Products That Make Money

[billbenson]

I think that to many people are afraid to sell expensive stuff. 10% margin on a $100 cosmetic item is $10. $10% on a $500K Caterpillar piece of farm equipment is $50k. And you might be able to get 30% margin.

It's probably about as easy to be a distributor for heavy equipment as cheap jewelry.

Just something to think about.


In World of Big Stuff, The U.S. Still Rules - Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-big-stuff-u-still-041200222.html)

[huggytree]

ive always been a big fan of selling 1 $10,000 item vs selling 10,000 $1 items.

people choose cheap items to sell because of lack of capitol

everyone wants to get into business with $1,000 to invest

no one wants to save $10,000-$100,000 and do it right

[krymson]

That's the life of retail, people can really sell big ticket items and they try. What people don't know how to do is create a want or need for it. Apple does a really good job at this, would you buy a $300 laptop that's gonna go to crap in 1-3 years or spend $1500 for a laptop that's going to last 7-10 years because of the quality and support? People WANT that kind af assurance and support and they get a really great product as well.

[vangogh]

I'm all for selling the quality product with the higher price and higher margin. It won't appeal to everyone, because of the price alone, but if you're making more per sale you don't need to make as many sales. You can save on customer support, advertising and other marketing costs in both money and time too.

[fayt]

I prefer higher quality USA made myself. It's worth the few extra dollars. Thousands of people will buy something if it's a brand name item or made in the USA. There is always a market for something somewhere.

[Freelancier]

Unless it's an app... then you want to sell a million of them for $1.99 and keep 70%. :)

Basically, the price of a product has to do with the market of the product. Phone/Tablet apps are cheap to make it easy for anyone to buy them without a demo. Most server-based applications are expensive, because the cost of the server + OS is often expensive, so the customer is already looking at forking over big bucks.

[Harold Mansfield]

ive always been a big fan of selling 1 $10,000 item vs selling 10,000 $1 items.

people choose cheap items to sell because of lack of capitol

everyone wants to get into business with $1,000 to invest

no one wants to save $10,000-$100,000 and do it right
If you are just starting out, you need to build up to that.
And you do that buy selling inexpensive products and services until you save enough to finance bigger ticket items.

Very few people start out with $100k.

I'm fine with selling 10,000 items at $29 ea. to keep a steady flow of money coming in. Actually, I'd be happy replicating that a bunch of times and having a protfolio of low cost items of value that sell 24/7 on autopilot. The potential customer base is larger, and will last longer, and if it's a quality product it can sell forever.

You can only sell so many Catapillars and there are only so many potential customers..and it's still a commision %. But something like a well received ebook or tool can sell forever to anyone and it's 100% commision because it's you own the product.

[vangogh]

You can only sell so many Catapillars and there are only so many potential customers..and it's still a commision %

True, but you don't need to sell a lot to equal all those 29 cent items. It's a lot easier to be please a small number of people than it is to please everyone. Sure it's less sales, but it's also less support and less advertising to reach potential customers, less production costs for physical goods.

I think you can make good money selling low cost products too. It's just different. It's a different strategy and different tactics. If I could pick between the two, though I'd prefer selling less of the higher margin product.

[billbenson]

You can only sell so many Catapillars and there are only so many potential customers..and it's still a commision %. But something like a well received ebook or tool can sell forever to anyone and it's 100% commision because it's you own the product.

Well, CAT is probably a good example. They have a ton of products from excavation to mining, to farm equipment. You won't run out of stuff to sell and you will probably make $50k per order. That's a lot of $19.95 ebooks. As you said, with a good ebook assuming your web site ranks well you can kind of set back and collect the money.

These are also very different business models. Both can make money. I think the ceiling is higher for the Caterpillar Tractors and beyond that, if you have a Caterpillar distributorship it will be easier to get other similar products and grow the business. Of course there are a lot of large companies selling trinkits - Amazon to name one.

One of my original points is that a lot of people are afraid to sell the big bucks stuff. You don't necessarily need to inventory or handle the product. They will drop ship custom made items. It's not like you need to inventory a bunch of $500k items.

How many times have you seen a post here where people want to sell cosmetics or the likes v.s. Catepillar Equipment?