EBay General

Question about reselling:

How you manage the logistics of your inventory?

Lets say you're buying online from a cheap source and reselling it at a markup on ebay.

Do you order the stuff to you and then ship it to the buyer, or do you just order the stuff directly to the buyer?

Seems like Source -> Buyer would have less effect on your margins, but seems risky

Are you selling used products or new products? Is this something you've created yourself and private labeled or is it a manufacturer item?

Are you well diversified in products or do you stick to a specific niche?

What was an important lesson you've learned recently from your business?

Thanks

These are new products, I started with a niche item that sold like hot cakes at an insane margin, motivated by this iv spent many hours a day research similar products and I now sell them at a tiny margin of profit, if I keep finding a few new things to sell every week all these tiny margin items will add up and il also be well diversified in case of anything.

>Sell 2 similar items to the same buyer.
>Items sold cheap, and for parts & not working, no cosmetic damage.
>Buyer receives and claims they are damaged, AND they don't work (durr)
>Call eBay CSR in Poolooville, both cases closed out within 30 minutes.

FFS I am sick of the fucking scammers.
Lel

Call again, and speak to an AMERICAN.

Generally speaking the male pooloos will actually remove shipping defects at random if you complain.. Currently sitting at 0.80%, I could give less of a fuck.

that's called dropshipping

How'd you find that first niche item? Like if you had to do it again with a different niche, how would you go about it? Are you making them yourself or sourcing overseas?

Yeah seems like Shopify have a pretty good intro to it.

Is it generally advisable though? I could see myself getting royally fucked by ordering from China but them messing with the order or it getting held up in customs

>selling windows tablet for 59.98 BIN
>get offer of 40 with attached comment "There is a new unit for $56.99 free shipping. I believe $40 for this unit is fair."
>respond back explaining theirs is running windows 8.1, mine is upgraded to 10

That's not what im posting this for though. It kinda erked me when I realized he basically said "Hey you're asking 60, someones selling it for 57, so i should be able to buy yours for 40"

what the fuck kind of haggling method or logic is that? what the shit

amen to that.

I've been selling on ebay for like 6 years, started when I was +/- 24.

Im currently a full time "professional ebayer", but truth be told I'll never stop, even if I go back into having a "real job" or focus on other business practices.

its easy to work with, not all that hands on, and can make some great side money even when treated as a casual side job

literally extra thousands of dollars to your income for significantly easy "work"

How'd you go about finding products to sell?

dropshipping (source > buyer) is a dangerous practice unless you're working with a company of quality, one you know well and trust, and/or is in the same country as your buying audience.

trusting a a chinese source to dropship to your american customers is begging to have tons of late/noship/lost packages and get your shit banned. go to any internet marketer forums and check out their selling physical products section and you'll see thread after thread asking how to get unbanned from ebay after dropshipper fucks your account up.

I'm sure theres plenty of reliable dropshipping companies out there, but none of them are going to be the "you can buy inventory from us and ship it directly to your customer", theyre going to be a strait up dropshipping company/inventory logistics companies that specializes in holding other peoples goods and shipping for them as needed.

truth be told -any- category or type of item can be profitable, it all depends on you as an individual. for example I might be able to get sony bluetooth headphones really cheap, you cant. You might be able refurbished car alternators really cheap, I cant.

Lots of people scour the internet randomly trying to find stuff to resell, but its a fools game because theres infinite amount of product available. You'll find some stuff here and there but you'll go through tons of shit to do so. People need to learn to pay attention to what is "special access" in their own life and knowledge. Play to your strengths.

I pretty much answered that on the second half of When I started ebaying it was due to my collecting hobby (not disclosing). I would get on ebay and search through listings to find a good deal on [niche items] once in a while, but would never buy because I was still in that "putting cc online is dangerous business!" mentality. After about a year of peeking at various auctions i cracked and had to have something i found, and made my first ebay purchase.

After that I became comfortable with the concept, and would look through ebay listings weekly/monthly and buy one or two things if anything caught my attention.

Eventually, I realized that I was able to find good deals because i had inadvertently become an "expert" in [niche items]. I could look through listings on ebay and when a group of [niche items] were listed, i could instantly tell how much each one was worth and how good of a bulk deal it was.

With this realization, I began buying large lots of [niche items], would keep the things i wanted, and resell the rest individually or in small lots to make back my investment and thus add [niche items] to my collection for "free"

after a couple rounds of this I realized I wasn't just making back my investment, but making up to 1000% profit in some cases.

That began the building of my ebay empire, I became the #1 source for [niche items] on ebay through this practice, until it became a real business venture and not just a collecting hobby. At that point I shifted gears and started treating it like a full on business, and began branching out into different, unrelated products/niches that I could get good margins on.

Again, the key is I always play to my strengths. You will typically find better profit margins if you stick with things you know, instead of just searching alibaba blindly.

Do you guys pay taxes when selling and making money on ebay? Or am I just a eurocuck who can't begin to imagine the tax heaven that is America

a little more story:

When I was dealing in my hobby niche, i did so through the entire starting phase of my ebaying venture, up until i became an "expert" at ebaying. I still worked a 9-5 job (in IT if youre curious) and was doing my [niche items] ebay selling on the side.

I continued to do that until the ebay business grew so large i decided to quit my job and go full time into ebaying. Keeping in mind, i was literally -only- dealing in my personal collecting interests inventory wise.

this niche is not something you imagine people build a career or full income with, imagine socks. Imagine a guy who had an entire business and life sustained by selling used tube socks. as weird as it sounds, it worked.

When I told my friends and family that I was quitting my IT job and going full time into ebaying my [niche items], the majority of people reacted with a "uhh...cool...good luck" attitude and gave me weird looks, obviously skeptical that this was a good idea.

My mom thought i was nuts as well, but had seen a few other successful similar things i'd done in previous years, so didn't tell me not to.

3 months into being a full time ebayer most of my friends and my mom asked me to teach them how to ebay. the only person that took to it at all was my mom. I told her just like i told you, play to your strengths to find inventory, ESPECIALLY when you're first starting.

she has always been one to shop at thrift stores, so i told her go to thrift stores and when you see something you think/know is a good deal, do a little research on ebay and if it looks like it might be a good deal, take a risk and try it.

sure as shit she started finding things and making up to 500% profit on them. she didnt grow it as big as me, but she did start seeing decent success.

She was glowing when she made her first 100 bucks in profits, heh.

So guys I have a drop shipping website setup but have done 0 advertising or link building (had 1 sale) but as a few people have pointed out I'm basically spamming alibaba junk and have no idea how reliable my sellers are.

It has occurred to me that I have a family friend with a very large metal recyclers - they mostly get in cars but there's a lot of other stuff there too, do you reckon this would be a good place to find crap to flog off on ebay?

They've actually asked me to sell stuff for them full time on ebay and/or a website (I'm a webdev) but they've been saying this for about a year with no attempts to actually start doing it.

absolutely*

1. items need to worth something (a shopping cart isnt going to be bought)
2. items need to be functional/not broken, fixable, or parts of it can be pulled and used
3. if parts can be used and pulled, you might have to do the pulling.
4. they need to be small enough (in size and weight) to be sellable online while maintaining a profit

My idea was to go for small stuff and just compare it to what's for sale on ebay, in saying that though they're not going to stress selling me $300 worth of assorted knobs and switches for $50 since their main cash flow comes from selling scrap to Chyna and I think they have to get rid of a lot of the plastic, plus metal is bottomed out so they're holding a lot of shit until the prices rise.

The only thing which is slightly of concern is #4 because I don't know anything about shipping costs and they get a lot of cars without panel damage in the front/back which I think would be decently profitable pre shipping.

why cant i list a single item? i register and i tried to list an item and i can list 0 items this month. its a fresh account, but still, i remember you used to be able to list around 10 items??????????????????????

just a guess, but "knobs and switches" are probaly going to either A. be very little in profit, or B. take a shitton of time to just list, much less sell.

my story is where I learned this lesson. The main reason I branched out past my collecting niche into other markets was because the profit per item was relatively small and i started discovering niches with higher yield for the same/less work. The mindset was "Why list/sell/package/ship 100 items for 10 dollars each when I can list/sell/package/ship 50 items for 20 dollars each"

i'd assume unless you can get a lot of the same type and model switch/knob, it's going to be a real pain in the ass to work with things like that because the selling qty needed for decent profits is going to be ridiculous for a one man operation.

Of course, this is just a guess so feel free to try. I would say at least try it regardless

In an unrelated bit of information, re-reading my previous posts made me want to add something:
to everyone who is asking "what should i sell", if you take my previous advice of play to your strengths, what normally occurs is:

>begin selling with personal interest niche(s), start of your ebay venture
>enjoy working since its a niche of interest to you. learning the ropes and "working" feels more like playing and fun time than a job.
>required skillsets are developed almost by accident because you enjoy it. Learning how to find/list/ship items is achieved easier.
>over time the various processes, mindframes, and abilities become second nature to you, and you will magically start finding profitable products seemingly like magic.

That's exactly what happened to me, because of my hobby starting grounds once my mind understood how to run the ebay venture and became accustomed to paying attention to deals, i started realizing various other niches my skillsets and knowledge are catered to, and thus new areas I could profitably function in were discovered.

call ebay and find out, how the fuck do you expect us to magically know whats wrong with ur account?

you're probably banned because your a scammer (hence why you know you used to be able to sell stuff instantly but now cant), but if you're legit new you probably didn't attach all things needed. PayPal, bank, email, etc.

I get discount electronics through my job; generally 100 to 200 off depending on the cost. I was think of splitting the difference and selling them on eBay any thoughts?

>just a guess, but "knobs and switches" are probaly going to either A. be very little in profit, or B. take a shitton of time to just list, much less sell.

The profit I don't think will be an issue since I can get them cheap, and as for selling time I don't really know, a lot of car parts can't easily be purchased here except second hand (older model cars with no aftermarket) - plus I would just undercut other sellers.

>trusting a a chinese source to dropship to your american customers is begging to have tons of late/noship/lost packages and get your shit banned. go to any internet marketer forums and check out their selling physical products section and you'll see thread after thread asking how to get unbanned from ebay after dropshipper fucks your account up.

Fuck, thanks for the heads up man. Guess I'll need to work out a system for inventory management for the near future then.

I wouldn't recommend this, but really it depends on where you work. Most places that give employees on electronics closely monitor what you are buying and will quickly fire you if they suspect you're taking advantage of their discount. If you do end up doing this just be cautious.

The discount is provided through an outside company. I don't think it is subsidized by my company in any way. At most I think they could just ban me from using the program

I agree. There was one guy who I used to buy chink made silver jewelry from (two to five items a month, for two years running.) He switched from receiving and reshipping to drop shipping. In the first month, one of the four got lost. Second, one of three. Third, one of four. I stopped buying from him. Drop shipping from chinkland ended a long-term relationship with a seller for me. Don't know, but hope he's still in business.

>The profit I don't think will be an issue since I can get them cheap

that's not really my point. If a knob has a profit margin of 1 dollar, then you have to get, clean, take pictures of, create ebay listing for, inventory store, package, and ship 100 items to make 100 dollars.

That's can become a LOT to do to maintain decent numbers

car parts can have great value if you're selling in the US (don't know about other countries), have at it
glad i could help

I'd suggest to everyone to start off manging there own stuff. It's good practice to be fluent in all aspects of your business so you never depend on an outside service to operate. After you grow so large it becomes difficult to handle on your own, THEN you can consider working with a inventory logistics company.

the pros that use chinese wholesell w/ dropshipping use burner/stealth accounts because they know theyll be banned at some point. Too much of a pain for me and you cant build a client base cause ur always changing.

i second this. Any time i've seen a situation where guy can get x item at heavy discount due to working for company, theres very strict guidelines and rules about it. Including how often you can purchase, how many you can purchase, if youre allowed to resell them, if youre allowed to gift them, etc.

I have a friend that works at microsoft. shes allowed (something like) 2,000 usd in purchases with her employee discount, can get windows 10 for 35 bucks or something. She is allowed to purchase and gift them, but is NOT allowed to buy any item that is planned to be resold at some point for profit. Even though theres no real way they would be able to track what happens to the purchases she makes she refuses to break that rule.

I've been trying to tell her for years to sell me 2000 dollars worth of windows OS and dont ask follow up questions, but she wont do it. MS puts all their employees through various morality training and i guess it works >.>

I imagine the margin to be closer to 20-50 depending on the part, I'm in AUS

>Charging more for a used unit when a new unit costs less.
>Charging more because it has a FREE upgrade included.

KYS.

Yes, taxes rape us.

I now see why eBay decided to start getting rid of Active Content

youtube.com/watch?v=IOwTAiat1vg

has anyone tried dropshipping from ebay to amazon?

This guy probably shouldn't even put DVD in the title. I'd bet eBay railed him for just having the word "DVD" somewhere on the listing. That seller sounds autistic as fuck though.

Well he's dead now so..

Used auto parts have pretty big value, what I pretty much sell. Especially if you sell something that is 20-40 dollars and can ship it first class mail(obviously small), its some of the best and easiest profits you can make.

Is he? His eBay account is still alive.

...what?

How unfortunate that he died. I was confused because his eBay account was still active. Didn't know you literally meant he died.

Wouldn't recommend selling computer components. You'll end up being 24 hour tech support for morons who don't know what they're doing.