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.
Showing posts with label Giftamax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giftamax. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
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.
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.
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