Hi scp63,
You have to always remember that ebay is not a retail market place, it is a wholesale market place, and the biggest one in the world on top.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when trying to sell on ebay is to look for a wholesale supplier. Of course ebay is already full of wholesale suppliers, so trying to find one that you can buy from and then try and sell at a profit back on ebay often makes very little sense.
Yes, there are some products that aren't sold at true wholesale, but the simple fact is that most are, and most certainly most of the popular products are, and if they aren't, then it's only a matter of time before they are.
If you do happen to find a product that is not at wholesale price, then you have an opportunity, however you would most likely have to source in a volume that would give you the best possible wholesale price to give you margin.
You can't just buy one or two things at true wholesale price, that's just a myth. Look at a company like Walmart, just imagine what quantity they buy in and what sort of wholesale discount they would be getting for buying in that volume.
Now compare some of their products to the same found on ebay, chances are that the prices on ebay will be even cheaper, so that might give you an idea of how much volume that seller is buying in to be able to sell at that price.
As I said, ebay is the worlds biggest wholesale marketplace, and that means it has some big companies selling products on there, not just newton nobodies.
Regarding liquidation.com, if you are going to buy surplus merchandise from an auction, you really have to know the value of what you are buying so you can adjust your bidding to meet the market expectations.
Straight away you are bidding on returns stock, so that means you are bidding on stock that a customer has had cause to return. Now that should be telling you that you are going to get a percentage that are not going to be usable. What size percentage that actually is, well that is something only researching several loads can tell you in reality.
If you are finding it hard to sell the products on ebay at profit, that indicates to me that you are paying too much for them to start with. Of course it could just be that the demand for the product is low as well, but that is the type of research you are going to have to do to identify a product with potential.
If you want to deal in liquidated stock I would suggest looking at actual liquidators, not a site like liquidation.com. If you buy from a liquidator, you will buying at a set price, so it will allow you to research an accurate pricing model, and from there you will know what potential the products have.
If you want to keep buying this type of stock at auction, then you really do need to have a baseline price that you are prepared to pay per load, or your pricing is going to be all over the place.
I hope that cleared a few issues up for you.
Cheers