Hi Cliff,
A warm welcome to SaleHoo :)
If this is your first time selling online, you might try experimenting with a few old things from your own home just to help you get your feet wet and get the feel of how it is to sell online. Another advantage is this will help build up your eBay feedback making you more reliable as a seller.
Remember that many online buyers will resort to a seller's feedback rating/score before pushing through with their planned transaction. This is especially true if you will be selling branded electronic products.
Many sellers also prefer dropshipping for starters especially if capital is limited. Through dropshipping a seller gets to offer their customers a wide variety of products without having to shell out any amount. Although the profit margins are pretty slim as you pointed out.
In checking wholesale prices, if you simply visited the sites and checked their published prices, you are not doing wholesaling justice. You have to remember that wholesale prices depend directly on the quantity of your orders. The higher your order volume the lower your wholesale price becomes. Wholesale is actually bulk or volume buying.
Liquidations on the other hand is still bulk buying but oftentimes you have no control as to the quality and type/state of the products in your pallet or box so you have to be really creative in order to sell all the items in your pallet.
One of the questions that keep coming up in my head is, If I buy large quantities of assorted products. It obviously is going to be quite large (depending on what I get) but I have no forklift or anything to unload a truck. Not saying that I am going to purchase a semi truck load of stuff, (at least not right now) but even if I buy something like a gay-lord box full of assorted electronics or something like that, it will still ship freight wouldn't it? How does this work? I'm selling from home.
Some suppliers or freight companies will help you arrange transport of your orders all the way to your doorstep. Some will offer freight forwarding from warehouse to door although others will only pay for up to curb delivery and you may have to pay additional for up to door delivery. Best you clarify this with the liquidator you will order from before you finalize your order.
Also, I read time and time again that new sellers should stay away from selling electronics. Is this still the case if a person buys in bulk? I know the competition is nuts in that field, but if I found a great deal in buying electronics in bulk, should I pass it up? What would you do?
Lots of people are under the impression that electronics is a highly profitable market. Unfortunately, this simply isn't true. Electronics is actually one of the most competitive markets online. The electronics industry has always run on very low margins from wholesalers to end users and marketplaces like eBay have only tightened the margins even further.
Most electronics sell at the wholesale price or below wholesale on eBay. That's how intense the competition is. How do these sellers make money? Well plenty of them don't. If you checked back on some of these sellers in a couple of months time, you may well find that they are out of business. As for the others, they use some very canny sourcing and marketing tricks, which we've listed below.
The point is, the number of sellers present in the electronics market is deceiving. It's much more difficult to make money in this market than it appears. If you do wish to stick with the electronics industry, then here is what we suggest:
* Use liquidation suppliers to get bulk lots at prices well below wholesale.
* OR: Purchase from wholesalers in very large quantities (and when we say very large, we mean a spend of $200,000 or more) - this is how the big eBay powersellers do it.
* Increase your feedback and get powerseller status BEFORE entering the electronics market. This will give you more visibility in the search.
* Sell via your own website or your eBay store if possible, as buyers generally pay more from these venues than eBay.
* Add third-party extras and up-sells to your orders. These will help you bump up your margins to a much more acceptable level.
* Better still - consider selling accessories for electronics rather than electronics themselves. Accessories are very popular, have less competition, cost less to ship and have much greater margins.
One more question for now, even tho I have tons more, but I will end it for now with this, It almost seems impossible to make a decent enough profit on e bay. Would I be better off packing up and getting out of that auction site. I don't see how people are making any money selling high retail priced items for dollars on that site. If I were to take the same product and sell it somewhere like Amazon, would I be able to make better use of my time?
eBay has become an extremely competitive marketplace and it is not uncommon to find products selling at prices the same as or lower than wholesaler. How can this be? Because lots of wholesalers sell on eBay directly to the public! Unfair yes, but its the reality.
We often suggest selling in multiple sites as an ideal approach, where you can direct traffic or customers from one site/listing to the other. You may want to keep a few active listings on eBay, since they still get the highest traffic rating among most auction sites while selling on other Link hidden: Login to view as well.
Hope this helps you off to a good start!
All the best :)