How To Start A Small Business In Florida - A Four-Letter Word That Makes Fortunes on eBay

In context it goes like this: And you'll hear it used hundreds of times daily at flea markets and collectors' fairs, today it's a word in its own right, 'Topo' isn't just an abbreviation. And in collecting terms it describes items having close connections to specified towns and cities, short for 'topographical', that four-letter word is 'topo'.

" "Got any topo postcards of Hartlepool (or other location)?

" "Where do you keep the Belgian topo?

" County Durham, "Are these topo prints of Easington in Yorkshire or Easington?

And so it goes for hundreds of different product types and millions of different locations.

And the highest profits too, but it's named places on paper that usually attract the highest interest among collectors. Daggers and dog collars, books and badges, you'll find named locations depicted on pottery and paintings.

Wood and brick, paper collectibles have other major benefits for sellers over topographical items depicted on materials like china and metal.

And they'll rarely be offered in bulk or priced sufficiently low to provide decent profits for resellers, they take up lots of space in your home or other business premises, costly to post, those other items are heavy.

Flea markets and boot sales, and can often be purchased in bulk at local auctions, inexpensive to post, paper is easy to pack. Also consuming very little space, is usually flat and easy to store, paper though.

National and even worldwide locations, even thousands of items relating to local, inside those boxes and chests you might find hundreds. So it's no great surprise to find auction salesrooms packed with huge boxes and tea chests filled with paper items and fetching just a few quid each on the day. Usually at auction, it has to do with the fact that our ancestors (Victorian being the most popular era for paper collectibles) accumulated and kept vast amounts of paper items and those items were usually kept together for many decades until someone finally decided to sell them. There's another major reason why immense profits can be made on paper items costing pennies buy and fetching high mark ups on eBay.

They can fetch amazing prices on eBay where it isn't uncommon for one item from an auction lot to fetch more than you pay for the entire boxful.

But I also know that theatre programmes and most other paper collectibles are in greater demand and fetch higher prices for their topographical element than as paper items per se. And sometimes for specific actors and actresses, i happen to know that theatre programmes are collectable in their own right. About 5 pence per programme; 100 for each box, i paid just £. 000 theatre programmes from the late 1800s and early 1900s, each containing more than 2, i picked up two huge cardboard boxes, last year at auction in Yorkshire, as an example.

With near mint items kept separate from others in good to poor condition, then I split individual town and city programmes according to quality. I kept other country items to one side for the time being. Next I split country piles into towns and cities and started work on piles for the UK and USA. Worldwide locations, uSA, so I split the programmes into UK.

American items on eBay.com, and listed UK programmes on eBay UK, i scanned top quality items individually.

I still have thousands of items left to list. 100 plus, and ten sold at £ thirty or forty fetched between thirty and seventy each, within weeks I had some programmes fetch ten or twenty pounds each.

Those other items include: I know theatre programmes are just one of many paper items that can bought for pennies and sold pounds purely for their topographical interest, officially termed 'ephemera', buying and selling paper items, with around forty years experience of collecting, more than this.

. . . Trade Catalogues , theatre Programmes, suicide Notes, share Certificates, scraps, scrapbooks, railway Tickets, public Notices, prints, posters, postcards, photographs, personal Documents, packaging, newspapers, maps, local Interest, letterheads and Invoices, letters, guidebooks, genealogy, funeral Items, programs, football, film Programs, film Posters, ephemera, documents, cheques, calendars, business Cards, bus Tickets, bookmarks, bonds and Share Certificates, blotters, bill Heads, beer Mats, bank Notes, almanacs, advertising Novelties, advertisements.

Can be found in those huge box lots that generally attract low bidding at auction, or all of those items, and any. . . .

The reason they fail to fetch high prices locally?

And most local auction buyers prefer to make big profits on one or two select items, which few people seem to like, that word is 'work'. It's because of another four-letter word involved in the days between buying and selling those items.

000 or more every week on eBay, 1, scanning and listing all this fabulous topo stuff can easily make £ anyone prepared to work at sifting and sorting, however!