Amazon Dropship

Hi there

Just wondered whether anyone else is using Amazon to dropship items they sold on Ebay?

I started doing this in January, I signed up to Amazon.co.uk's Prime service which gave me unlimited 1 day shipping. Ignoring their terms for the service I decided to start selling a bunch of stuff on Ebay that was for sale on Amazon, then when I sold something on Ebay, I simply ticked the box on the Amazon order page that said 'Don't print prices on packing slips regardless of what I enter above', I then entered the customers address.

Eveything was going very well to start with, I was sending books, dvd's, electronics, etc via one day delivery, and the customers were thrilled to get a cheap book next day delivery. Any negative feedback was minimal, and purely from people who realised what I was doing, more fool them!. I had about 25k GBP going through my account every month

After a while I started experiencing some problems as Paypal were becoming increasingly slow to transfer my funds, as i'm guessing they were scrutinizing what I was doing, and thus I became late with orders due to not having large amounts of reserve funds to honour orders. Also sometimes I would sell an item on Ebay, go back to Amazon to buy and realise the price had gone up, so I had to either take a hit or refund and say it went out of stock, risking negative feedback.

I found a helpful tool called 'camelcamelcamel' that latched onto the Amazon site,and informed me when the price of an item went down on Amazon. It would have been more helpful for it to tell me when the price goes up, and I was liaising with the developer with a view to adding that functionality.

Eventually they limited my account and asked for supplier information blah blah blah. That was the nail in the coffin as I borrowed some money from the customers to fund a short term investment knowing that I could just fill in the hole with new customers!. But when they limited me, I couldn't withdraw funds. So I ended up a few hundred pounds in debt with Paypal. I also received an email from Amazon reminding me that Amazon Prime was purely for non commercial purposes

So now i'm going to open some fake ebay and pp accounts and start doing this again. This time I will avoid making the same mistakes again, by having a reserve fund of cash in case Paypal are slow to transfer. I'm going to streamline by putting more info on the listings so I don't end up answering inane questions all day long. Also I will use the non-prime shipping service most of the time, thus staying under the Amazon radar.

Anybody been doing this?, I know there are large businesses on Ebay doing the exact same thing, I would like to know how others are operating.

Cheers

How are you going to open fake ebay and paypal account? dont they latch on to stuff like that. PM me your ideas and ill try to help you.

No its pretty easy once you know how to open fake ebay and PP accounts. I'm hoping to open around 10 Ebay accounts so if Paypal limit me again I can switch over to another straight away

Wouldn't actually be easier to create fake amazon accounts and distribute your shipping across a few prime accounts? I know they used to offer prime trials.

Sasha-bg

I have heard this before but never tried it. What type of products are you having success with now?

I though people on eBay are looking for bargains and Amazon is not always cheap. So how are you picking your products for eBay listing?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts/ideas.

goawayplease said:

Wouldn't actually be easier to create fake amazon accounts and distribute your shipping across a few prime accounts? I know they used to offer prime trials.

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Very good point, didn't think of that. Whilst I was using the one day service, my positive feedback was glowing due to speed of delivery and also packaging(thanks amazon!). If I could keep that going, would be huge bonus. I mean even if I had one Amazon account and they suspended me or whatever, i'm guessing opening another account wouldn't be so hard

blackjack said:

Sasha-bg

I have heard this before but never tried it. What type of products are you having success with now?

I though people on eBay are looking for bargains and Amazon is not always cheap. So how are you picking your products for eBay listing?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts/ideas.

Click to expand...

Well the point is that people sometimes assume that Ebay is cheapest for everything always, when obviously it's not. Even if they do a quick google search, alot of the time Amazon's results won't appear.

I mean you can just go through the Amazon site and find pretty much anything, then go to Ebay see what it sells for and try your luck. The most steady things are the cheap books and dvd's because the price doesn't fluctuate that much, these have the lowest margins. But if you have a huge inventory you can make it work. Or you can sell electronics, homeware, toys etc, where there are bigger margins, but the price can change quickly as I said, and you can be out of pocket or have to send an apologetic letter to the buyer saying you're out of stock.

There are websites in the UK like offeroftheday.co.uk which show daily offers
from all the major retailers, you can narrow it down to Amazon and just start from there.

If you manage to keep Amazon prime going then that'll be huge bonus, who's gonna complain if they receive a book in an Amazon box, but they ordered it at 6pm the previous day?!

thanks. what part of UK are you from? I am from UK too.

blackjack said:

thanks. what part of UK are you from? I am from UK too.

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Well i'm from the UK, but living overseas now.

So were you declaring your items as gifts? Cause it would be pretty easy for them to detect if all your bought items are not really shipping to you lol

imo if you have multiple amazon accounts, it might help to "cool off" once in a while so they don't get that suspcious

blackjack said:

Sasha-bg

I have heard this before but never tried it. What type of products are you having success with now?

I though people on eBay are looking for bargains and Amazon is not always cheap. So how are you picking your products for eBay listing?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts/ideas.

Click to expand...

This. I can't imagine there would be many items on Amazon cheaper than they are on ebay.

vovvnesk said:

So were you declaring your items as gifts? Cause it would be pretty easy for them to detect if all your bought items are not really shipping to you lol

imo if you have multiple amazon accounts, it might help to "cool off" once in a while so they don't get that suspcious

Click to expand...

Yes, sending as gift, forgot to mention that

xl_The_Jackal_lx said:

This. I can't imagine there would be many items on Amazon cheaper than they are on ebay.

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Most items are cheaper at Amazon than Ebay, and maybe some items selling on Amazon aren't on Ebay at all.

sasha-bg, do you just offer on ebay for a fixed prize you determine or do you let others bid and hope the amazon prize or more is the final offer?

sasha-bg said:

Most items are cheaper at Amazon than Ebay, and maybe some items selling on Amazon aren't on Ebay at all.

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I was thinking of doing this a few years back and did a couple of trials but the packaging was clearly from Amazon when I tested it out. Is this why you were receiving negative feedback Sasha?

I also used some Channel Island suppliers to sell dvds but they used to take several days to arrive. In the end, I used to order several dvd's at a time, upfront and got them delivered to my home address instead (as delivery was free). I simply removed the invoice and added a new label and voila, item ready to post! Slightly riskier method but I used to auction my items one at a time and then use second chance offers for any overstock.

topsytips said:

I was thinking of doing this a few years back and did a couple of trials but the packaging was clearly from Amazon when I tested it out. Is this why you were receiving negative feedback Sasha?

I also used some Channel Island suppliers to sell dvds but they used to take several days to arrive. In the end, I used to order several dvd's at a time, upfront and got them delivered to my home address instead (as delivery was free). I simply removed the invoice and added a new label and voila, item ready to post! Slightly riskier method but I used to auction my items one at a time and then use second chance offers for any overstock.

Click to expand...

I think alot of people either don't think anything of receiving in Amazon box, or they assume that you are reusing packaging. I mean my feedback was about 99.6%, if I got a negative feedback then it was a dip in the ocean compared to the positive, because I was selling a lot of stuff.

I thought about getting the items delivered to me first, but then the cost of reposting will cancel any profits.

I haven't used auctions and second chance offer much, the thing is if you're offering an auction, then chances are by the time its sold the item will have gone up in price on Amazon

That does not sound illegal.

I currently have an amazon and ebay account, the ebay-account has the same name as my company.

What would be the worst thing that could happen if I just started to sell via those two accounts? If that's a bad idea, how do I create fake accounts on both.

I think the idea of letting it deliver to me to resend it to the ebay buyer is the best one, to make sure there is no amazon elements on it.

Additionally, what is going to happen if a product has issues? Will the people send it to me for me to complain to amazon?