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I have looked into selling new products on ebay as a business and other places and I swear the compitition is incredible. So many willing to make just a buck or less on thier new product items.
what's truly amazing is how many sellers are actually losing money and apparently dont realize it. And even the ones that are making money, many arent making enough.
there was one seller that used to be on ebay (havent seen any sign of him for some time now) that was buying from one of the same places I buy from, so i know his cost. He was selling at a mere 20% markup. And it was through his ebay store, so he was paying 8% in FVFs to ebay, plus PP fees, etc.
lessee, buys it for $100, sells it for $120, ebay takes out 9.60, paypal takes $3.78 (2.9% + $0.30), so we have $120-$9.60-$3.78 which is $106.62 And since his s/h was right about the same amount that it would cost to ship + u-pic insurance, we wont can pretty much ignore s/h expense and s/h charged to customer.
So, for a $120 item he woulda made a whopping $6.62! and that's not including listing fees, and accounting for having to relist for items that dont sell. which admittedly, it's only 3-cents to list in a store, but nonetheless...
Most of his items were less expensive than that, his avg price was right around $40. So, lesse what a $40 item works out to be. cost would have been $33.30, ebay fvfs would be $3.20, pp fees would be $1.46. $40-$33.30-$3.2-$1.46 = $2.04 profit.
and none of this is including all the auctions that were run to lure people to store, and the ones that didnt sell at auction...
lesse - a $40 item at auction has a $1.20 insertion fee, has a FVF of $1.76, and paypal fee of $1.46. this time it's $40-$33.30-$1.20-$1.76-$1.46 = $2.28 profit (IF it sells)
You'd think that his time was worth at least minimum wage....
another one of my favorites is the people that spend 15 cents in order to make a penny. Search ebay for items that are started at $1.00. If they'd have started them at 99-cents the insertion fee would be 15-cents less.
first thing you have to do when starting a business is to understand your expenses involved in said business.
course, another thing that is killing sales for people trying to make a profit is all the stolen goods being sold on ebay, all the counterfeit goods being sold as genuine (fake prada, etc), and all the fake items being sold as real (many times i've seen fake turquoise being sold as real, fake coral coral as real, silverplate as sterling, etc.). And then there's all the short Karat stuff being sold as gold (in the US it's illegal to call it gold if it's less than 10K), gold plated being adverised as real gold and then in tiny print buried in the ad you find that it's plated, etc.
between the people that cant figure out if theyre making money, the people that are selling stolen goods, the misrepresented stuff that the seller is misrepresenting simply becuase s/he doesnt know their product, and the scammers, it's tough. it's really tough.
