Looking for someone with experience selling on eBay and amazon

[Chad Williams]

Hello everyone,

I'm curious about selling on eBay. I'm capable of setting up the eBay store and listing the items. What I'm really interested in learning is what makes a eBay store successful.

What kind of profit margin do you need on products?

How many different products should you have listed?

Is it better to sell $100 products or $5 products?

Is it better to carry similar products like all pet supplies, or all car cleaning supplies?
Or better to carry random items, just a little bit of everything?

I have some products in mind. A few high priced products and even more low cost items. It won't be hard to find other products in the same field either. I actually ran across this potential opportunity by accident. Please share with me any knowledge or experience you may have with eBay and Amazon.

[Owen]

The problem is with eBay is people don't go on eBay to buy brand new products. If you manage to buy $1,000 worth of inventory for a $10 retail item, don't sell it on eBay. That's when you'll want to get a seller account on Amazon and sell it professionally.

[Harold Mansfield]

In my experience, ecommerce is already hard when you have an original product. Multiply that by 100 as a first timer on eBay or Amazon reselling non original products that anyone else can also buy in bulk and list for sale.

All of your questions aren't specific to just eBay or Amazon, you're basically asking how to sell things online. If you want my advice, don't do it. You're walking down the same path as many, many people before you over the last 10 years who have lost their ass because they knew nothing about retail, sales, marketing, or ecommerce thinking that buying "something" cheap and in bulk and reselling it was easy money. It is not.

Look at it this way, whatever you find to sell, you're already behind probably hundreds of other people who are already selling it.

[SumpinSpecial]

I'm with Harold for the most part. Do a business plan for your idea. That's really the only way to evaluate if the idea has a chance of working. Also, I've heard that the margins on eBay sales are paper thin after eBay deducts their fees. Amazon is the same way. A few years ago I set up an Amazon Seller account to get rid of a bunch of books I had accumulated over the years. I did it for the spare change rather than a for-profit business, but I was still shocked at the large fees Amazon sucked out. Amazon made more money on it than I did! I ended up abandoning that and donating the books to Goodwill instead!