Duplicating Listings From Amazon to Ebay

well my bright idea is to make a duplicate of as many 'Hot' items from amazon as possible, and post them on ebay. my guess is that i'll have 3-5 duplicates of each item, totalling between 10,000 - 500,000 ebay listings. Even if all i make is $.25 off each item, my expectation is that having a massive number of popular items will still drive very many daily sales, almost inevitably. This process will be completely automated, where i will have minimal involvement anywhere in this process.

are there any good reasons you can think of that this idea wont work? at this point, all i can think of is to figure out a way to ensure i dont post any VERO items, (which i know nothing about.) my work-around for this, since i dont know much about the so-called 'Vero Police,' is to just check and see if the item in question is also for sale from other sellers. if there are more than 2 different sellers with the same item posted, i would make the assumption (potentially incorrectly) that this item is not a Vero item, since it hasnt been removed from the other sellers. this doesnt seem like the best approach toward the vero problem but im confident that i can figure out a way over it either way. although the 'wait-and-see' method is not realistic with this many items being posted.

any thoughts?

Several problems you will encounter with your idea as I see it (I do both sides of the drop shipping business)

braveIndia said:

well my bright idea is to make a duplicate of as many 'Hot' items from amazon as possible, and post them on ebay.

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The problem with this is that there is 15% selling cost on eBay and on "hot" items the price differential tends to be less.

braveIndia said:

my guess is that i'll have 3-5 duplicates of each item, totalling between 10,000 - 500,000 ebay listings.

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1. You would need a massive eBay account to pull it off. If you don't have such an account already, it would probably cost thousands of $ to buy an account that is big enough and has enough selling history to support this without getting banned quickly.
2. You would be dealing with hundreds of sellers in this scenario. Considering that return rates on eBay can be up to 20% depending on the niche. Will you be able to handle the returns efficiently?

braveIndia said:

Even if all i make is $.25 off each item, my expectation is that having a massive number of popular items will still drive very many daily sales, almost inevitably. This process will be completely automated, where i will have minimal involvement anywhere in this process.

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1. Making $0.25 each item is recipe for disaster. What happens when you get scammed out of a $200 item in an attempt to make $0.25? You would have to sell 800 items for no profit just to break even. Also consider that you have to provide return shipping label paid for by you if a customer complains that item is defective, and return labels can cost $10-20 on bulky items.
2. There are already Chinese operations that do this with proprietary software. You would be competing with them.

braveIndia said:

are there any good reasons you can think of that this idea wont work?

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1. In order to have any chance you need to avoid "hot" items since they have the most competition doing the same thing, and "hot" item sellers who move volume tend to sell on both eBay and Amazon so you will be at a price disadvantage.
2. You need to make way way war more profit than $0.25 an item.

braveIndia said:

at this point, all i can think of is to figure out a way to ensure i dont post any VERO items, (which i know nothing about.) my work-around for this, since i dont know much about the so-called 'Vero Police,' is to just check and see if the item in question is also for sale from other sellers. if there are more than 2 different sellers with the same item posted, i would make the assumption (potentially incorrectly) that this item is not a Vero item, since it hasnt been removed from the other sellers.

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VERO is much more complex than that. For example you can have 100 sellers with the exact same item and you can still get banned when you list the exact same item because the level of policing varies by countries. So if you copy a Chinese listing on a US account, that can get you banned.

With ebay accounts, you are limited to sell a certain amount every month, and its not much, even if you upgrade to power seller, they still throttle your account, so you can't upload the number of listings that they claim, and it takes a month each time to speak to someone on support and ask them to upgrade your listing capacity.

all excellent points. although i am new with this general idea of dropshipping duplicates from amazon, i am not new to selling, so stuff like profit margin and returns are not an issue and as far as i can see, have been worked out thoroughly in advance. when i said a $.25 profit, i was just using it as an example. the profit margin will always be a specific percentage of the original price. also, i dont do returns mostly. most likely, if someone wanted a return from me, because of how rarely they typically happen, i would just refund the money and tell the buyer to keep the item. omitting any return-shipping woes. (this would also be dependant on the niche/niches i use).

accounts with high selling limits are for sale through buyvcc. so it wouldnt be one enormous account, but probably as many as two dozen computer-controlled medium-sized accounts. and even if, for some reason, i wasnt able to use buyvcc accounts, i still have the ability to generate all of my own accounts as well as slow-incoming feedback, as many as i need. and i can even wait a year for them to age if needed. my goal is to start slowly to stay under the radar, regardless of where the account comes from.

when i mention 'hot' items, i also mean items that i have found through computerized research to be popular. not necessarily the items that paypal posts as their 'hot' items. items that are in-demand but also with little competition.

braveIndia said:

all excellent points. although i am new with this general idea of dropshipping duplicates from amazon, i am not new to selling

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Then go do it. Don't ask random strangers. You'll learn a lot more by trying and failing until you can iron out the problems.

I can agree with that, everything I've been able to learn has been thru try/fail/repeat. I just know that getting an account blocked for X amount of time can quickly spiral out of control. And I get very little opportunity to focus on the specificity of any individual item, so I really have to pay attention to staying within the guidelines while handling mass information at a time.

I think I'll start with reading up on Vero so I can do my best to avoid it. I see that Vero is more complicated than I thought, but if I was able to find a nice list or collection of items that are labeled as vero items, I can get a better idea of how to avoid them on a mass-scale level.

I've been able to locate a few hundred ebay sellers who I've found to be dropshipping their complete inventory from amazon, so im also considering using their sales records as guides to help me in the right direction.

braveIndia said:

if I was able to find a nice list or collection of items that are labeled as vero items, I can get a better idea of how to avoid them on a mass-scale level.

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ALL branded items are potential VERO items. If you want to avoid VERO items completely the only way to make sure is to avoid branded items.

braveIndia said:

I've been able to locate a few hundred ebay sellers who I've found to be dropshipping their complete inventory from amazon, so im also considering using their sales records as guides to help me in the right direction.

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And I would guess most of them make no money, from what I've seen from my dealings with them. Most people whom I've come across who I'm reasonably sure makes "better than getting a job" wage dropshipping are either large Chinese operations or at least semi-dominant niche players who source off Amazon. If you source them off Amazon, your are already at a cost disadvantage because your cost includes Amazon selling fees which can be 20%.

You can't list a bunch of items unless you have an account that has been aged with tons of feedback and trust. I suggest you sell slowly and build up each month. Good luck

in a previous post i mentioned that i was a self-described 'ebay programmer.' so for this project, when i say i want to sell 'hot' items, i am going to be creating my own list of hot items by ;etting my computer do lots and lots of automated research. its great because ill be able to find some, if not all of the best-selling items on ebay, where profit amount wont be as much of an issue.

previously i did the same with a Dak Prescott Football Jersey, on a much smaller scale. (I dont even remember who he is or who he plays for lol.) my computer generated a single item with excellent sales rates (not an entire niche), and instantly made sales. because i was able to let my software do the research, i was able to sell 2-3 jerseys per day at a $20 profit. and that was just one single item, again let alone if i have 10,000 items up for sale. not to mention, using this methodology of research, im able to greatly reduce the amount of non-sales, where typically in the past ive sold 85%+ of my entire inventory in under 7 days. so again, the issue is not so much whether or not ill be making money doing it, because i definitely will. the issue, it seems, is whether or not i'll have any other unforeseen complications arise that i havent already worked out. buyvcc accounts are expensive, and selling slowly a must. in which case getting a bunch of vero suspensions or getting banned because of vero would be disastrous.

also, can you give me a better example of some branded items vs. un-branded items?