How to Play the 'What If?' Game on eBay

 

If you've never played the 'What If?' game before, this is how it goes.  You take a common item, say an empty bottle, and you ask yourself:  What if it was bigger?  What if it was smaller?  What if it was packed with sand from Brighton Beach?  What if it was painted red with white stripes?

It's a strange pastime, this What If? game, but from it has emerged some of the most profitable products of all time, most prominently Coca-cola which started life as a cough syrup, rather thick, very gooey, and leaving a strong after-taste.  Until someone said 'What if we add water and drink it'.  The rest, they say, is history.

Here are a few What If? questions, and products they must surely have spawned:

*  What if we fill it with something silly?

Tins filled with holes from Polo mints, offered as competition prizes in the 1970s, are valuable collectors' items today and, like one I saw in a recent sale of advertising memorabilia, they can fetch hundreds of pounds a time.

Tins filled with London Smog - a kind of dirty fog that hung across London and caused hundreds of deaths daily in the early 1950s - were offered as souvenirs to tourists and locals and frequently end up selling on eBay.

Bottles filled with Irish Turf sold like hot cakes to Irish-American families when they first appeared in the 1980s, before copycats moved in and killed the market.

*  What if we broke it and sold the pieces?

Witness the former wooden Brooklyn Bridge, torn down and replaced by the current metal and concrete variety, which was sold piece by piece by Paul Hartunian and generated millions of dollars. 

The same technique helps sell pieces of turf from well-known football grounds, pieces of meteorites, even pieces of Plymouth Rock that sold on eBay a few years back at between $609 and $2165 apiece and none bigger than a walnut. 

When the Berlin Wall fell, a friend transported hundreds of fragments home, framed them, and sold them in pre-eBay times at £20 a time. Goodness knows what they'd be worth now with an international audience to target.

Demand and price can be inflated by linking items to specific events. So pieces of rock from Plymouth (from where originated America's Pilgrim Fathers) sold well during Thanksgiving week and strips of turf flew out of the turnstiles when Wembley's historical football ground was closed for refitting!!

*  What if we buy this stuff that doesn't sell and add it to something else that does always sell?

One hundred plus Penny Black postage stamps offered at an auction in Yorkshire last month attracted zero bids from stamp dealers unused to selling anything quite so torn and tattered as these pathetic specimens.  My daughter bought them instead, made them into charms, and sold them as charm bracelets under her 'Hobo' vintage jewellery banner. Those stamps costing a few pounds each added £50 and more to bracelets normally fetching ten or twenty pounds apiece.
 

The What If? game include more than just three questions, there can be thousands, and you can pick and choose your own suggestions for turning low value products into high price best sellers.  Here are a few to get you started:

 

What if it was much bigger?

 

What if it was handmade and offered in limited edition rather than mass manufactured and sold to the masses?

 

What if there was a label on it?  What if it was placed in a box?

 

….. and so much more besides.  So go and begin asking your own questions and turning your low value products into high profit inventory for your eBay business.

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