Hidden Secrets for More Sales in eBay

In fact, you don't need to read this section before you can start your eBay business. With all details in previous few articles, you have got all you need to know to start selling. But to help you further, I'd like to get you some more hints which could help you get more sales

Auctiva

It's a 3rd party eBay solution that I think really useful. And the best thing is: it's free of charge.

There are several things Auctiva can help you sell better. Just let you know some:
- Free template making your eBay listing more professional even you don't know any HTML. Also similar service in eBay, but not free.
- Multiple pictures can be posted in each listing. And hosting all your pictures in their service without any charge. But in eBay, multiple pictures require extra fee.
- You can schedule your listings to be posted at your preferred time. Again, eBay charges you extra fee to do so.

There’re also a lot more benefits you can get from Auctiva. You may check it out in their site.


Try Understanding More of your Suppliers

While you're preparing your items to sell in eBay, I'll suggest you to order a few items from your suppliers (e.g. Giftamax introduced in our few articles previously). Even you don't need to keep any stocks when you're working with this supplier. But to have a look at the final products yourself will definitely help you understand more of products.

Compare between the sample images and the real products and see if they are really good as you expect. See how the package is done and so you can know how to answer related queries from your future customers. Evaluate the transit time and see if it's within the acceptable level.

It'll help much on your future business.


Little Tricks to Speed Up Your Sales

eBay is a marketplace based on trust. As you can imagine, if you start selling with zero or just a few feedbacks, customers would tend to move away to other sellers. So how to turn it around more quickly at the beginning? Try to be a buyer first.

You can also earn feedbacks as a buyer. If you can start with 10+ or 20+ feedbacks when you start selling, people would have much more confidence to buy from you for sure. Therefore, try to find something you need. Buy it in eBay instead of anywhere else.

If you start by doing some purchases first, there are several benefits:
- Earn feedback
- Get the items you want at a good price with lots of choices in eBay
- Understand the buying process. Then you know what process your future customers will go through. That can help your communication with them much.


eBay Basic Store

If you're serious to build a profitable business in eBay, there're no reasons you don't subscribe to their Basic Store. A lot of benefits you can enjoy by paying a small fee. Just name some of them:

- You can post Store Inventory Listings, much lower listing fee and longer duration.
- Free Selling Manager (original price $4.99 per month). With selling manager, it makes your life much easier, e.g. sending bulk notice to customers, leaving feedback in bulk, monitor sales performance with simple graphs and statistics, categorized tasks for your easy follow up, etc.

A lot more benefits not mentioned here. You can take a look at eBay.com and find out more.

Investment Budget and Pricing Strategy for Your eBay Business

Last time we talked about how to determine what to sell from the Giftamax product list. Now you have to think about your pricing strategy and investment budget. Remember you should not raise a price war when you don't have to. The reason you pay your effort in eBay is for making profit. And since your products are coming with certain uniqueness, you should position yourself well.

Let me make an example by one of my eBay accounts, selling mouse pads.

- Store inventory items posted each month: 1000
- Auction items posted every day: 20, i.e. 600 listings per month
- eBay store monthly subscription fee: $15.95
- Giftamax monthly membership fee: $19.95

After doing research, I decide to sell my mouse pads at $5.99 + $5.99 Shipping. Not the most expensive nor the cheapest, but with reasonable profit margin. Though I don't need to pay for any shipping fee to Giftamax, I still split up the total price into a selling price + shipping price. In this way, I can save some eBay cost as eBay charges transaction fee based on the selling price when you sell an item successfully. However, the shipping cost must be reasonable, or it may violate eBay's policy about Excessive Shipping Charges.

When posting items in eBay, remember to add a gallery picture to each of your listing. You have to realize that most customers are attracted to your items because of your pictures. When they search and look around thousands of listings in eBay, it's quite unlikely they will go into your item page if they don't know what you sell by a quick glance.

For the price settings for store inventory items, I set $2 more expensive than the auction items. It's a strategy to earn more profits. If the customers want to get the items immediately, then they have to BUY IT NOW at a higher price. If they don't mind waiting until auctions end, they may have a chance to buy at a better price.

I offer shipping discount when people buying more than 1 item at a time. In this way, hopefully I could encourage people buying more items at the same time, less profit per item, but more profit in total. You may think about and see if this strategy also suits you. By ordering from Giftamax, your work doesn't differ much between placing order for 1 item and 100 items. Now I charge $5.99 for the 1st item and then $3.99 for each additional one.

Now after selling in eBay for a period of time, I know the sales conversion rate of my items. But as a new eBay seller, you may need to estimate at the beginning. And don't be too optimistic in your estimation. It's also true that certain customers may have hesitation to buy from a new seller. So the sales at the beginning will be slow for you. Be patient. Everyone needs to get thru this stage before they can make real money as a Powerseller. Now as a Powerseller, my sales conversation rate is about 40%, i.e. about 8 items sold per day.

OK, with all details, we can start our budget calculation:

Fixed cost I have to pay, i.e. even without any sales, I still need to pay and that will be my risk of loss:

- Store inventory items posted each month:
1000 x 0.03 = $30
- Auction items posted every day: 20, i.e. 600 listings per month:
600 x 0.35 = $210
- eBay store monthly subscription fee: $15.95
- Giftamax monthly membership fee: $19.95

Total fixed cost: $30 + $210 + $15.95 + $19.95 = $275.90

Cost I have to pay after my items sold (8 items sold per day, and around 50% auction items sold at $5.99 + 50% store inventory items sold at $7.99):

- eBay transaction fee for store inventory items:
$7.99 x 12% x 4 x 30 = $115.06
- eBay transaction fee for auction items:
$5.99 x 8.75% x 4 x 30 = $62.90
- Paypal fee for store inventory items:
($13.98 x 3.4% + $0.3) x 4 x 30 = $93.04
- Paypal fee for auction items:
($11.98 x 3.4% + $0.3) x 4 x 30 = $84.88
- Item cost paid back to Giftamax:
$3.49 x 8 x 30 = $837.60

Total cost for items sold: $115.06 + $62.90 + $93.04 + $84.88 + $837.60 = $1193.48

Total sales payment received (120 pieces from store inventory and 120 pieces from auction): $13.98 x 120 + $11.98 x 120 = $3115.20

Net profit per month: $3115.20 - $275.90 - $1193.48 = $1685.82

Now you know how to calculate your budget. One point you have to bear in mind is that your sales volume at the beginning will be slow when you are new to the market. Also, lack of item choices may be another reason customers don't stay in your site for too long. It does take some time before you can have thousands of items in your eBay store and encourage your customers to buy more from you. Don't worry too much if you find you can't reach the scale like mine. It's understandable. But my suggestion is: just start from a small scale. Even with only 40 or 50 items ready in your list, post them up and start making little sales. You may have little loss at the beginning when the sales are not enough to cover your cost. But if you treat it as a serious business, certain investment is a must.

Once you get in track and prove your strategy profitable, you may start expanding your scale by creating more items with different designs, or creating different items with the same designs. Either way you should expect your profit may grow as you wish.

What Should you Customize to Sell?

Have you done a thorough research on the items available in Giftamax and determine what you'd like to sell?

Let's say you have determined to sell Belt Buckle. Do a quick research in eBay and you have located a few Powersellers or High-Volume Sellers (sometimes some high-volume sellers don't take the Powersellers status. I don't know why).

Can you see what they're selling? This is where you can start. What a frequent seller sells is actually something popular in eBay. You can start searching for some similar images from anywhere you can think of. Google and Yahoo image search is one of the key areas you can explore. In some future articles, we'll list you a few more useful resources where you can download tons of images.

You can search of a lot of similar images in Google or Yahoo. But pay attention to the copyrights before you know you're allowed to use the image for your own use.

When selecting images to download, try to download some higher-resolution ones. If you want to know if the quality of your image is good enough for the products, try to enlarge the image in your screen to a similar size of the final product (e.g. if you're going to attach the image to a 18" x 15" x 6" Tote Bag, then the printed image will be more or less the same as an image enlarged to the full screen of your monitor. If you're doing a much smaller item like 1" button, then a lower-resolution image will still be OK).

After downloading the image, you may need to do some simple editing (resizing, removing some useless areas, adding text, etc). Here you'll need to use your graphic program to help.

To know what size of image you'll need for creating your item, check out the advice from Giftamax.

Now upload your edited image to Giftamax. Then you can follow the steps in the site to select the image and attach on the items you want. A sample item image will be created. You can use it for your eBay listing then.

The item number you can find is the reference you'll use for placing orders to Giftamax. The image file you upload will be saved in the server and used for creating the final products. Once you're familiar with the system and would like to create hundreds of products at once, you can use the Bulk Add function. You should be able to find more help in the site.

Can You Really Make Profit with Giftamax Products?

Can you really make profit with Giftamax's products? Let's do a simple research we've learnt previously.

What is Giftamax's supplier cost? Check out their Reseller Price List.

By joining their reseller program, the per unit item cost is the only thing you have to pay. There's no additional handling or shipping cost. So your budget calculation is pretty easy.

For example, the cost for a Cigarette Money Case is $8.49.

Anybody selling similar products in eBay? And how much?

I can find quite a number of similar items in eBay by typing the keywords “Cigarette Money Case”, selling around $20 including shipping. Remember that Giftamax doesn't charge you any additional shipping cost? Therefore the shipping & handling you charge your customers is also your profit.

$20 - $8.49 = $11.51.

So not a bad profit margin, huh?

Of course, we still haven’t calculated the eBay & Paypal cost. In some other articles in future, we'll talk about how you should price your items after you've determined what to sell.

Since there're hundreds of items available in Giftamax. Just do a similar research on other products. If you have particular preference on certain items, you can try to do a more thorough research. Try to find out a few Powersellers on those items. You can learn a lot from them. In another article next time, we'll tell you more how other Powersellers can help your business. Don't treat them as enemies. The more Powersellers you can find who are selling similar products, the bigger the demand you can expect. The eBay marketplace is just so huge. As long as you remain your uniqueness in your product designs, you'll definitely sustain well.

One more thing to remind you about Giftamax. If you're really interested to join their reseller program and utilize their drop shipping service, you'll need to pay for their membership fee. The reason they charge for a membership fee is to ensure that they're working with serious sellers instead of just an end customer ordering 1 or 2 pieces only. Also, the membership fee will be used for the maintenance of their equipments and online customization system. When I'm writing this article, their membership scheme is free trial for the first 30 days, then $19.95 per month. To be honest, I don't think it's a very big money to invest. And I do think the free trial period is quite enough for an evaluation. So if you treat it as a real business, just include it in your budget calculation.

Now you know there're hundreds of items you can sell after linking up with Giftamax. But what kind of images should you use to customize your items? How can you know what kind of styles can sell?

Before we move on to talk about the images in the next article, let me remind you one required skill you should have, i.e. you need to have certain skills in image editing. Learn it yourself or find someone to help. When we move on to the next article, I'll assume you can follow with the required skills.

Giftamax - A Reliable Drop Shipping Company to Share

For the past few articles, you should've got the basic concept why you should and how you can work with a reliable drop shipper to start your eBay business. Today I'm going to share one of the drop shippers I've been working with for the past few years and with whom I've made quite a good profit to support my living. This company is Giftamax. If you'd like to know more about this company, simply take a visit and know more about them.

The reason I talked about the product search in eBay previously is to let you know the most fundamental, but effective, research skill you’ll need to use day after day. And when you come across any new supplier like the one I’m currently introducing, you can do the same research and find out if you can make any profits by ordering from them. Don’t just listen to me. Do the research yourself.

There’re a number of services they can provide. If you’d like to create your own web site and utilize their direct ordering system, you can try their VIP Domain Stores service

In this blog, we’ll focus in the eBay business. Therefore, the service you need from them will be the Drop Shipping service. Again, just take a look at their detailed explanation and you’ll know how it works

Another reason that you can probably do well with their products: all items can be customized yourself by attaching any image file from your choice. Remember we talked about the key to success in eBay is your price strategy? The fact is there’s another key success factor: Uniqueness of your products. Because you can customize your items with your own design, that’s why you don’t need to worry too much about the price war as long as your designs are popular. But how to know what designs can sell? I’ll show you later.

OK, let's stop here for today. Instead of listening too much from me, you might be excited to explore the hundres of interesting items from Giftamax and see opportunities you can find from them. I'm going to elaborate in more detail in some future articles how you can locate good items to start for your eBay business.

What Are the Benefits by Getting Local Shops as Your Drop Shoppers?

Think of a situation: you're shopping for ladies' apparels in a shopping mall. Then you stop by 2 boutiques. One is a small shop with less than 100 items. Another is a huge shop with more than 5,000 items. If they're selling similar things, which one will more likely get your sales?

You will probably hang around the 5,000-item shop and spend your money there, right?

It's a very simple retail strategy. The more choices you can offer to your customers, the more likely they'll spend more time in your shop. The more time they stay in your shop, the more likely they'll spend their money on. You don't have to be an expert to understand this truth, do you?

In fact, it's just the same in the online world. The more good items you can offer in your online shop, the more interests your customers will have. This is one of the benefits you can get when working with a local shop. If you try to set up an online business by ordering in bulk or wholesale for certain items, how many can you order? Just a few t-shirts can cost you a hundred bucks or more. How much money do you need to invest before you can start selling in a resonable scale?

Besides, don't expect all your items can be sold. It'll never happen. Otherwise, you'll never see those season-end sales in all the shops around every year. Then how much profit do you think you can earn at the end if you try to order from wholesale yourself?

However, if you can get a local shop as your drop shipper, it's no more your concern. You have the product variety for your sales without any investment on stock required. Whatever the local shop has, you can just post in eBay and sell. The shop owner will never mind you advertising too much for him. If you can work with a few different types of local shops and make your eBay shop like a department store, your customers may be trapped and never go for other sellers, just like what you do when you go to a real department store.

Isn't it good?

Additional Strategy to Find Good Items to Sell in eBay

Last time we talked about approaching local shop owners in your area and you should be able to look for a lot of partnership opportunities which can help you setting up your eBay business without the need to worry about the stock. However, some of you may have experienced difficulties with certain hesitation from the shop owners. The most common concerns they have are probably:

- No idea how to determine the shipping cost as they sell face to face all the time
- No experience how to manage the shipping process
- Not frequent internet surfer and may have difficulties to manage everything thru email
- No printer to print out the invoice or delivery order
- No time to stop by the post office while they have to stay in shops most of the time

For a person who is not used to PC and internet world, it may not be easy to persuade them to start a new online distribution channel though they know it could bring them additional revenue. Man are natural born to resist change.

However, the same concept can be applied to people who don't own local shops, but are familiar with the online sales, i.e. people who have their own shopping sites or sell in online markeplaces other than eBay.

There are tons of auction or C2C marketplaces in the world. None of them is as popular as eBay, but there're still lots of traffic. A lot of them may focus in the market in particular region or country. These sellers decide not to sell in eBay because of a lot of reasons. The most common concerns are the price structure and strict policies by eBay. Language barrier is a common factor, too. If you come from a non-English-speaking country and you're good in English, you can act as a bridge between the global market and a lot of sellers in your local marketplaces.

So once you've identified potential suppliers in different online marketplaces, you can send them emails and tell them what solutions you can offer to bring them additional revenue. Most of the time you can get a response within a day or 2 as these people are from the online world.

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?

How to Find Good Items to Sell in eBay?

One of the most common questions that I heard from people who want to start a business in eBay is: How to find good items to sell in eBay?

I understand the frustration to find a starting point when you know nothing about sourcing at the beginning. When I firstly wanted to start an eBay business, I had this frustration, too. Is it possible for an ordinary person like you and me to sell in eBay? Is it only those big retailers who can invest huge amount and buy in wholesale dominating the who retail market?

Not very long after my first frustration, I found my way. In fact, the answer was just all around. I saw it every day, i.e. the retail shops I bought from every day.

Have you ever thought of approaching those retail shops (mainly those small ones probably operating by 1 or 2 owners. Don't bother thinking about the big chain stores) and offer a solution to the shop owners that you can bring in revenue for them? It's not talking about a one-time sale by yourself, but a continous revenue added on their existing business without any additional investment required.

Imagine you're a shop owner and you're offered with such a good thing, how can you reject? Of course, there're always skeptical or narrow-minded people who are not willing to explore new things. But according to my experience, over 80% of people will be interested to discuss further and know more.

But what exactly can you offer to these shop owners and in return helping yourself to start an eBay business? Just spend some time to think it over first. I'm going to unveil more of my strategy in the next article these few days.

Deciding What to Sell in eBay

Simply speaking, everything can sell in eBay. It all depends on the balance between demand and supply, i.e. the price strategy. If you are already selling certain products in other places, e.g. your own local shop, you can just do a simple research in eBay and see if eBay is a proper platform for your business.

Let's say you're selling computer accessories products. You think you have a very good source of USB drive. Then let's do a research in eBay and see how the demand is. Take a look at this example: you type in a key word "USB drive 2gb" in eBay search and notice that most people are selling around US$30.

Now you can have a rough idea how much a 2GB USB drive can sell in eBay. Including shipping, it costs around US$30. If you find out that you can make a decent profit from your current supplier, you're very likely to make a profit in eBay.

Or course, item cost is one thing. You also need to consider the cost you have to pay back to eBay, Paypal and the shipping cost. Don't expect every item will sell when you post in eBay. So you have to estimate your sales conversion rate. Certain profits from the sold items will be allocated to cover those not sold. I will show you some calculations about all these budget preparation based on the real sales records from an eBay account in some future articles.

How Can I Find a Drop Shipper for (PARTICULAR) Items?

When going thru different forums, very often I can see people ask:

Where can I find a drop shipper for toy items? Where can I find a drop shipper for lingerie, Where can I find a drop shipper for DVD? Where and I find......

I think these people are putting their focus in a wrong place. Why in the first place you have determine what you should sell before you have started your drop shipper search? This is a common mistake that most people tend to sell something they WANT or LIKE themselves.

It's TOTALLY wrong. If you like something, go buy it. You don't have to work on it. You may not have the advantage to sell it.

Take the branded digital products in our previous discussion as an example. You can never beat the big retail store while they can get good price in wholesale based on their scale. It's just a waste of time to try selling these items as an individual.

You should first look for a list of drop shippers and a list of items offered (by whatever means). Then do a research in the market (probably eBay) and see what price most people are selling at. Calculate and see what profit margin you can make. Start selling if you find it's possible to develop a profitable business.

That's it. This is the way you should do. Even if you don't like the items you sell, what a big deal? You won't necessarily touch the items yourself. You should sell what your customers like, not what you want.

How Can People Sell for Less Than Wholesale in eBay?

Well, you cannot sell for less than wholesale if you are drop shipping. Forget about it.

At the beginning, I felt frustrated as everybody did. I saw a popular auction for a name brand of digital cameras for less than I could even get it for at any drop shipper. How could they do that?

There could be tens of reasons. Perhaps the seller bought thousands of products from an overseas source and therefore, he can still get a very decent profit when he sells at a very low price. Perhaps the seller was selling at loss for some items as a way to advertise his other items. Perhaps the seller worked at the factory and got a great deal on reconditioned items.

The answer is: DO NOT TRY TO USE DROP SHIPPING FOR POPULAR NAME BRAND DIGITAL CAMERAS, OR IPODS, or things like that. You can never compete with the big retailers.

Then what should you sell? The answer is: unique items that your customers cannot find the exactly same ones from other places easily. You can define your profit margin freely without the need to worry about the price war out there.

How to find such items? Just take a look at this company first: Wow Gift Mart

Try to get some ideas on your own first. I'm going to share more detail and experience at a later time. Have fun.

Drop Shippers Who Charge for a Member Fee

I've been hearing a lot of so called EXPERTS in a lot of internet forums saying "You should never trust a drop shipper if you're asked for a member fee to join".

I'm always having doubts how these EXPERTS came up with this theory. Why can't a quality drop shipper charge for a member fee for maintaining their service and system? Why can't a free of charge drop shipper scam your money?

According to my experience to work with quality drop shippers during my eBay selling history for the past few years, to determine whether or not you can trust a drop shipper, you should judge the quality of products, reseller price they offer, profit margin you can get, actual service quality, etc, so finally how much profit you can earn at the end.

There're quite a few drop shippers whom I've been working with through out all these years which brought me enough profits to support my living. One example is Giftamax (http://www.giftamax.com). They have too many good items I can resell with decent profits in eBay. I never mind paying them the minimal member fee as it's not really significant compared to the real profit they brought me.