5 ways to shop for a living

By Melinda Fulmer

Christine Coulombe can spot a deal a mile away.

When she finds a good one, she cleans out all the stores in her area, spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. But what her neighbors think is just an expensive personal obsession is actually a lucrative business.

Reselling those bargains earns Coulombe $40,000 to $50,000 a year from eBay auctions and resale shops, more than her gig as a part-time registered nurse.

"I love to shop. But I don't buy just to buy," Coulombe says. "It has to be a killer deal."

Here are a few of her favorite recent purchases:

• Coach leather goods and accessories. Coach goods are one of Coulombe's reselling mainstays. On a recent trip to a Coach store, she noticed some $9.99 leather dog accessories that had been marked down from $100. She bought a dozen of them and resold them on eBay for 50 to 60 bucks a pop. (Coach representatives frown on this practice, however. "People should only be buying for personal use," scolds Coach spokeswoman Andrea Shaw Resnick.)
• Gap clothing. Coulombe bought 20 down coats from a Gap store that were originally marked from $159 to $189 before being slashed to $9.99. With a couple of coupons and an additional $10 discount, she scored the 20 coats for $100 total. She sold a few of them on eBay for $30 and $40 apiece, more than recouping her initial investment, and will sell the rest at the peak of the winter-wear season, when they could fetch higher prices.
• Toys. When toys go on sale for 80% to 90% off after the holidays, or during slow retail periods, Coulombe buys them in bulk. Sometimes she can sell them to a children's resale shop on her way home from the mall for a 100% profit. "I'll try to profit within the hour," she says. "It's all in knowing what sells." Those $150 T.M.X Elmos? Yeah, Coulombe got in on that craze, too.

It doesn't have to be a lot of work, Coulombe says. She visits only about five stores to find most of her deals. But when she finds a good one, she moves quickly.

Though some people find deals by going directly to manufacturers, to government and self-storage auctions, to estate sales or even on trips to other countries, there are easier ways to score bargains, says Jim Griffith, eBay's official dean of education and a reseller himself.

"You can find (good) product to resell just about anywhere," he says -- even on eBay.

There are many venues where resellers hawk their finds, including Craigslist, consignment shops, swap meets and garage sales. Where they sell partly depends on the items and how big of a profit they're after. Because eBay charges an insertion fee of 20 cents to $4.80 and takes a sliding percentage of selling prices, sellers such as Coulombe try to peddle their goods for several times their purchase prices. Craigslist can typically fetch higher prices than selling through consignment shops or garage sales, they say, but you have to be ready for strangers to come knocking on your door.

Griffith and Coulombe both report finding bargains on eBay from people who have mislabeled, misspelled or mismarketed certain items. Indeed, on one post on bargain site Fatwallet.com, a shopper found an iPod that the seller was marketing under the wrong generation or version, potentially costing him $100 in profit.

5 simple methods

Though most successful resellers would rather sell their souls than trade their shopping secrets, here are five simple ways that Coulombe and others say they score some of their bargains:

• Rebate deals. Many tech items, such as software, printers, video cards, computer memory and modems, can be found free or greatly discounted after manufacturer and/or store rebates. In recent weeks, OfficeDepot.com customers could nab a Linksys cable modem for free after a $20 Linksys rebate and a $20 Office Depot rebate. By adding a $10 product to their online shopping cart and typing in a coupon code, they could also get free shipping and their choice of a slim compact-disc player, Bluetooth headset or retro minifridge thrown into the bargain.

That's not bad, but rebates can often take months to be paid out, and some you might not get back at all. Some manufacturers and rebate-fulfillment houses have a bad track record of paying rebates. Government watchdog agencies are trying to crack down in this area, but there is still some risk involved in buying and expecting to get money back later. For casual buyers, that may not be a huge problem, but for resellers there are often hundreds, if not thousands of dollars at stake.

• Buy one, get one. You can find these deals, often referred to as BOGO, on cosmetics, toys, video games and clothing. Though many BOGO items have been marked up before the promotion or consist of things that have fallen out of favor, Coulombe says there are some gems to be found.

Continued: Watch the clearance racks

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