Selling Online.

DavidNW

DavidNW

Big Geek
Hi,

Anyone had any experiences of marketing online? So many people seem to be making a living by selling online. There is something called 'drop shipping', someone purchases something from, say, your website, you take their order and pass the details onto a kind of wholesaler, then they - ship the product direct to the buyer and you keep any profits.

David
 
Dropshipping is great if you get something that will sell and gives you enough return. You should get stuff for 50% when dropshipping. Good dropshippers provide catalogues without shop branding, PO BOX return address so you can whack your shop name on top of the address, invoices/receipts with your letterhead etc.

Ive also had trade accounts with people too. Generally they ask for an initial minimum order of a resonable size then lower min orders after. ie £500/100. The outlay, returning of goods etc is the worry.

Also sometimes things just stop selling. I had 1000's of resealable bags, envelopes, smoking papers, notebook left over from my selling days. Thy eventually go but I relied on regular sales.

I made most money from sex toys (!), resealable bags and dietry/body building products. I know someone who makes a killing selling organic growing mediums, plant nutrients from internet suppliers.

You would be surprised whats sells. I made £30 a day for a good year or so from 2"x2" resealable bags.

Checkout Alibaba if you want to take a risk. I know people to have made a killing by selling LAN cards from a site like Alibaba. They also used to buy cheap stuff off ebay and resell. Big money in buying old vans (10years plus... £500 jobbies) giving them a clean, MOT etc and resell. Honestly, big money!! ie My ibook was bought for £120 and I could have sold it for loads more.... double if I was lucky at the time. My dSLR was bought for £200 with 4 lenses.... every other similar auction was around £450-£500. Gold toothpicks slip by on ebay every now and ten for a tenner, resell for £100.

I never did any proper internet selling but made about £1000 a month on ebay.... and email. I used to email my old ebay customers offering them more of what they bought the first time from me... offer to do the sale on ebay and a good 10% of them would buy again.

Marble Tesserae for making roman/classical mosaics is expensive but stone mason will almost pay you to get rid of the waste they produce. Its easy to chop it up with a tile whizzer.

You could sell information. Useless info for a £1 on ebay... I did the dirty selling website addresses "buy a 52" Sony Bravia" for £20. £1 for the address and about 20 sales a day.

My stepdad sells "healthy living" info. He's got a website selling subscriptions to access Yoga/Pilates videos, articles written by dietricians and doctors hes contacted etc. $20 a month and a fair few subscribers.
 
Wow! Thanks a lot - some very encouraging information there. I'll check a few things out. Thinking of buying my own website from a drop shipping company. If I do that, I will have to try hard to get a lot of search engines listings so that people can actually be directed to the site! You could have a really great looking site - but of course, you need buyers to be able to see it! There's lots of offers from companies to get you listed - at a price. However, I'm not too confident that you'll get hits on the first 2 pages of Google - which would be where you would want to be seen.
 
I reckon dropship providers make more money from selling those sites than the products! Like the ebook people.... "buy my ebook, it tells you how to make millions!"
Not saying its a bad thing though. It takes a lot of time to do your own site. I had problems adding my 2500 products. It was a 750,000 cell spreadsheet. I should have paid a student £6 ph or summit!

Id look into osCommerce and maybe a graphic designer for your logo if you want a site. It isnt all that difficult. Your rank on the search engine pages is a tough one. Thats hard work.

I thought about creating osCommerce websites with a domain name included and all products preloaded and then sell the site with the dropshippers details included. Once you have done one its a matter of a new logo and colour scheme and its a new site and a new business to sell.
 
Found a Chinese wholesaler that will sell Chanel No5 for the equivilent of £10.00 per bottle. You, have to buy a lot of 12 pieces. They ship that for you for free. Just checked on ebay and that same product is up for auction at £36.00 per item, with a lot of bidders.

Your profit margins would be very good if you sold, even at the current bid price, even with ebay's selling fees. It all sounds too good to be true. What concerns me is the question of: "Are these products genuine?". I guess you will only know that when they arrive.
 
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