How to buy iPhone 5s cheap and resell it for profit?

The best way of finding items with great value is to look for auctions on eBay. Especially if the seller’s rating is quite low, you will get less competition since other buyers might be scared to risk purchasing the item of him.

For example, type in iPhone 5s in search on eBay and select the option: auction. Scroll down until you find phones that are not faulty and add them to the watchers list. It is not worth placing a bid on them since you do not want to the price of the item to go up. Your aim is to get it as cheap as possible. Please find the picture below to see the details of the phone and the seller that I found.  

The con of this phone is that it is locked to EE. However, you can unlock it for £20. I have highlighted the key areas. Even though, the seller only has 4 feedbacks, he has sold 3 items in the past 6 months. Auction is ending at 6:42PM on Wednesday. It is easier to purchase items when auctions are finishing early in the morning or late at night when there are fewer buyers online. What you will need to do is just to log in at 6:30PM and check if the price has not gone up too much. If you research the market, you will notice that the value of locked iPhone 5S 16GB Grey is about £100-£150. You do not want to pay anything more than £100 including the postage fee (£5.50).

If you resell the same phone on eBay for £150, eBay will charge you £15, PayPal fees will be £5.20 and postage with recorded delivery will be another £4.45 if you choose Royal Mail. I would not recommend you using MyHermes since you would have to pay even more if you want to add more than £20 insurance on your item.

That would make you £25.35 profit. If you can sell it on Gumtree for £130 and offer a pick up option – that would be even better.    

You need to be aware that scammers exist on eBay. Most of the time, scammers create new accounts and have low feedback. You need to be especially careful that the item location is United Kingdom. However, you could escalate a case through PayPal and get a refund if something goes wrong and eBay does not help you.