Saturday, November 17, 2012

How to Make Money Buying & Selling Computers on Craigslist

Here are some of my tips on making money buying and selling computers on Craigslist and also on eBay. First of all there is no easy get rich quick scheme, it takes a lot of work and some time. You should know a little something about computers as well but it was stuff that I easily learned by searching Google.
  1. First things first start searching Craigslist for cheap computers and parts. Primarily search for people that are getting rid of their parts collections.
  2. Put ads in the wanted section for computer parts.
  3. Put an ad in the barter section for computers as well. I would make sure I had a list of things to barter.
  4. When buying computer parts especially older parts don't pay more than a $1 per part unless there are some know good parts like fast cpu's or big memory sticks. My rule of thumb is not to pay more than what stuff goes for on eBay or Pricewatch.com. There were many times that I was able to buy large lots of parts for about $50. 
  5. Now that you have lots of parts separate your parts. This is important becasue some parts are worth more individually on eBay than they are on a computer system.
  6. If an item is bad don't trash it. There are usually local computer recyclers that will pay you per pound for your computer scrap. When gold was up I got as much as $4.50 a pound for motherboards. One MB weighs about 1.5 pounds so do the math. Even bad memory and video cards get you about $2.00 a pound depending on gold prices.
  7. Some items are worth more in scrap value like older ceramic CPU's and anything coated in a lot of gold like old Pentium Pro CPU's. I sold fours of those old CPU's on eBay for $175.00, four gold coated processors!
  8. I would only build computer systems with motherboards that have a 533mhz bus speed or faster. On occasion I would build a 400mhz system but only if it had a fast processor and lots of memory.
  9. When I got a good system, I would install one of the many Linux operating system on it for free. There is no sense in installing older Windows operating system illegally. My Linux operating system of choice is Linux Mint.
  10. I would sell most systems for around $50 to $100 depending on how many goodies it had and how big the hard drive was.
  11. Always keep your scrap metals as well. I went to the scrap yard every few months and got around $50 for the old computer cases and aluminum parts I would separate out myself.
  12. When I was done selling computers I made good money and learned a lot about building desktop computers.