

Saving On Children's Clothes with Ebay


Today is a special Keep Your Money Friday because you have the pleasure of reading a post from my mom. Every year my mom likes to buy my children new & used clothes off Ebay. She came to me with the idea of sharing it with you and of course I couldn't say no. So please feel free to leave comments.

In today’s economy, everyone is looking for ways to save money without sacrificing quality or going without things which are needed. Children’s clothes definitely falls in this category. Let’s face it, children’s clothing can be quite expensive and even after paying high prices for children clothing, they outgrown them in a hot minute.

Many of us think of Ebay as the place to buy the latest electronics, or cheap refilled printer cartridges, but it is also a great place to find good, used, children’s clothing.The secret to finding what you need is to vary the search results. The best deals are not on single or matched items. Use the word “ lot” in your searches for example use Children’s Clothing Lot, but these search results are still too broad and you will be wading through a lot of listings you are not interested in. Let assume you are looking for Girls Clothing in size 3T. Enter Girls Clothing 3T Lot, this search will include new as well as used.

At the left of the search results page, there's a box labeled Condition, click the used or new link.To find best deals, you can limit the search even more. Look to the right, you will see a box reading "Best Match". Click on the drop down arrow and select, "Price+Shipping: lowest first". The search results are rearranges with the lowest prices listed first.I try to pay about $5.00 shipping for 5-8 pieces of clothing. The bidding prices usually does not go excessive in this category. Overall, with shipping, I average about $1 per clothing item. My goal is to keep these orders under $10. Here is an example of such a transaction, but I paid much less than $10 for 6 items of clothing. The total was$6.04 with postage.

The larger lots of children's clothing can sometimes be very competetive as well as expensive. You will sometimes find yourself bidding with dealers who will break up the lot and sell in smaller lots. Before bidding on large lots, pay attention to the shipping prices and keep in mind that the starting auction price is more than likely to rise considerably. Watch these items in you Ebay account under "Watching".

The above examples shows how you may want to limit your searches. You can adapt these search techniques for any item on Ebay, but you may find the largest amount of childrens clothing by searching under the biggest category:
When you enter this page, do not click on any of the links on the page, look at the top of the page and type in what you are looking for, for example: girls 3T lot used. I pulled over 500 results. Try it.You will find more enough to keep you busy and within your savings budget.

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