“Start really small, have a specific niche

Hi everyone, Anthony from The Perfect Price shares his incredible journey on SellingOnlineToday!Listen online here. Listen on iTunes here.Some thoughts from the interview“Back in the day I was actually driving a London black cab, which was great but I just wanted a bit more job satisfaction and not so much driving.”“I started back in 2004 selling used DVDs on eBay. They all sold out which gave me encouragement to carry on. Then I progressed to buying up unwanted collections of playstation games. The down side of that was that there were a few returns of used products.”“I wasn’t really sure what niche to go into.”“I came across a pharmacist in Nottingham who was selling up his bricks and mortar store. I bought quite a lot of his stock, toothbrush heads and dental products. That sold so I decided to go into to health and personal care specialising in dental care niche. That was in 2009 and I haven’t looked back since that day.”“I had always wanted to do this sort of thing. It was something I dreamt about doing, working for myself and working from home.”“It’s amazing just how much information there is and you think that you are never going to take it all in but you do.”“I bought probably about £1000 worth of stock, sold those again on eBay and that was when I decided to concentrate on the dental care niche.”“2009 I went full time, I handed my cab licence back and that was that really.”“Initially Amazon was just 10% of my business with eBay 90%. Today that totally gone the other way. It is now 90% on Amazon.”“There was Amazon France and Amazon Germany and we sell on all 3 with the UK as a pro seller. The possibility is in the coming months is Spain, is a new amazon platform they have set up and possibly Italy.”“We don’t sell on (Amazon) USA because we found that the competition is very, very fierce particularly for what we do so we feel that it wouldn’t be something we go further with.”“We have designed our own products called Price Perfect Teeth Whitening Strips which is on our website. They have really taken off in quite a big way.”“We use FBA to shift those products to our customers in Europe.”“we were finding that when we were selling other brands that the competition was really stiff.”“On amazon they list in price order so you really have to be cheap or fairly cheap to get the buy box. The buy box is quite important on Amazon. So in order to get to the top, we found if we make our own brand, we are selling our own products and this is the way to go in my opinion.”“There is massive help out there. We sourced a graphic designer on elance, which is a site where you can find really good people doing all sorts of graphic work, photographic work and we use them also for translation.”“I use FBA and that is really like having an extra full time member of staff. We shift our product to their fulfilment houses and they ship it out to the customer.”“The race to bottom is something that we try to avoid. Sometime you can, sometimes customers will come to us because we have got very good feedback. We concentrate really hard on customer service.”“You don’t have to be the cheapest of the lot as long as you are up there.”“It is like a whole new world, social media, I have found it a little bit difficult. I don’t think it has worked for me just yet.”“The problem with eBay and amazon, particularly Amazon, is that they don’t like you to contact customers that you have sold to. EBay we sometimes put a little slip in, business card in the packaging.”“We have to be very careful (with Amazon) because they do watch to make sure you’re not trying to hijack what they term as their customers.”Best advice: “I would probably give 3 bits of advice that I have used but I probably wished I had known way back when. The first one would be don’t try and sell the latest must have gadgets like apple iPhones because you just won’t be able to compete and you well end up losing money, there are big boys out there selling those sorts of things. The second one would be start very small, have a specific niche and don’t be talked into buy big quantities of stock straight away. The thing would be research. I think is really, really important. You need to check out on eBay the completed listings to see what has sold, what sort of prices you can get and not forgetting costs. This is something when I started out, not forgetting about, but perhaps not making as much note of as possible is the postage, the listing fees, selling fees, PayPal, taxes etc. That is important.”