My husband has been an ebay seller for around 8 years now as a hobby. He has a tremendous amount of knowledge about music, musicians, music collectables etc.
So he has gone out to second hand music stores and purchased collectable CD's cheap, and sold them for profit on ebay. With his knowledge he has been able to keep a very high sell rate, and some nice income on the side. His knowledge really is what has made this successful though.
Two weeks ago I started to challenge him, and asked what will it take for you to post / sell 10 times as much product as you do now? What is nice is that his statistical numbers has been very stable throughout the last 8 years. He sells 3-4 items out of each 10 posted, and he sells at average $9-$10 a piece. It goes as low as $0.99 and as high as $120+ per cd depending on collectability.
So - many, many conversations later. We are set up with new data base software, posting templates, automated email scripts, a new computer is coming on Tuesday, and when the new computer is here we will go looking for someone to help us with data entry. We cant afford much help with this initially though.
One thing that is difficult with the current business model is that a large percentage of his stock is rare out of print cds. Often there is something special about a recording that only a collector would know about. So his listings has to tell the collectors about this specific cd. IE, there is a certain amount of data entry with each cd. If he wants to make 1000 postings a week, thats a lot of work.
So I figured we could add some recurring products to the mix. It would be good if we could find small to midsized whole sale lots of music related products. For those we could write one add and continue to run it until stock runs out.
I have found a couple of great places to buy current whole sale cd's and dvd's. That could augment our sales some, but we would still have to do quite a bit of initial data entry per cd / dvd.
I have had a devil of a time finding that perfect product that is music related where I can make money on ebay. As we all know the electronics end of it - dvd players, cd players, mp3 / mp4 players are all dead ends for people like us.
I have tried to research cd cases / cd storage towers. First I thought that would be a really great option, but looking deeper into it I dont think so.
CD scratch repair might be something do-able. I am not sure yet about the market, and honestly I am not sure which product is even the best.
If I could find something like downloadable music gift cards for a good rate that might be something, but I have yet to find a supplier for that. I can do something with this in affiliates though.
I have tried to run the research tool here on salehoo, but it just hangs for hours.
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. I feel like I am maybe not seeing the forest for all those trees by now.
Malene