Ever thought about putting your refilling talent to work for you? I'm not talking about starting an inkjet refilling business, however, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. What I mean is if you enjoy refilling inkjet cartridges there are ways that you can sell them and make some money without a whole lot of effort.
Many people think that a refilling business is the type that people bring you their cartridges, you refill them, and they pay you and leave. That's the hard way to do it. A much easier way is to obtain empty cartridges, refill them and sell them. The trick is where to get the empties so you don't go broke in the process. Another thing to realize is you only want to refill cartridges that have print heads on them. Most HP and Lexmark cartridges fall into that category. Most Canons and all Epson's won't.
The easiest place to sell your cartridges is on eBay. You can also sell them to your friends, neighbors and work associates. If you sell them on eBay you could include in your ad that you buy empties. Offer $1.00 per empty and stipulate that they must be virgin cartridges, never before refilled. Another place to get your empties is empties.com. You can also make up some fliers and pass them out to local business' offering to buy their empty cartridges. So many companies throw them away and would gladly sell them to you cheap.
You don't need a lot of expensive tools to get started. A couple refill kits will pay for themselves rather quickly. If you specialize in a few types of cartridges you won't have to buy a lot of supplies. Popular cartridges like HP C6578 and HP 51645A, HP 6656, HP 6657, Lexmark 12A1970 and 12A1980, 10N0016 and 10N0026.
You will also need boxes and cartridge clips or just use print head sealing tape. These are pretty cheap and you can find them on the internet.
If you have a printer that fits a popular cartridge you can use it to test your cartridges before selling them. You can buy printers on eBay for pennies on the dollar for testing machines. Don't forget the other auctions like Yahoo, Ubid and Amazon for buying printers. Actually you might get a better deal buying a printer on the smaller auctions.
Price your cartridges about 25% below retail or use the prices from our web site. There's plenty of business to go around so what are you waiting for?
There's not enough room here to go into complete detail but if you want more information take a look at Matt Eve's book on starting a refilling business:http://atlascopy.com/cartridge-refilling-business.htm
Having Fun With The Printer Support Techs
Many years ago when I was a copier technician my boss would always tell us to push our companies supplies, paper, toner etc.. Of course they wanted to sell more supplies and make more money but their techniques were very questionable. Just like printers you could go out and purchase generic supplies and some worked better than others naturally. Well the supplies that we sold were also mostly generic, however, they were branded with our companies name and logos. Here's where the sneakiness comes in. When a customer complained about a repair cost estimate we were told to blame it on their inferior generic supplies and to further that the repair would have been much cheaper if they were using our over-priced supplies.
My Printer Died - An Epitaph
My printer just died. My Epson C60 that I've had for almost 2 years was my buddy. I loved that printer. It was there for me through thick and thin. Sure it had it's quirks and idiosyncrasies like not printing when my office temperature dropped to 17 degrees because I forgot to turn the thermostat up one bitterly cold morning. I had to open the lid and point a ceramic space heater inside to thaw it out.
When Is Black Not Black?
Did you notice how many different black inks there are available? At last count we have forty different black inks listed on our web site. You may be wondering how many shades of black can there be? Well there are actually different shades of black which I will explain in a bit.
