If you are interested in selling on eBay, you might wonder where you can get items to sell. I’m talking about after you’ve exhausted the logical first places, such as items in your garage or loft or spare bedroom!
One of the drawbacks for anyone wishing to expand an interest in auctions into a business - be it part or full time - is the need to have stock to sell. Here are some of the issues you face:
Locating suppliers of stock at affordable prices
Somewhere to store your stock
The means and space to wrap the items
The time to take them to a Post Office
One of the ways around all of these problems is to use dropshipping. There are many people in the USA making extra cash, and in some cases making a living, by selling items on auctions on a dropship basis.
Dropshipping has arrived in the UK, and you may want to consider it further. You might be asking, “What on earth is dropshipping?”
Dropshipping is a system of trading offered by certain suppliers. These suppliers have stocks of goods, normally products which will sell well on auctions, and which they are willing to package and forward to your customers DIRECTLY.
This is how it works. Let’s imagine you are a seller on eBay. You join a dropship company. You then get access to the company’s online catalogue, which will usually have hundreds of items at discounted prices. It will also explain to you how much they charge you for P&P to your customer.
You select an item, create an auction listing and list it. The auction finishes, and your winner pays you.
All you now do is send the winner’s name and address, and the payment, to the dropship company. The payment is the cost price, plus the agreed shipping cost. The dropship company then package and send out the goods to your winner. Your profit is the difference between the discounted catalogue price you pay, and the winning bid.
The system has some great plus points - you’ve made zero outlay up-front for stock, and you are alleviated of all stock storage, packaging and mailing problems. And you have a ready made supply of new and different product lines.
On the flip side, you need to be careful you can make enough margin - don’t forget you pay any auction fees incurred. And if you accept PayPal or any other online credit card payment system, you will have to pay their percentage too.
With the right product, at the right price, dropshipping might be a useful addition to any eBay seller’s armoury.
Brian McGregor is an eBay and internet entrepreneur. He recently created the ‘eBay Master Class’ for eBay sellers. For your free copy, please go to http://www.workwinners.com/ebm-request.htm
If you look around a little on the web, you’ll no doubt come across people trying to sell you ebooks about eBay’s ’secrets’ for as much as $20. Here’s a sample:
“Along with 400,000 other excited eBay fanatics I now make a living using the Internet and eBay. I can go days without ever speaking to a single customer, but I have a world wide customer base. My online business runs like a well oiled machine with a part-time effort!”
You too can get such valuable tips as:
“All you need to do is write a list of questions other people would pay to get the answers to, give that list to a friend, have the friend call you on the phone and ask you those questions, record the call, have the recording transcribed, and edit the transcription! Presto - you’ve just created a ‘meaty’ ebook fast!”
So What Do These Books Contain?
Don’t be deceived by the slick sales copy and promises of ‘automatic sales machines’ and unique sales strategies. Most of these ‘winning money-making strategies’ boil down to the same thing. Follow their advice, and you’ll be writing long, old-fashioned sales copy in an effort to sell shoddily-written downloadable ebooks to gullible souls, either directly through eBay or by trying to redirect people through your About Me page to your website.
The theory is that the rubbish ebooks will sell themselves, and you won’t have to do a thing.
Here’s a question to ask yourself: if these ’secrets’ work so well, then why aren’t the ebooks authors spending every hour they have putting them into practice, instead of trying to sell you ebooks? If these secrets were so valuable, then why would they give them away for that price, or any price? Out of charity? Yeah, right.
Here’s the reality: trying to sell ebooks on eBay or anywhere else is very likely to get you nowhere, and fast. The bottom fell out of the ebook market a long time ago - in fact, it’s doubtful whether it ever had a bottom to begin with. The ebooks are an effort to get to you sign up for all sorts of services, making money for the ebooks’ writers each time. In short, the only way to profit from ’secrets of eBay’ ebooks is to be selling them, not buying them - and do you really want to become a con artist?
If you’d like to take a look at one of these ebooks, try searching for the name and picking through results. The chances are you’ll find an excerpt or review - and if it’s not by someone trying to sell you the ebook then it won’t be a favourable view. The fact that most ebooks you buy for $20 come with unlimited resale rights should tip you off if nothing else does.
It’s All Out There for Free.
You can almost any information that someone might be trying to sell you in an ebook for free using a search engine, if you take the time. Ebooks aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on.
If you’d like a real way to make more money, look out for our next email: we’ll show you how and when to use eBay’s powerful ‘Second Chance Offer’ feature.
Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.