eBay Powerseller, selling on eBay, a hard lesson learned

There are cases where you purchase a bulk load of products to sell on ebay, which is similiar to having a hit record on the radio. The products will sell at your Ebay auction listings almost as fast as you can put them up for sale, and at the price you want.

But there are also times when the products do not sell quickly, and at a lower price than anticipated.

Lesson 1 Evaluate all factors before buying large quantities of product to sell on eBay.

Lesson 2 You need to forecast the time needed to sell the entire load of product, this will help you determine the correct price to bid on the liquidation.

Here is an example of an eBay Powerseller not taking into account all of the costs that may be involved, before buying a large load of product.

Powerseller “A” bid and won a pallet of what was perceived to be a great value, a load of name brand cosmetics. The load contained over 7000 individual items such as lipstick, nail polish, hand creams etc. The average cost per piece was 75 cents, so the entire load was purchased for $3750. The Powerseller thought they did their homework, the individual items were selling for a minimum of $2.50 each on eBay.

There are several problems that occurred after the purchase. The eBay Powerseller was so focused on the potential profit, nearly $2 per item, which then added up to $14,000 profit. (If all were sold). They did not accurately forecast the time needed to sell all the cosmetics.

The reality is there was not a high sell rate with these items, they averaged selling 10-20 of these items per month on eBay. It would take 29 years to sell all brand name cosmetics inventory at that rate.

In order to sell this slow moving inventory they had to take this product and sell it on the weekend and local swap meets etc, they were able to move through the cosmetics but it was barely a break even scenario after all the time and additional labor involved in selling the goods.

4 questions to ask a before buying a large quantity of products for resale.

1. Have you checked the eBay-completed auctions to get an idea of the demand? Using the free eBay search functions to view completed auctions. Viewing the completed listing we give you a snapshot of what the eBay market will bear.

2. Did you also check completed auctions under multiple search terms? You can apply this question to any of your eBay sales. I always research the product name title and any descriptions even prior to listing an auction up for sale. (This will not only increase your success rate but also will also give you more bids and higher ending value of your eBay auction.)

3. Did you account for any additional storage fees for these items)? This question is designed to see what if any additional fees you may incur storing this product over a longer period of time.

4. How long will it take to sell through the load of product? This question is designed to find out how much time to sell through you entire load at which point your profit would be calculated If it take over 6 months to a year this may not be a load of product you want to purchase.

Learn from this lesson Unless you are given the product to liquidate at no cost be very careful in evaluation all cost and the time involved to sell through a load of items for resale on eBay.