Ask me anything about dropshipping on ebay

Ambitious12 said:

What could be the relation between fake reviews and dropshipping??I mean any product have all fake review that anyone can guess,and now time to dropshipping.

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There is no relationship between drop shipping and fake reviews that I know of. That may just be because we pick very safe items (think kitchen appliances, petcare products, etc)

david g rees said:

Great thread, thankyou.
Been wanting to get back on the EBAY selling bandwagon for a while.
I did well a few years ago (not dropshipping) and made a good profit but had a big fallout with Paypal over some refunds so stopped doing it. I still have my 10 year + Ebay account with over 1200 positive feedbacks but had to open a new Paypal account, so will i have limits on that to start with?
What about fees? Listing so many items will surely cost you a fortune in fees,especially if many don't sell.
How do you tell if another Ebay seller is drop-shipping?
Have you had many complaining about it arriving in Amazon packaging?
Do you offer free shipping on your items?
Do you recommend a shop or just list normally (if a shop do you specialize in certain products rather than just a mish mash)
Finally are your listings basic or do you have an html template to make them look fancy?
Thanks again, following this thread with great interest.

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We appreciate your appreciation

Sounds like you were crushing it. Unfortunately you will have limits on it and if they catch a hold of the fact that your Paypal accounts are linked you could easily get shut down. Would be worth a phone call to explain your situation to an eBay rep (pro tip: If they tell you your account is at risk hang up and call back. Once they tell you your account is safe take down the call reference number and eBay employees name)

Anchor store gives you 2,500 items free and 5 cent insertions. Worth a subscribe

No. They always just assume I packaged it in an Amazon box myself. I've sold thousands of items and believe I've only had one instance where somebody brought it up- it was on a joint account.

This story is actually worth noting: Me and my buddy received an awesome email from one of our customers questioning a price difference between our item and amazons- dude actually looked the item up on Amazon

Turns out he lived in our town and went to the exact same CBTL me and my friend were at. He had a group of three girls with him and was going off about it.. His punch line was "I can't believe they're located here in Santa Barbara! I'm swear to god I'm either going to sue them or copy them"

Me and my buddy had a such good laugh about it... Little did he know (he couldn't have sued us. Arbitrage is completely legal)

It's easy to tell whether an eBay seller is dropshipping. Look his item up on Amazon- Multiply his eBay price by .13

Add that number to the amazon price

Subtract that number from his eBay listing price- If you do that to 3 or 4 of his items and he's making a profit on all of them he's dropshipping

All items get free 2-day shipping

theknott said:

Quick Question, Amazon is asking for a phone number for the shipping address. This may be printed on the label. What do you guys do for this?
EDIT: Didn't see my buyer provided a number. Does eBay give you a phone number as well?

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Congrats on the success!

DO NOT PROVIDE YOUR BUYERS PHONE NUMBER.

Here are examples of good phone numbers to use:

1234561100
3334441111
0029901100

^ You want these numbers to not exist

password01 said:

Yea, I've been kind of wondering about this too. Supposedly it's not really an issue - people don't care and only a few people post negative feedback because of it.

I am thinking about putting into my Terms and Conditions of each listing something along the following lines ::

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Nobody cares that it's coming in an Amazon package. Don't put anything about Amazon in your terms and conditions

Revise your listings so that nobody knows your items are coming from Amazon

What's your opinion of Amazon to Amazon dropshipping? I've seen many people doing that and it appears to be just as thriving.

abbas2 said:

What's your opinion of Amazon to Amazon dropshipping? I've seen many people doing that and it appears to be just as thriving.

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I think that selling products on eBay is more profitable. I used to work at a Starbucks some Amazon web developers regularly attended and I gathered that they search for really successful stores that they can undercut

Here's a speculative article http://www.forbes.com/sites/retailw...ing-third-party-sellers-using-their-own-data/

This is awesome that you are doing this, I want to thank you in advance.

Anyways, I tried drop shipping about a year ago but eventually gave up. Super embarrassing but I found the method I followed on Warrior Forum (I didn't know any better!) and followed it for about 4 months. It got more and more intense each month and on the final "phase" I found myself downloading and purchasing fucking terrible software that was designed to check for price fluctuations as well as act as a mass poster.

The posting didn't look good, like at all, and the price fluctuations were too much to keep up with and the software did a terrible job of fixing the issues that came up. I ended up getting banned because of all my cancelled orders due to the software not picking up on price changes on Amazon and me not being willing to constantly take huge hits.

ANYWAYS, thought that info may be valuable for my questions, as I would LOVE to get back into this.

1. About how much do you pay for your software and what is it doing for you?
2. How much time a day do you spend monitoring your prices, adding new products, shipping, etc etc. And how has your time commitment with this business grown or rose as the demand has?
3. When did you make the upgrade to a premium store? Another issue I had is I was getting destroyed by eBay fees.

WhyZee said:

This is awesome that you are doing this, I want to thank you in advance.

Anyways, I tried drop shipping about a year ago but eventually gave up. Super embarrassing but I found the method I followed on Warrior Forum (I didn't know any better!) and followed it for about 4 months. It got more and more intense each month and on the final "phase" I found myself downloading and purchasing fucking terrible software that was designed to check for price fluctuations as well as act as a mass poster.

The posting didn't look good, like at all, and the price fluctuations were too much to keep up with and the software did a terrible job of fixing the issues that came up. I ended up getting banned because of all my cancelled orders due to the software not picking up on price changes on Amazon and me not being willing to constantly take huge hits.

ANYWAYS, thought that info may be valuable for my questions, as I would LOVE to get back into this.

+1. About how much do you pay for your software and what is it doing for you?
2. How much time a day do you spend monitoring your prices, adding new products, shipping, etc etc. And how has your time commitment with this business grown or rose as the demand has?
3. When did you make the upgrade to a premium store? Another issue I had is I was getting destroyed by eBay fees.

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2. 0 time doing any of it. As demand picked up we were forced to find solutions (used to spend 4 hours a day fulfilling orders)
3. Every account goes premium as soon as it's created- you need to factor ebay fees into your pricing. $2 pm means $2 profit AFTER ebay fees

Euphorix said:

I used to work at a Starbucks some Amazon web developers regularly attended and I gathered that they search for really successful stores that they can undercut

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100% true. If you're TOO successful Amazon will start competing against its own sellers. ABSOLUTE TRUE STORY. I know a 3 seller partnership who was doing $100K+ a month an amazon. Somehow Amazon found out that one of the partners had been banned before on Amazon through his bank. The previously banned partner was not registered as a seller on Amazon, was not a shareholder in their corporation, had absolutely no link to the Amazon account except the bank info. Since bank does not give info to Amazon without a court order, we suspect that Amazon hired its own private investigation firm to find out. So they used that as an excuse to close down their Amazon seller account, and about 3 months later, Amazon themselves started selling knockoffs of the exact same thing the banned account were selling.

What is "dropshopping" ?

give me details please, I don't have a clue to what it is

Swiftly said:

What is "dropshopping" ?

give me details please, I don't have a clue to what it is

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In this scenario it means that Amazon is shipping your items to your customer. Here's an example of Dropshipping via arbitrage in action: You find a mug on Amazon priced at 20 dollars, you then list that mug on eBay for 32 dollars. It gets bought on eBay. You take $20 from the $32 your customer just gave you, purchase the item, have amazon send it to your customer, and you keep the remaining $12 as profit.

Paypal and eBay take 13 percent of your sale so you end the transaction with $7.84. This is more than enough to purchase this pocket stash, a domain, or the next low cost item that you sell.

Let me know if I can clarify any further

hateandbreak said:

Simple. Make a new account and link the same paypal. eBay allows multiple accounts but don't over do it.

Your new account will be a 500/25000 after you list an item (can be anything to activate the seller account).

Fill out everything you possibly can inside the eBay account. Hope this helps!

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This always works even if you've sold nothing on the original 5 limit account?

1morenoob said:

This always works even if you've sold nothing on the original 5 limit account?

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Yeah. Unless you're using a stealth abandon the 5 item selling limit account

It will save you 7 months (assuming you get an upgrade every thirty days)

Hey, sorry but I am a complete newbie to the whole Ebay scene. Can you explain what drop shipping is? Sorry if its a bit too much to ask, just wanting to learn a new method. Thanks.

berrset said:

Hey, sorry but I am a complete newbie to the whole Ebay scene. Can you explain what drop shipping is? Sorry if its a bit too much to ask, just wanting to learn a new method. Thanks.

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Its explained in the post above.....

berrset said:

Hey, sorry but I am a complete newbie to the whole Ebay scene. Can you explain what drop shipping is? Sorry if its a bit too much to ask, just wanting to learn a new method. Thanks.

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Euphorix said:

In this scenario it means that Amazon is shipping your items to your customer. Here's an example of Dropshipping via arbitrage in action: You find a mug on Amazon priced at 20 dollars, you then list that mug on eBay for 32 dollars. It gets bought on eBay. You take $20 from the $32 your customer just gave you, purchase the item, have amazon send it to your customer, and you keep the remaining $12 as profit.

Paypal and eBay take 13 percent of your sale so you end the transaction with $7.84. This is more than enough to purchase this pocket stash, a domain, or the next low cost item that you sell.

Let me know if I can clarify any further

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Giving you the answer because it was your first post on bhw. Welcome

Grab a coffee to sip on and through the thread buddy

A question about having a shop on Ebay, do you sell anything or a specific type of item...i.e. kitchen appliances or movie memorabilia...if you have a mish mash of allsorts doesn't it look odd?
After reading this thread again have now got the push to start again,have put a few items up i can make a profit on, want to upscale to a shop soon, i am concentrating on UK at the moment as this is where i am based.

I've just been tricking around with my account (Web and API).

There doesn't seem to be any mention of limits anywhere... does that mean I am unlimited?

Also, looks I got access to the File Exchange. That's pretty rad, right? I can now get my VA's to maintain listings through there without giving them direct access to my account or anything..?

bookmarked this thread will cross that bridge when i get there, looking for a sweat product as of now.

Y M C M B said:

bookmarked this thread will cross that bridge when i get there, looking for a sweat product as of now.

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Dude, the idea isn't really about a "sweet product" - I'm pretty sure it's a numbers game where you list as many items as possible.

Then, using the general rule of thumb you will sell 1% of your listings.

You will need a strategy that enables you to bulk identify products that you can list and profit from.

Good for you! I personally have crushed it selling a mish mash of products (there is an order to the chaos of course)

You can go either way though. One of the more profitable stores I've ever come across only sold paintball related equipment

david g rees said:

A question about having a shop on Ebay, do you sell anything or a specific type of item...i.e. kitchen appliances or movie memorabilia...if you have a mish mash of allsorts doesn't it look odd?
After reading this thread again have now got the push to start again,have put a few items up i can make a profit on, want to upscale to a shop soon, i am concentrating on UK at the moment as this is where i am based.

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Your selling limits will be under the My Selling section. They'll usually appear after you list an item or two

password01 said:

There doesn't seem to be any mention of limits anywhere... does that mean I am unlimited?

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Y M C M B said:

bookmarked this thread will cross that bridge when i get there, looking for a sweat product as of now.

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password01 said:

Dude, the idea isn't really about a "sweet product" - I'm pretty sure it's a numbers game where you list as many items as possible.

Then, using the general rule of thumb you will sell 1% of your listings.

You will need a strategy that enables you to bulk identify products that you can list and profit from.

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The trick is to list a massive amount of "sweet items". We say 1% because it's a very conservative/realistic starting point. We're doing 3% a day now but we've also been in the game awhile and have developed an eye for products that will repeatedly sell