How to find and sell regular, reliable and repeat products – and avoid unsold stock cluttering up your home!
publication date: Jun 22, 2006
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How to find and sell regular, reliable and repeat products – and avoid unsold stock cluttering up your home!
It’s rarely what you sell that determines how successful you will be on eBay. Real success comes from knowing what people actually want to buy and finding items to satisfy their needs. And there’s a lot of money to be won or lost in the process.
Learn from my experience. For my first main product, I chose cufflinks I liked – emphasis on ‘I liked’; I bought ten pairs of each, total 100 pairs at £5 a go. £500! With a resell price of £14.99, gross profit £9.99 each, I expected to triple or even quadruple my investment real fast. In practice I sold the odd pair, now and then, and soon found my selling fees way exceeded my takings. They eventually sold out at £4.99 a pair, less than I paid wholesale!
Today it’s so different. Today I research products very carefully before even contemplating buying stock. Actually, I hardly ever buy stock before taking an order and I rarely create my own eBay pictures or sales materials.
I work out almost exactly what will sell before I even find the physical product and I’ve arranged with many product owners to let me sell their goods exclusively.
Study these few easy product selection tips, using cufflinks as our example:
• Check what is currently in vogue by studying other people’s listings for fastest selling items with multiple bidders and highest realisations. It will take time but the end result can be fast, easy and certain high profits for everything you sell. For this example, I’d key ‘cufflinks’ into the search box top right of any eBay screen and study the results. You’ll see how to do this very soon.
• No one research method is best. Success comes from researching and continually researching products, even those you’ve been selling for years, using all suitable tools at your disposal.
• With a product in mind I turn to www.google.com, my preferred search method, and key in such as ‘cufflinks masonic wholesale’; ‘masonic’ being my chosen niche area. In practice I use various keywords, such as: ‘cufflinks masonic pewter manufacturer’, and so on, in hope of locating the majority of suitable suppliers for items I’d like to sell. I save search results rather than check sites upfront or list sites on paper. Copy me by creating a folder on your desktop to house your search results. When you’ve found a site you want to study later, go to ‘File’ and choosing ‘Save as’, opting as I do for ‘Web Site’ which lets you save pictures and all site details in one go. Make sure the results go in your folder or they’ll be spewed all over your desktop.
• Now begin visiting sites stored in your folder, by clicking on the index files. You might find graphics are missing, depending on your software, but no matter for now. Check who the seller is and where they are based, prices, minimum order values if any, look for products most like those chosen from your earlier research. Make a shortlist of ten or so companies, ranked by your own first preference, second, and so on.
• Particularly check sites with quality graphics and try downloading graphics to your desktop in expectation of being allowed to do this by the seller. This isn’t illegal unless you use the graphics for personal gain without permission. If the graphics aren’t already stored in your folder, return to the site proper, point your cursor on a graphic, right click the mouse, choose ‘save target as’ and hopefully you’ll see ‘GIF’ as an option. Locate your folder as the storing location and choose ‘save’ to store the graphic. Return to your desktop, open the folder, click on the icon. If it appears nice and clear then it’s probably suitable for your eBay listing. Give it a suitable name to remember it by and move back to checking those suppliers’ sites.
• If the graphic is small it may be unsuitable for eBay listings. Nothing looks worse than a skimpy graphic sitting amongst its bigger, bolder counterparts on eBay’s listing pages. Go back to the product owner’s site and click twice on your chosen graphic which very often grows bigger and more suitable for you. Otherwise ask owners for gif files for their products; most will accommodate.
• For items you’d like to test-market, contact the supplier, tell them who you are and that you are planning to sell their products on eBay. Request permission to use their graphics and maybe their sales spiel to sell their products. Most will more than happily agree. I’ve only ever had one refusal. I always confirm their approval by email and keep a copy for myself in case they ‘change’ their minds later.
• List the item on eBay at the lowest possible price to cover product, selling fees and your own acceptable profit. See how far bidding goes and if multiple bidders emerge. Calculate possible number of sales and eventual profits before the auction ends, and order the minimum possible quantity to fulfil orders. The first time I did this for pewter cufflinks, depicting carp figures for fishing enthusiasts, the results were profitable in the extreme. The cufflinks cost £5 a pair, two people were bidding and stopped at £60 and £62. Both eventually bought cufflinks that cost me £10 and brought £122 profits less selling fees. That doesn’t happen every day, not with the same product, but it definitely does happen every day across a good range of, say, fifty or so products.