There are a few ways to sell items on these auction websites, i’ll give you a brief overview of the ones that i know about and then I’m going to focus on the one that i have found works best.
Method 1 – You can buy rare collectables from other countries that will sell well in your own country. For example you could sell things like American comics or American style furniture in the UK because there is a good market for it.
Method 2 – Buy rarities such as antiques or rare books and then sell them to the world market. This generally works best on ebay but you should know about the cost you are paying for it and the amount you can sell it for. You can’t expect to buy a product from ebay and then sell it back for a higher price in the same place. For this you will have to buy locally or from other niche websites.
Method 3 – This is the final and what i consider the best and safest way to sell things on auction websites and that is buying in bulk from a wholesaler and then selling them off individually.
This way you can get the best deal on your products and you can also do your research before hand to know roughly how much profit you are going to make. When you are working it out the things you need to factor into your profit margins are:
1) How much the batch of items is going to cost you.
2)How much it is going to cost you to get them posted to your door.
3)How much the packaging is going to cost you in order to send it off to your customers.
4)How much the product is going to cost to post each time for a variety of different postal services (next day, second class e.t.c)
5) How you are going to sell your products on these websites and what the commission they are going to take off you will be for each product.
Other things that you will have to factor in but you can’t really prepare for is you may have to post up items several times before they get sold. Also if you decide to sign up for the monthly service, such as getting an ebay shop, you will have to make sure you sell the items quickly enough to make up for the monthly bill.
Once you have done all of this you can take all of those costs away from the total retail price that you can expect to get and then you will have a rough idea about how much money you can make with each item.
This method means you can plan ahead and set up a more reliable business model, you get to choose products you know are already selling so you don’t really have to test your products and finally you can plan to reinvest your profits to get larger quantities and make bigger savings and therefore bigger profits.
I’m not going to get into this much but just a quick word about the Amazon vs Ebay debate. I recommend that you test this out for yourself but in general Amazon is best for selling items from wholesale and Ebay is best for selling items which are more rare and special. The ebay shop seems to be a better monthly service though because you have more options for setting up your shop
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