Have you tried drop shipping to boost sales?
One of the hardest things to do when running an ebay business is finding a never ending supply of products to sell, and keeping up with new trends and new products.
There are a very large number of ebay seller who use drop shipping as a cheap and efficient way to run their ebay store "back room"
Imagine you never had to buy stock, pay up front, store hundreds of different items, and then post to all your happy customers. Well that is the point of drop shipping!
You never actually touch the item you are selling with drop shipping.
How it works is you open an account with a drop shipping company. These companies typically stock thousands of products, and they give you a "trade" discount if you sell one of their items.
If you sell one of thier products, you order it for your customer and pay the "trade" price, and keep the difference to what your customer paid you (minus ebay and paypal fees of course). The high professional and organised drop shipping company then sends the item to your customer.
Just to spell that out again:
you advertise a product for more than the "trade" price and what ever ebay fees etc
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a customer buys form you, and pays you
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You order the item from the drop shipper and provide your customers postal details
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The drop shipper sends the item to your customer and provides tracking number
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you tell your customer the tracking number
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they get the item thinking it was sent buy you, you get good feed back
Easy money right? No not always. It is easy, and hence other people are going to be as on to this as you are. As a result the margins tend to be very small. But when you consider all you have to do is answer emails, order products, and enter shipping details etc, it can be a very easy way to run a business.
One drop shipper I have come across is Focal Price.
Their range is huge, but be very carefull to ensure they are selling a real name brand item, and not something "for" use with a name brand item (this is the case when ever dealing with a new supplier.
I suggest always ordering the item yourself first to check it out.
It then comes down to your skill in researching the market (terapeak being the #1 tool) and having attractive listings and ebay presence that make customers buy from you not somebody else.
SaleHoo is a fantastic company that has made finding drop shippers much easier as well.
They have 1500+ verified legitimate drop shippers on their data base, and like EBay they allow feed back. So if a source is found by any of the other members (or SaleHoo's anonymous purchases from a source) to not be good to deal with, you will find it on the feed back section, or by checking the forums.
They also offer a lot of research and education tools that I’ll be writing about more.
