Many of us are using coupons at the grocery store to take the sting out of the moment when the cashier hits the total button, but did you know that you can make extra money selling grocery coupons on Ebay?
As of this moment there are 33,060 auctions on Ebay for coupons. Examples include one seller who is selling her (12) Free Drink coupons on Southwest flights. Another seller is simply selling 15 coupons for Yo-plait frozen drinks. In fact, if you browse the coupon category you'll find that most are grocery coupons and some of them are selling for big bucks! One auction for a lot of baby formula coupons just closed for $96.01! Now, that took some serious work to gather enough formula coupons, but I have come up with some easy ways to make money selling coupons with just a few hours of work. I'm going to show you how to find the coupons that sell for big bucks and how to list them on Ebay.
I'm going to start backwards and tell you a little about how to sell coupons, because its important to understand how this work and what coupons sell before you start hunting for them.
First, Ebay offers every user five free auctions per month so we will get some mileage out of that, but also remember that auctions with a starting price under $1.00 only cost fifteen cents so we can keep our seller fees pretty low. Also a quick disclaimer before I move on: most coupons will contain language that prohibits them from being resold. You'll notice that Ebay buyers always include language in their listing that explains that the winning bidder is paying for their time to collect, clip, and ship the coupon and not paying for the actual coupon. Ebay requires that you include that language otherwise they may delete your listings.
Now, where to find all these wonderful coupons to resell???
Despite their decline in popularity, newspapers are still the number one place to find coupon inserts. Definitely save any coupons that you aren't using from your Sunday inserts. You should also check with friends and family and ask if they will pass along any coupons they aren't using. I've even heard of people engaging in some Sunday night dumpster diving to find discarded coupons. Not for me - but, by all means have at it.
At the end of all this coupon collecting it is time to list them on Ebay. It's common for Ebay sellers to sell their coupons in multiples of the same coupon (20 or so). One interesting thing I have noticed is that lots of only 12 to 15 coupons generally sell for the same amount as the lots of 20. Make sure you also list all of the specifications of the coupon in your Ebay listing (i.e. expiration date, exclusions, whether the coupon can be doubled, etc).
However, if you weren't able to obtain 12-15 copies of the same coupon you could list your coupons as a hodgepodge. In this case I would recommend you putting them in lots of 100 and advertising them like this Ebayer:
One final suggestion is that if you are serious about selling coupons I suggest buying coupon inserts online. One such site is
Coupons & Things by De-De - she sells the entire insert for a fee, usually somewhere between 30 and 90 cents. I have had a lot of success buying coupon inserts from De-De and reselling the individual coupons on Ebay. She also has tons of individual coupons for sale you can buy for your own use. You need to make sure there are some valuable coupons in the insert before purchasing them. Usually coupons that offer a high dollar amount discount and coupons that don't require you to buy more than one of that item are the coupons that sell for the most money.
Good luck Penny Hoarders!
