Learn how to boost your eBay profits with backend sales.
I am going to tell you about a insider game plan that can triple your eBay income. This system is so simple. Even so, only a handful of eBay sellers take advantage of it, in spite of the fact that it takes very little effort. So, what is this rarely used cash cow?
Backend Sales!
Allow me to demonstrate to you an example of a tactic I came up with. I noticed there were some eBay sellers who were selling enormous batches of greeting cards. In fact, when I first looked into it, there was a lot of 1,000 cards for sale, with only 2 days to go in the auction. Can you guess what the top bid was?
One Dollar!
Can you believe it? The final bid ended up a little higher, but not very much. When the auction closed, the high bidder got 1,000 greeting cards for under a penny a piece.
There are many eBay sellers who commonly auction batches of 25 greeting cards for $5.00 and up. What kind of a profit could you make if you bought one thousand cards for one dollar and then turned around and sold them for $5.00 per set of 25 cards? Two hundred dollars, which is a 20,000% return on your money! Not bad.
By the way, there are deals comparable to that on eBay all the time. You can uncover many of them by doing some basic eBay market research.
However, this article is not about discovering low priced products on eBay and reselling them for a profit. That will be a topic for a future article. So now, back to backend sales (no pun intended). :)
These humongous batches of greeting cards come up for auction on eBay frequently. So, I resolved to use them as a backend sale product. Here's my strategy.
I purchased a huge lot of greeting cards for around $0.02 a piece. I then made up an order form to market the greeting cards twenty cents a piece (you can always boost the price later). Every time I shipped something I sold on eBay, I just tucked in a sample card & envelope with an order form.
When my customer (winning bidder) received item, they were surprised and pleased to find that I had included a free card that they might be able to use (nice little gift). And, they saw that they could order more cool cards, for only $0.20 a piece, in batches of 25. Since most cards usually go for two to three dollars a piece, that represented a discount of more than 90%. That's a pretty impressive offer.
The cool thing about this strategy is that anybody who ever purchases anything from me can become a life-time customer. They could buy cards from me for years. My initial "one-time" sale to my customer can turn into a life-time income stream, as they reorder cards again and again.
You can do the same thing. All you have to accomplish is identify a consumable product that people buy, use up and buy again. Buy the product on eBay for at a bargain price, or through a reliable discount product source. Set up an order form that you can include with your online auction sales. Then, kick back and let the money roll in. Cool!
Don't forget, your backend items do not need to be greeting cards. That is just an instance of something I happened to observe. You might uncover other great consumable items that are a closer match for the kind of products you usually sell on eBay. What you really want is to find items that people will buy from you again and again.
To summarize, backend sales is nothing more than the act of selling more merchandise to customers who recently purchased something from you. The best time to approach a prospective life-time customer is when they are already happy with a purchase and they are in the "buying mood."
Don't forget, the perfect backend item should be consumable. At the time you get a new customer, you will want to offer him something that he will need to reorder from you each time he uses up his supply. This will create life-time customers that can be the source of a never ending revenue stream for you.
