Something in the water

[Corey&Xu]

Hi Cory,

There are so many ways to go thats is hard to even decide where to start. It depends a lot on where you live and the population base you have. Is it a tourist area? If not then what you sell would probably be a lot different then if you are selling in a tourist area. It also depends on the employers in the area (are salaried low, medium or high). It also depends on location where you start the store. You could be in a great tourist location but pick a lousy selling area where the people don't come. Great walk in traffic is needed and sometimes that don't matter.

When I came back with my wife on a CR1 back in 2002, I got laid off the after I returned. The company no longer needed me since I had set up their manufacturing operation over in China over a 5 year time period. I did get a large severence payment and also was able to draw unemployment for 65 weeks so we never worried about life money. We brought back a huge amount of different arts and crafts, jewelry, etc. because the company I worked for paid for a container shipment of all my household goods which was delivered to my driveway and unloaded and unpacked for me. At first we didn't know exactly what we wanted to do. We started out trying out a large flea market for about 9 months. This showed promise for a while but it just never got to the volume we wanted it to. So then we opened a storefront in a strip mall, thats primary store was a donut shop. I drove by this shop most every day and it was close to home and it was always busy. A shop was blank right next to it and we though that we should attract a lot of business! Wrong, people feeding their stomach don't buy arts and crafts at all. We only did one month of over $2000 in sales and that was December. We stayed open for 18 months (covered 2 Christmas seasons). The trend didn't improve but we had started doing arts and crafts shows and summer festivals about 8 months before we closed. We started noticing that we did more sales doing a couple shows a month then we did in most of the months of storefront operation plus our costs were way lower than the storefront was. So I started researching more and more shows. Plus I also decided to give ebay a try starting in 2004. We spent the next 3 years sorting out the shows that fit us and eliminated the ones that didn't. I also refined what I was selling on Ebay and noticed that in both cases our sales continued to grow and are still doing so at this time. Ebay does take a lot of time to do though. I probably spend about 40 hours a week on it alone but the nice thing is that I can pick whatever hours I want to do it. As far getting far up in the search on Ebay, you need to structure your titles right for what you are selling. This is easy to do, just type in keywords and see how many hits you get then try to pick the same keywords. I really stay away from keywords that get to many hits because then you could be so far down the list people won't find you or even see you until it is maybe only a few minutes until the auction closes. You also need to pick the best days to have your auctions close. Different products work best on different days. Jewelry is extremely popular on Ebay. So I really don't sell any jewelry at all on Ebay. Its difficult to get noticed in many thousands of ebay sellers. If you are one of a few selling a popular product that will usually work the best. I also have an ebay store and generate a lot of sales there to. I don't use ebay though for any of my listings, I use a third party service because ebays tools work so slow and are really a pain to use. I have noticed that ebay is a long grind. I have been selling now for going on 7 years and each year gets better. Your customer base continues to grow each year and I continue to get more and more repeat customers. So my business is getting pretty good now. I have been a power seller for 5 years now and am a top rated seller which also helps to keep costs lower. However, Ebay does really nickle and dime you to death so it definitely is not free to do. Paypal also takes about 3% to. I should also mention that we still do around 35 arts and crafts and summer festivals each year but they are almost all on the weekend and we do real good at them but we don't import anything now and haven't done so for the past 2 years. We now do many juried shows because we do all our own designs and construction. We really love doing the shows. Our daughter who was born while we were still in China is now almost 9 years old and she loves going to the shows with us. My wife also has made so many friends and loves doing the shows to. We get along great together so even though the shows can be tiring we enjoy them greatly. I might add that I also now have good retirement pay coming in so we really don't feel any pressure to sell a lot at the shows although we do quite well. Well my fingers are getting sore, besides I need to get some work done for a show this weekend. If you have questions, you could PM me.

Gale

 

 

Gale,

Thanks for all of the information. I will need to re read it to follow everything but your experience will help us to think through what would be a good way to start. I will see if my wife is interested in sending you a PM as I think we could get alot of information from you that would be helpful.

[Corey&Xu]

Ever heard of paragraphs, Gale? btw Gale, what 3rd party tool you using? We have used Channeladvisor for years but looking for a change.

 

Corey, dont let anyone ever convince you that you cannot succeed. When I started my business 8 years ago, primarily selling on ebay, many told me I could not make a go of it. Since then, I have done over 250,000 ebay transactions. Determination and dedication goes a long way. With that being said....

 

eBay (aka FeeBay) is a really tough marketplace these days. The barriers to entry are virtually nothing. This works for you in the beginning but works against you as time goes on. Almost anyone with a couple bucks and access to a computer can sell things on ebay.....and most have done so. The supply/demand ratio is at a point where there is no equilibrium advantage for the supplier. And if there is one, it will not last for long. An example is the category that we sell in on ebay. There are a handful of suppliers that are basically selling items at delivered cost. I question how they continue to survive, but they do so. Due to this and some other factors, our ebay sales are only about 10% of what they used to be in 2007 and 2008.

 

Back then our ebay sales were about 80%+ of our sales. Now they are roughly 20% as we have focused more on our website. We basically use ebay for customer acquisition. We make no money on ebay despite being higher priced than some of our cut-throat competitors. But we then try to route them to our website for future sales.

 

eBay has also dramatically raised their fees for most categories over the past few years (although they did finally reduce them a bit this spring). And it is a fairly cumbersome system to operate effectively. Frankly, its a pain in the @ss. As Gale eluded to, you really have to stay on top of it and analyze many things on a regular basis.

 

But worst case scenario, you can use it for what it is: a cheap easy way to get started and get your feet wet and see if you can make a go of it. If you can make it on ebay in 2010 then you can make it anywhere, imho.

 

Brian,

That is exactly what I think in regards to Ebay. I also have sold a few items on their site but I think as a buisness it could be very cumbersome and difficult to make a profit. As you stated and Gale also mentioned the number of people and companies selling the same or similar products make it tough to build up a buisness that will be profitable. We would like to have a website that we could sell through but getting traffic to the site may be the challenge there. My wife has had a very succesful buisness in China that she still could continue with but she does not want the travel. To have a small buisness here may not satisfy her either.....trying to figure that out as we go.

 

Thanks again for your reply.

Edited August 11, 2010 by dnoblett
Replaced "]" on last quate tag. (see edit history)

[shanghaigale]

Hi Bcco,

I am terrible about paragraphs. I do how to use them but usually I am in to much of hurry to worry about them. I just try to get my ideas out there as quick as I can.

 

On 3rd party tool. I switched over to Auctiva close to 2 years ago. When I switched over to it. It was totally free so all the things I was paying for on Ebay such as Picture manager ended up being free. However, they do now charge $9.95 a month for the membership to auctiva. I do get a free gig of photo storage for that amount though and have managed to just stay below the total. My items are all unique and require a lot of pictures and each listing is different from the next one although some of them can be somewhat similar. I like to preschedule my listings and Auctiva allows me to do it (saves 10 cents per listing) and I can also do relisting quite easily on items that do not sell each week. There are other fees that ebay doesn't get me on either. Auctiva is so much easier to use for me that I would never go back to ebay for listings.

 

It sounds like you started on ebay a little over a year before I did. I agree with almost everything you say. It is a lot of work and definitely not for every product. I tried some of the import stuff to begin with and didn't do very well. So actually I sell mostly unique american items now. This way I don't have to worry about my supply. I used to import a lot from China but that was definitely a hassle. I had a broker that handled everything for me in Seattle but the costs continued to go up and up. Also you really had to be careful with the items you imported. It has been mentioned the fish and game problem. Luckily I had a good relationship with my broker and they always steered me away from problem groups. I knew a guy that had major problems with importing Chinese minerals. You have to have the proper paperwork to make sure that it works right. Anything done wrong can hang it up in a customs warehouse for weeks and they charge you for this. So you want to keep your product moving to your site. I finally quit importing about 2 years ago. The last straw for me was when my regular trucker from Seattle to where I live wanted to retroactively charge me an extra $85 for using a liftgate truck because they had to unload the pallets in my driveway and couldn't do it without the liftgate truck. Luckily I had a copy of the final invoice and a liftgate fee was not mentioned. I ended up changing to regular postal shipping for a while longer and gave up on the broker. I did the combination Sea and Air shipping and could usually get the stuff within about 30 days. Sea shipping could take a long time and I hated waiting that long. I would usually ship in 30 kilo boxes because that kept me below the weight limit that the postal service would handle. Never had a problem doing it that way.

 

I still find that my ebay sales are growing but they probably comprise about 50% of my sales. I found that over the years, large dealers would contact me on Ebay and ask about other items and I would end up setting up wholesale deals with a lot of them so a lot of my on going sales now are with these large dealers who may order several times a year and I never even worry about ebay for these guys. Ebay however, has been a great advertiser for my products so I will continue to use it both for sales and for picking up more customers. I don't have a web site. I did for a while but due to the nature of my products, keeping it up was to much work and I just didn't have the extra time to deal with it.

 

I agree with your last paragraph. Ebay is definitely labor intensive and usually pretty low ball but you can make money at it if you work really hard. I live in the countryside so it definitely opened up a sales method that has benefited me greatly.

 

Gale

 

 

 

 

Ever heard of paragraphs, Gale? btw Gale, what 3rd party tool you using? We have used Channeladvisor for years but looking for a change.

 

Corey, dont let anyone ever convince you that you cannot succeed. When I started my business 8 years ago, primarily selling on ebay, many told me I could not make a go of it. Since then, I have done over 250,000 ebay transactions. Determination and dedication goes a long way. With that being said....

 

eBay (aka FeeBay) is a really tough marketplace these days. The barriers to entry are virtually nothing. This works for you in the beginning but works against you as time goes on. Almost anyone with a couple bucks and access to a computer can sell things on ebay.....and most have done so. The supply/demand ratio is at a point where there is no equilibrium advantage for the supplier. And if there is one, it will not last for long. An example is the category that we sell in on ebay. There are a handful of suppliers that are basically selling items at delivered cost. I question how they continue to survive, but they do so. Due to this and some other factors, our ebay sales are only about 10% of what they used to be in 2007 and 2008.

 

Back then our ebay sales were about 80%+ of our sales. Now they are roughly 20% as we have focused more on our website. We basically use ebay for customer acquisition. We make no money on ebay despite being higher priced than some of our cut-throat competitors. But we then try to route them to our website for future sales.

 

eBay has also dramatically raised their fees for most categories over the past few years (although they did finally reduce them a bit this spring). And it is a fairly cumbersome system to operate effectively. Frankly, its a pain in the @ss. As Gale eluded to, you really have to stay on top of it and analyze many things on a regular basis.

 

But worst case scenario, you can use it for what it is: a cheap easy way to get started and get your feet wet and see if you can make a go of it. If you can make it on ebay in 2010 then you can make it anywhere, imho.