Hi
I am considering selling items on eBay.
I am wondering how do people become the intermediary between say Samsung products and the consumer?
2ndly how does it work?
Do I buy items from Samsung and sell them? what if they don't sell - can I possibly return them back?
any insight greatly appreciated.
hypothetical
Ask Samsung, say "I want to be a Samsung reseller"
Samsung is a high profile company. As such, they might have certain standards about who can stock their retail products and where it can be sold. This is going to be up to each company's management and how good your proposal is. As far as I know, your proposal regarding sending the stock back is similar to selling stock on consignment. You would pay a fee to have access to stock and maybe settle at the end of each month. Or even ship stock straight from your supplier, after it's been sold (drop shipping).
You have to factor in fees of around 20% with eBay and the fact that there are many established sellers in most categories. Certain items can have good prices but finding these gaps in the market takes research or luck.
If you want to become a reseller/retailer for electronics you'd need to get an agreement with the manufacturer.
These agreements will layout payment terms, prices, stock terms (including potential returns of unsold stock).
If you're a massive retailer with a solid network and a large customer base you've got some leverage to negotiate decent terms.
If you're some guy with zero customer base and no platform reach that isn't available directly to the manufacturer (eg eBay) you have zero leverage and will likely have to pay upfront and make big orders to even be considered by big brands.
Different story if you plan to buy a container load of cheap crap from overseas. Buy it and sell it off at the highest price possible - profit.
that was an idea but wouldnt that impose import duty on the product here?
i was thinking electronics and perfumes.
Depending on what you are selling there are parallel import laws for some stuff that can make you legally exposed to the existing rights owner(s). meaning that if you somehow buy a container of closeout Samsung tablets from the US and try to import then flog them off here, Samsung Australia could possibly sue you for selling in their territory etc.
Additionally you will pay GST on the stuff you are importing.
I used to be an ebay Powerseller and getting access to good stock at a good price is the key to profitability.
So then how does a newbie start.
looks like a chicken and egg problem.
Do you have an idea on what you want to sell? Do you have contacts or know where to source the said items that can be sold for a decent profit?
The second statement, I don't see anyone telling you that, it's a business secret. To me it sounds like you want a get rich quick method without having done any basic googling research. If I (or anyone) can make good money selling something, why would I tell you?
You'd need a solid business plan and decent financial backing so you could pay upfront for an opening order of stock.
It's not a chicken and egg problem at all, it's just not a "get rich quick" situation either. If you want to get in a position to stock the best goods and make great margins on them you have to do the hard yards.
To break into a highly saturated market like consumer electronics you'd need:
A point of difference, why shop with you over the established stores?
A long term plan. You won't make money up front, and whilst you try to break into a market and win customers you'll probably lose money. You need to have a plan that shows how you can ride out this phase
Be willing to work long and hard. This is an established market, it will not be easy to break into. Read up on the work ethic of someone like Kogan and the hours he still pulls.
Just remember, if it were easy, we'd all do it.
I did this a few years ago and the trick is to do a lot of research. Have a look at what sells then research what you could source that stuff for. Run some numbers in excel to see if you can turn a profit factoring in all of the associated costs (ebay fees, paypal fees, postage fees, GST etc). Do you have the time and energy to spend days/evenings putting stuff into postbags/boxes then posting. Do you have a PO Box, are you willing to spend hours dealing with morons. This last point is the thing I didnt realise until I was involved. I could write a book about some of the crazies out there! it can be very trying if you are doing this part-time to come home and find out your wife is upset at answering calls or having randoms turn up at your front door to complain about a frayed seam on a pair of $7 bike shorts that you have already given them a refund and apology for etc. Make sure all of your personal contact details are hidden and the only contact details are your PO Box number and maybe a dedicated shop mobile etc. Even then some web sleuths will find you to chase you about something mad.
When you are doing your numbers factor in that not everything you list up will sell. Do good research on what your likely products currently sell for. Dont expect that what you think is a good/fair deal will be shared by others. Can you beat the prices of others or can you somehow differentiate yourself.
As a powerseller I used to be part of some Powerseller only closed online forums and used to get invites to the PSA conferences etc (Professional sellers alliance). My experience seemed to be fairly common and most eBay sellers loved to whinge about the crazies out on the net. If you can find something worth selling where the numbers stack up you should make sure that you are respectful and never take the crazies to heart. Even when i was furious I used to apologise to the crazies and offer them a refund. I have actually had crazies stall or refuse a refund from me because they wanted to have an argument. I had one guy wanting to use his $7 purchase as a way to engage me in debate about the evils of capitalism and the benefits of communism. I tried politely to give him his $$ back and apologise for whatever he thought was wrong with my product and he openly told me that he didnt care about the product or the refund, he wanted to point out to me that my making a profit off others was immoral and wrong etc etc. I had another tell me he bought one of my products but didnt like the colour, he wanted to return it to me for a different colour, when i explained that I only had one colour the item he received was the exact item in the photos on the listing. He demanded i have the factory make him a custom one in his preferred colour or he would leave me neg feedback. I politely declined and refunded his $$, he posted up some neg feedback and also banked his refund.
Some sellers get massively upset over the crazies. Sorry i seem to have gone on about it but dealing with them is the single biggest thing i wasnt expecting when i started selling on eBay.
ebay really is no place to make a living. its so time consuming & tedious. If you have good products, your better off making your own website & building it from the ground up. Ebay is full of competition & the worst part is fee's. Plus no-one wants to pay postage because its dead money, so they factor that into whether or not they buy the product. I'm no expert but the profit margins are slim & the trips to the post office are annoying to say the least
re your comment - "trips to the post office are annoying" - what do high volume sellers do? how do they post 100 items a day - surely they dont make 1 big trip to the post office.
and your comment - "If you have good products, your better off making your own website & building it from the ground up."
postage and trips would be the same for any online website too?
although i do agree re the eBay fees part.
There are prepaid satchels you can buy from the postoffice that you drop in the post boxes on the side of the road. Make life easier but you need capital for those also because they are about $7.00 each and only hold 500 grams (you can buy bigger ones that hold more but they cost evne more). I think you get a deal if you buy in bulk but that's a chunk of change before you have sold a product.
will get to the 2nd part later. at work right now
I recently got hold of some electrical stuff which i could sell on Ebay - but the items were weighing 7kg each. so postage was troublesome in that i needed to go to the post office in person.
So for small items i can post in the post boxes on the road.. but for the larger items i cant -hence my Q of how do mid-high volume sellers do it?
currently i only sell about 2-3 items a week. but if i work something out - i maybe able to sell more items maybe x number a day.
(i don't call 2-3 items a day high volume - but good to know if there are better postage options available)
i called a couple of courier companies and they work out to be more expensive than auspost.
Where do you source your goods from ?? I sell mostly 2nd hand stuff. I want to sell new stuff. I know a way you can 7kg box for cheap
You can buy the 'Satchells' in bulk from the 'Aust Post' ebay shop. I used to buy them by the 100's. I literally used to spend my nights packaging things up and putting them into a big bag in the boot of my car. If the load was small enough for a post box i would drop them off early in the morning on the way to work, if there were too many for a Post Box the Post Office used to give me big sacks. i would fill up a sack and take it in my lunch break to a nearby business Post Office.
Selling something that is easy to pack (ie fit into a 500g post satchel) makes the whole process much easier. I tried selling bulky things once and the time spent wrapping them up for postage was not worth the profit I was making. There are special eBay satchels now where you can print out the actual postage details straight from eBay and insert on the Satchel. back when i started you used to have to rewrite every one with a texta onto each bag!
eBay can be frustrating to deal with and most sellers feel the balance of power is with the buyers. The commissions are high. i tried other online auction sites but frankly, although their terms were much better the only place I could sell my products was eBay. If you are able to setup your own store you can make more profits but it comes with a whole raft of complications to have merchant accounts, ensure SEO of your webpage, getting your shop out and recognised through advertising etc. there have been some very successful sites that grew out of ebay like Surfstitch i think and maybe Kogan as well. eBay is a cheap and easy way to get started.
I had my shop for a couple of years and it steadily grew, in the end i had a pretty loyal customer base and i was making around $1K per month in clear profit. I reckon that if i had tried I could possibly have made a real business out of what was really a hobby that got out of hand. In the end i switched full time jobs and had to travel interstate a lot. People didnt like waiting for their stuff to be posted out and I couldnt take my stock with me interstate for 5 days on a business trip so it became increasingly hard to manage. I tried getting relatives etc to help but that just created a whole new set of dramas. in the end i stopped about 2 years ago.
Without giving out your secrets what were you selling ?
@PAOK11: Bike clothes and compression wear. I managed to find a reliable supplier through Alibaba that was OK initially to sell me small batches of stock. Good idea on his part because what started out as $150 ish transactions for tens of pairs of shorts grew into thousands of dollar orders for enormous boxes worth orf hundreds of pairs of shorts per month.
I was very concerned about the whole 'piracy' potential so I made sure my supplier put a logo I designed onto every pair of shorts I sold. I literally had my own sportswear brand I guess!! Logo was something I madeup one lunchtime using MS Office at work, took 5 mins and I just sent the factory the .png file. My reasoning was that if the only logo on the shorts was one I owned then i wouldnt be infrionging on any trademartks. Additionally, the factory had a catalogue of their own 'house' designs for products. i didn't design my own, I just bought theirs and had then sew my logo on the side.
I ended up at bike clothes because I tried a couple of other items that went OK but not great. I went to buy some bikeshorts for lunchtime spin classes and couldnt believe Lycra shorts were costing me over $100. I did some research and some maths and found that there was not a lot of sellers in that category at the time. The prices I was being quoted by the factory+ the commissions I would have to pay left me with a nice profit so I went ahead.
At first I was interested in the shorts/stock etc but in the end it was mostly about competition and $$. EBay kept changing their commission schemes and how they priced listings and Final Value Fees. It was a real PITA to have to rejig everything whenever eBay decided to 'improve' their fee structure, bad luck if I had a garage full of bikeshorts bought on the basis of a fee structure they changed at random. I tried selling other things from time to time, compression shorts were great sellers around the time footy training starts up every Feb/March. Compression tights sold well when it started getting cold on a run around May.
I would spend a lot of time looking at how my listings compared to competitors and re-running my spreadsheets to check prices. There were other competitors with cheaper shorts, i even bought a pair of the real cheap ones and they were pretty bad quality compared to mine. I had some great customers that left good feedback and I often sold even though my shorts were a bit more expensive. I planned to sell about 1 in 4 of the listings I put up. the others were automatically re-listed.
I planned in my costings to have to write off a couple of sales a month. To keep my feedback good I almost always rolled over and gave people refunds if they asked. I had people try to scam me but not as often as people make out. It might be worse with electronics but bikeshort buyers were mostly OK, just the odd time-consuming mentally disturbed nutbag here and there.
@2ndeffort wow what a fantastic story, thank-you for sharing. This gives me inspiration to expand my little business.
Want to sell on ebay do you? LMAO be prepared to get scammed. I sold a brand new sealed Telstra Y5 with invoice. 18 days later buyer opens case, battery is hot and phone restarts. I explained that I am private seller and I sent the item as described and he should go back to manufacturer. EBAY rules in his favour and I get back a opened/ used phone missing the sim card that is in perfect working condition. He ruined my feedback too. In the end I contact fair trading and ebay end providing a ''one time good will'' refund and I sell the phone for $80 on gumtree but still not worth it if you ask me. Stricly pickup only from now never again will I post anything.
Research is the key. Find the demand, source the product.
If you can get these 2 right then you can make money if the profit is worth the effort.
I sell one product on eBay.10 units max a month (my account is limited for some reason). For the amount of time it takes me to sell(list, correspond,pack&send) these 10 items I end up with about $150 profit for 3 hours work in total. It's beer money. Those 3 hours would be wasted any way, so I drink my "free beer" whilst ebaying.
I supply prepaid satchels to some ebay sellers
Let me know when you are ready to sell on ebay
Just don't even go there Sheya. You will waste a lot of your time, you will make no money, and there is a fairly large chance you will actually lose money; and possibly credibility as well (with your friends/family/your bank/etc.). Quite frankly, this is not something a 'newbie' should even think about doing, at least not from Australia. The 'market' for this type of 'service' is well-and-truly saturated, and besides, ebay is really only beneficial for private sellers who want to get rid of stuff, or big companies selling BULK amounts of stuff, themselves.
It is referred to as 'FEEbay by many for good reason, and the entire system is also quite heavily skewed in favour of the buyers rather than the sellers, re 'returns'/refunds/disputed transactions etc.; which makes it an attractive 'hunting ground' for scammers. It's my guess that a self-described 'newbie' would be particularly vulnerable to these unscrupulous 'buyers'.
Do yourself a favour, and head back to the drawing board.
If ebay buyers report things wrong with the product - have them return it and refund the $$.
how many people will intentionally damage a product only to get their $$ back. not more than 25% (I hope).
Also your ebay store should point people to your main website - where majority of the sales would come from.
eventually hike up the ebay price - lead them to the cheaper store URL.
Non-Ebay question…
I wonder if things go wrong - i.e. product gets damage in transit (after ordering from non-ebay website) what options do the buyers have to report sellers?
in the event the seller doesnt acknowledge the buyers problems?
Just a thought, how do you plan to buy off Samsung or are you using Samsung as a hypothetical ?