Scouting round for bargains really pays off!

When I was planning our Surprise Wedding (July 2011), I spent months scouting around online, mostly via Ebay for items to use during and to decorate our venue.

I had fallen in love with the idea of a dessert/cake table and found a gorgeous vintage cake stand to use for our wedding cake, and some lovely, plain white porcelain cake stands for the 6 cakes I had asked our mums, sisters & aunts to make for our 'engagement party'.

Our cake table

I bought the 6 x porcelain stands on Ebay for an average price of $11 per stand, I was able to negotiate down from the listed price of $19 each, as I was buying 6 of them.

Plain porcelain cake stands - we used 6 of them on the table

So straight off the bat I saved $48 on buying the cake stands (6 x $11 v 6 x $19).

Fast forward to post wedding/honeymoon, we find out we're pregnant and think holy hell where are we going to put the baby, as our 2nd and 3rd rooms were chock-a-block with wedding deco's.

So I went into Ebay selling mode.

I listed 1 of the cake stands to test the market, with a starting price of $5, well blow me down if that stand doesn't sell for $22 plus postage!  Quite bizarre, if the buyer had scrolled down about 8 listings they would have bought them new where I did for $19 plus postage!

So over the next 3 weeks I list the 6 cakestands, and my total of sales for those stands was $138, plus postage, which averaged $23 per cake stand, more than double what I paid for them!

Now I don't know if the story I put on the listing re how we used them for our wedding swayed people, but I was one very happy camper.

We've now sold about 30 of our wedding decos/bits & bobs on Ebay, and crazily have made a profit on 28 of them!  At last count we're up about 45% on what we outlayed to buy them!

We've got a bit more to sell, waiting for the wedding season to kick off again.  Shall keep you posted!