chapter we’re going to start off our discussion with a simple way to maximize your profits. This is something that the powersellers think about all the time. That’s why they’re powersellers.
The best way to explain this is with an example.
Let’s say you decide that you want to buy packs of Topps Baseball Cards. You go to a wholesaler and buy them for $1.50 a pack. You know that these particular cards go for $3.50 a pack in the retail stores, so you want to undercut their prices. So you decide to sell the cards for $2.75 a pack.
Okay, you buy 100 packs that cost you $150. You sell all 100 packs for $2.75 a pack and make $275. Your profit is $125.
But look at what happens if you just did a little shopping. Let’s say you did some shopping around and found somebody who would sell you those same 100 packs for $1.00 a pack. Now, you’ve only spent $100 instead of $150 and your profit has just gone up from $125 to $175 for selling the same 100 packs of card.
If $50 extra doesn’t seem like a lot of money to you, take a powerseller who would have bought 10,000 packs of cards. That’s 100 times as many cards. So instead of $50 extra profit he has $5,000 extra profit, just because he got each pack of cards for 50 cents less. Even if he had gotten the cards for just 10 cents a pack less, that’s still $1,000 extra profit.
The point is, get the best deal you can because with bulk sales like this, every penny counts. If you get nothing else out of this whole series, get this one point. It will make you so much extra money in the long run.
Another thing you want to do, if you are ordering new items, is to ask for samples. If your supplier doesn’t offer samples, don’t buy from them. Why? Look at it this way. If the item you’re buying is crap and you don’t get a sample beforehand, you’ll have to buy a whole bulk to find out and trying to return them won’t be easy. Certainly you’re not going to want to sell them. So if you can’t get samples, don’t do business with the supplier, no matter what good things you’ve heard about them.
If you don’t know where to look for suppliers, the best place to look, and nobody thinks of this, is the yellow pages on the Internet. Yes, they have their own web site. This will help you find suppliers in YOUR area, which is very important.
Their search feature is very simple. All you do is go to
The first box is where you type in the business name or the category of the items you’re looking for and the second box is where you type in your city, state or zip code. Some cats will have more results than others. The items that are the hottest will usually have the most results because more people are trying to get into the action.
There are a ton of places to find suppliers online. The best way is to go to Google and type in “Wholesalers.” The reason is because any list I give you now can be outdated by the time you read this. By going to Google, the sites that appear at the top of the listings are going to be your best sites.
In our next chapter, we’re going to start going over the steps you’ll need to take to actually start selling your items on Ebay.
This is where the real fun begins.
See you then.