How to Make Money from Items Owned by Other Local Shops?

Last time we talked about that you could possibly offer a solution of additional revenue to owners of local shops in your area, and at the same time help yourself setting up your eBay business. Some of you may have already got the answer and started working. For other who are still confused what it's about, don't worry. Let's go it over in more detail below.

The solution you can offer to the local shop owners is: selling online on behalf of them. You're not going to buy in bulk or wholesale from them, or you'll just spend too much cost before selling anything. It's not what we want when setting up a small business.

What you should offer them is: while they have been investing a lot in their shops, they should make use of their existing resources (stock, product variety, etc) to make some additional income on top of their core sales. During this vulnerable economy, it's always no harm to set up as many sales channels as possible in order to sustain.

So this is the plan: if your targeted shop owner has the pictures and product details in hand already, ask him to send you. If he doesn't, get your own digital camera and do it yourself. Then you can post the items in eBay and promote for him as if you are his sales representitive. Whenever you've sold an item, inform the shop owner and ask him to send to your customer directly. There shouldn't be any detail of his shop in the package and therefore, the final customer only knows it's a package from you. If you can prepare a simple invoice or delivery order for putting in the package, it'll definitely make your service more professional.

Of course, you should get to an agreement with the shop owner how much discount off the retail price he can offer you, or in other words, how much commission he's willing to pay for your sales effort. Besides, an agreement about how to settle the payment with the shop owner is also needed for a smooth operations in future.

E.g. an item with a retail price $100, the discounted price in your agreement could be $65, shipping & handling costs $10. Then your cost is $75 for this item. If you sell at $100 in eBay, after deducting your Paypal and eBay cost, probably you can still make $10 net profit. So can you see? Without investing in any stock, you've started your business in eBay.

And for the shop owner, he may have earned less based on the discount he's offered. But don't forget it's just an additional revenue for him. He has nothing to lose. If you don't make any sales, he doesn't need to worry anything as there's no cost for him. Can you think of any reason that he should reject this solution you offer?

To keep your business running, you never need to touch the real items. It's the job of the shop owner. All you need to do is to keep a closed communication (probably thru email) on every single order. So in this way, you can work with a lot of shop owners at the same time by staying closed with your PC. You can keep expanding the scale until you think you've earned enough and you can't manage more.

What do you think?