- Mar 10, 2010
- 42,695
- 107,139
I do a little eBay and have, in the past 6 - 8 weeks ramped it up as I am finding some super good pricing for the kinds of products I offer. My problem used to be that I would find a product that I knew had a decent profit margin but I was hampered by others selling the exact same thing at a price that was either better or in the same range and it caused competition that made things a little slower.
So I took a page out of the wholesale books and looked at their business model. Places like Sam's Club, BJ's Wholesale, Costo and the like. Years ago Costo was a customer of mine and we had to do some retooling on our product lines because of how they wanted their purchases from us packaged.
They wanted their package to have quantities in there that nobody else had; i.e. if the normal packaging had 6 items, they wanted 8 so that the number would be different than anywhere else. Should the packaging be a dozen, they wanted 15 and so on.
To be honest, the margins were not there to make me a happy GM on the manufacturing end, but the value to us was the branding of our products in their stores. It killed me as to my monthly bonuses until I had the bean counters back out the sales/costs so that my numbers looked reasonable.
So, how did I apply this to my eBay offers?
I found products with decent margins that had a fair amount of interest on eBay... I bought a variety of items all in the same niche (my current niche) and had a whole bunch of different products sitting in a spare room in my home. A closet will do, a garage, part of your office, whatever... just keep things organized.
Then I married some of them up that were related. For instance I took some (hypothetical products, Folks!) athletic shoes and put them with 4 pair of quality socks and made a product; took a hammer, 5 screw drivers, 2 wrenches and a mini-tool box and made a product... getting the idea? I just made sure that the combination of products I was offering was not something that was being offered there. So people looking for hammers would say, "Hey, I could use some screwdrivers and wrenches too", and those buying shoes would say, "Yeah, new socks would be great to have with my new shoes".
I took pictures of the package offerings that were not even close to what you would see in eBay for any of those items at all, and wrote unique titles and unique listing content. So the packages were different, the images were different, the title and the listing information were different.
Then calculated my cost and added in my profit and listed them.
Sales for my niche products are better than they were as my competition is really not the same and the margins are still there as well. You just have to make sure that what you are putting together as a package is not the same as what is offered anywhere on eBay if possible or, at the very least, is not offered by many people.
This has increased my sales and thus my income and the time spent was not out of line with the increased revenue. It is important that you calculate your costs properly so do not miss the mark there or you'll be saying nasty things (probably all true) about me behind my back.
So I took a page out of the wholesale books and looked at their business model. Places like Sam's Club, BJ's Wholesale, Costo and the like. Years ago Costo was a customer of mine and we had to do some retooling on our product lines because of how they wanted their purchases from us packaged.
They wanted their package to have quantities in there that nobody else had; i.e. if the normal packaging had 6 items, they wanted 8 so that the number would be different than anywhere else. Should the packaging be a dozen, they wanted 15 and so on.
To be honest, the margins were not there to make me a happy GM on the manufacturing end, but the value to us was the branding of our products in their stores. It killed me as to my monthly bonuses until I had the bean counters back out the sales/costs so that my numbers looked reasonable.
So, how did I apply this to my eBay offers?
I found products with decent margins that had a fair amount of interest on eBay... I bought a variety of items all in the same niche (my current niche) and had a whole bunch of different products sitting in a spare room in my home. A closet will do, a garage, part of your office, whatever... just keep things organized.
Then I married some of them up that were related. For instance I took some (hypothetical products, Folks!) athletic shoes and put them with 4 pair of quality socks and made a product; took a hammer, 5 screw drivers, 2 wrenches and a mini-tool box and made a product... getting the idea? I just made sure that the combination of products I was offering was not something that was being offered there. So people looking for hammers would say, "Hey, I could use some screwdrivers and wrenches too", and those buying shoes would say, "Yeah, new socks would be great to have with my new shoes".
I took pictures of the package offerings that were not even close to what you would see in eBay for any of those items at all, and wrote unique titles and unique listing content. So the packages were different, the images were different, the title and the listing information were different.
Then calculated my cost and added in my profit and listed them.
Sales for my niche products are better than they were as my competition is really not the same and the margins are still there as well. You just have to make sure that what you are putting together as a package is not the same as what is offered anywhere on eBay if possible or, at the very least, is not offered by many people.
This has increased my sales and thus my income and the time spent was not out of line with the increased revenue. It is important that you calculate your costs properly so do not miss the mark there or you'll be saying nasty things (probably all true) about me behind my back.
lol Great piece of advice and great to hear you are profiting from such simple method 
