How to make money on eBay selling products you don't have...
There are plenty of people out there making a good living - either part time or full time - by selling on eBay, but it does comes with some disadvantages.
Firstly there is the question of risk. In order to sell things you need to buy them from wholesalers in the first place. That means spending money upfront in the hope of making a profit later on. Secondly you've got the problem of storage.
This isn't too much of a worry if you sell something small like watches or pocket money toys for example, but if you sell exercise equipment you'll soon run out of room to store it all. And then there's the problem of posting it out to your customer.
Fortunately there is a solution which wipes out all of these problems in one fell swoop.
It goes by the name of dropshipping, and there are plenty of people out there who make a good living from it.
How selling on eBay NORMALLY works
If you have a product you want to sell, you would usually take a photo of it, write a nice description, weigh it and figure out the postage, and then list it in the hope that someone somewhere will buy it.Success! A few days later someone does, at which point you accept payment, wrap the whole thing up, trot down to your local post office and queue up to pay for the postage. Then you wave it goodbye as it wings its way to your buyer. Job done. Then it's off home to start all over again.
Drop shipping, on the other hand, is rather different. For one thing you won't need to worry about visiting the post office anymore :-)
Is it possible to sell a product you don't have?
With drop shipping, you are basically selling a product on behalf of someone else.They will give you all the information and pictures you need to be able to create a good listing and you list the item as normal, charging the same amount for postage as the drop shipper would if someone bought it directly from them.
When someone buys it you accept payment just as you would normally. But the next stage is very different. Instead of getting an item ready to post, you log in to your online dropshipper account, pay for the item plus postage and enter your customer's details as the destination address.
The dropshipper then mails the item off to them - no packing to do for you, no queuing at the post office and no storage issues to worry about.
So how do you make money with a drop shipper?
The prices you will see on the drop shipper's site when you log in won't be the same as the prices your customers will pay. You will normally find you can set your own prices - which can easily be double the drop shipper's base price, sometimes even more.So let's say you sell a DVD on eBay for $15 plus $1.50 postage. Your drop shipper will mail this out for $6 plus $1.50 postage. Your customer sends you $16.50, you send $7.50 to the drop shipper, and keep $9 as profit - less your eBay fees.
You can see how selling even ten or fifteen items a day can bring in a decent income every week. All you need to do is find a drop shipper which gives you the opportunity to put a decent mark up on a popular range of related items, in the hope that you can make some multiple sales as well as single ones.
How to get started
The first step is to find a decent drop shipper. You should always do your research first to make sure you select a good quality company to do business with.It's a good idea to find some online forums to ask around in to see if anyone can recommend a good drop shipper to use. Try and find out as much as you can about an individual dropshipper before working with them. Searching on Google will also bring up some results, and again while the annual fee to use a drop shipper is usually quite low anyway you can always start with a free one until you gain some experience.
Once you've found a good dropshipper spend some time looking through what goods they are offering for sale. Some will provide detailed descriptions that you can simply download to your computer or copy and paste into Turbo Lister - eBay's free bulk listing tool.
Make sure you know exactly how things work before you start listing the items; that way when you get your first order you will be able to process it quickly and smoothly. Remember not to process any orders until you have received cleared funds, so wait for cheques to clear if you are paid by this method.
For people who want to start selling items on eBay with little or no start up capital, dropshipping can be the ideal solution. So long as you do your research and don't get caught up in the sales pitches of the few companies that aren't as good as they would have you believe, there is room here to make a lot of money.
