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ebay Dropshipping

5 Reasons Why I Closed my eBay Dropshipping Store after 2 Years

24th August 2018 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Ebay Shop Closed

After almost exactly 2 years I finally closed my eBay dropshipping store last month so I thought it my be useful to share my thoughts on this sideline hustle and give you some of the reasons behind this closure.

How my Process Evolved over Time

I originally started by using the freelistings that eBay gave me to list my products with a 30 day auction. I added all of my products manually, so this meant that my overheads were really low. The problem with this was that it took a long time to add all of these products and also I had no tracking in place, which meant I often had orders that I couldn’t fulfil as they were out of stock or their prices had changed.

Most recently my process had changed completely so that I had my Philipino listers adding all of my products to my own branded store, which was integrated with SKUgrid tracking, which automatically updated prices and removed out of stock items. This meant that the amount of time I needed to invest was significantly less, but my monthly overheads were a lot higher.

This might sound like a good position to be in and the automated business model is what a lot of digitial entrepreneurs are seeking to achieve, but why wasn’t this working for me?

1 – Hassle

I think the number one reason for me was the amount of hassle I got from different orders. Remember, any time you get to deal with the general public, they are generally going to be a royal pain in the arse. Even if I wasn’t touching the products at all, this was still certainly the case with eBay dropshipping.

Returns

One of the biggest risks with this business model was returns, because the buyers are so protected by eBay and Paypal, that they can return pretty much anything and you will need to accept it. The problem is that as an intermediary, it won’t be as easy for you to return a product to your supplier as it is for an eBay customer to return it to you, which leaves you completely exposed.

This is particularly the case for any overseas Global Shipping Programme orders that you do. Lets take a recent example I had where a customer bought a cat flap with a magnetic chip detector and this was sent to Hong Kong. They reported that the item didn’t work correctly, so I had to facilitate a return for them. My supplier wouldn’t pay the cost of the return from Hong Kong, so I had to pay this myself.

Always On

Another major drawback with this business model, is that you are tied to your computer if you want to take this seriously. This means that at least once per day you will need to check into your eBay account to process orders, deal with customer service issues and generally check what’s going on. This will be fine for a lot of people but if you’re looking for a more passive stream of income where you can travel the world as well, this is a big drawback.

2 – Mistakes

In my store I had nearly 5000 products in the end, most of which were listed by other people manually, so there are always going to be mistakes and sometimes these mistakes can be costly.

The biggest example of this for me happened about a couple of months ago, where I listed a fish tank filter. One day I woke up and found that I had sold over 30 of these. These orders had been integrated with SKUgrid so the pricing should have been correct but I checked the orders and everything looked fine. I then sent out a total of about 50 of these orders over the weekend, and  finally realised why everyone was buying them…..

My original listing was for a filter which costs about £199, however, at my supplier this had sold out, so my software automatically took the price of one of it’s variations, which was the replacement filter pads, and priced these at £19.99… Unfortunately, all of my buyers thought they were getting the £199 filtration system for a bargain price and consequently meant that I had a major returns and customer service nightmare on my hands.

The next 2 weeks were absolutely terrible as I had to negotiate 50 returns with my supplier and all of the customers, and try not to get bad feedback at the same time!!! Amazingly, I only got about 4 negative feedbacks in the end and also received some really positive feedback as well, but this took a lot of work and also lost me a fair bit of money as well.

3 – Return on Investment

The other key reason for me giving this up was it just wasn’t giving me a good enough return for the amount of time that I was spending on it.

Even though I really limited how much time I was spending on it each month, the overall fees that I was being charged made it very difficult for me to make a big profit.

At a minimum each month I was paying £89 for an eBay shop, and extra 9p for every listing created over my 1500 free listings and £19.99 for the SKUgrid software, and my listers were being paid 20c for every listing they created.

On top of this every sale you made eBay would take 13% and Paypal would take between 3 – 4%.

This meant that for most of my products, I would only make a 10% margin and would need to sell around £2000 worth of products before I even broke even. I also need to add a 40% tax rate on top of this, making this pretty much unviable.

I had thought about expanding this more and using more automated software to list products, but the main issue with this is that as a UK seller if you sell more than £80k worth of products you then need to become VAT registered and pay an additional wedge of tax.

As I’m now a freelance Project Manager I think this would have also applied to my contract income as well, which would be a massive no-go!!!

4 – eBay Fraud

The final hammer for me that made me think “Sod this for a game of soldiers”, was when I almost lost £1500 on a single transaction.

Over the past 6 months, I had over 30 occasions where buyers had bought high value products (£500+) from me, and then I found out either from eBay, from the buyer contacting me or from me contacting the buyer, that they had their eBay account hacked and these were not valid transactions.

This was extremely frustrating because when I had real orders for high value products, I had to contact the account owners to validate they had really ordered the product, which caused a delay in me dispatching the products and in a few cases led to me getting bad feedback.

Worst of all was the case where someone purchased a coffee machine from me for £1500. I bought this from my supplier for just over £1k and sent it to the address that was provided on the Paypal payment receipt.

The order was dispatched successfully and signed for from my suppliers courier. A few weeks later I received a Paypal dispute case opened up against me, saying that the buyer’s account had been hacked and they had not received the product.

I sent in the proof of delivery to both eBay and Paypal and had to wait 70 days, before I got a message from Paypal saying that the case had been closed in favour of the buyer!!!

I couldn’t believe this and contacted Paypal, showing that I clearly had proof of delivery, but they told me this had been decided by the buyers bank, so there was little they could do but dispute the claim. To be honest I really thought I’d lost this money as I was stuck between eBay, Paypal and a bank, none of whom was likely to take any responsibility for this.

I disputed the case and amazingly a month later this was closed in my favour and my money was returned to me.

This had been quite stressful and to be quite honest, I really couldn’t be arsed with this anymore.

5 – SKUGrid Customer Service

The final nail in the coffin for my eBay store came a few days later when I realised that SKUgrid was automatically changing the listings for 2 of my suppliers (Over 1000 listings) to be out of stock.

I contacted SKUgrid who told me there had been an issue with the feed, and they had no idea when this would be resolved so I would have to update my listings manually until that time!!!

As you can imagine this raised my blood pressure even further and I didn’t want to risk either a heart attack or throwing my computer out of the window so just decided to close my store instead!!!

Any Regrets?

I have a lot on my plate already with affiliate websites, Merch by Amazon and my Low Hanging System mugs, that I can honestly say I don’t miss this extra hassle.

It was a shame that I’d built up so many listings and had good feedback on my account, but it always felt a little bit that I was only a second away from disaster.

Most of the time I interacted with customers or opened my emails it would be something negative, and this can be mentally tiring.

Would I Do the Same Thing Again?

I still think that eBay dropshipping is a great way to get into making money online and for very little up front costs, you can earn your first digital dollars. This is an amazing feeling and will surely lead you on to bigger and better things.

I’ve also learned a tonne about the types of products that sell well, how to market products, retail arbitrage and using eBay in general, so for this alone it has been completely worth it.

How Much Money Did I Make in 2 Years eBay Dropshipping?

This was definitely no goldmine, and it also took a lot of work, love and attention to set up and run, but over the course of 2 years I probably made about £5-6k after tax.

If this was your only focus online, I still think that you could build this up to be a proper business, but you would need to spend a lot more time on it.

Realistically, I’d recommend following someone like Jonathan Lieu who now uses Hydralister to list all of his products and fully focuses on eBay dropshipping. If you are constantly testing different products, then sooner or later you’ll have a good set of products and suppliers that you can rely on and build up your business from, however, I think I’ve got other fish to fry at the moment, that hopefully won’t be as stressful!

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Filed Under: Dropshipping Tagged With: ebay, ebay Dropshipping

The Pros and Cons of Working with a Virtual Assistant

20th March 2017 By martinos74 1 Comment

Portrait of friendly Virtual Assistant woman with headset

As part of my eBay dropshipping business there are a lot of manual, repetitive tasks that you need to do in order to run your store and maximise profit, so I decided to outsource this work and in this article we look at the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a virtual assistant.

The main task is creating new eBay product listings, which involves a lot of labour intensive tasks.

For each listing I need to:
• Download, resize and then re-upload images
• Create an SEO optimised title
• Add a product description
• Find the source UPC/EAN code for the product
• Fill out all of the relevant product attributes

In total this takes a minimum of 10 minutes to create a listing and after doing about 500 of these bad boys, I realised that it was time for me to get some help in so I could focus my efforts elsewhere.

This is when I decided to outsource this work and look for a Virtual Assistant who could carry out the majority of these tasks for me, at a relatively low cost.

Disadvantages of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Quality

Finding a top quality virtual assistant is key, otherwise you’re going to spend more time fixing and correcting their issues than you would if you did it on your own in the first place.

In the past few months I’ve hired 3 different Virtual Assistants, 2 of which were terrible and the last one, who is fantastic.

To be honest after the experience of the first 2 VA’s I thought that this was pretty much the standard level, and you really do get what you pay for.

For each of these VA’s I gave fully detailed briefs, reviewed and fed back on their work, but they consistently made the same mistakes over and over again, which was infuriating.

For all of their listings I would have to go in and fix a lot of what they had created and the overall quality of the listings was terrible.

The main difference is that the second VA filled out every single detail that I asked for (and more) whereas the first 2 completed about half of the tasks, didn’t check the final listing, and were clearly just interested in the fee per listing.

Time

As I mentioned above, if you don’t get a good virtual assistant then you will spend lots of timing correcting their work, trying to coach and improve them and generally communicating with them what you want can be a drain on both your mental resources and your time.

Whilst I don’t mind putting in additional effort up front to try and train someone to do things the way I want them done, if they do not progress and repeatedly do not listen to your advice then this is a huge waste of time.

Loss of control

This is more of a mindset change than anything else, but if you’re hiring a virtual assistant then you’ll need to learn to delegate responsibilities.

Whilst it might be hard to find someone who does things as good as you think you do them, you also need to put your faith in their ability to do this.

However, this loss of control can have disastrous effects.

For example, my VA who’s attention to details was lets say ‘not the greatest’ listed a product that was worth £1300 for £130. Of course this promptly sold and left me with the headache of contacting the customer, profusely apologizing and cancelling the order.

Advantages of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Time

Of course, by far the biggest advantage of hiring a VA is that you should end up having more time that you can dedicate to the things in your business that are going to turn the dial. If there is anything that you do, which is manual and repetitive, then look at putting a system in place and automating this. This should ensure that you have a newly freed up source of time that you can dedicate to high impact activities and tasks.

Share Ideas

Being an online entrepreneur can be a lonely business. There are many hours that you will be spending in front of the computer on your own, and no-one else from your friends and family will have the remotest idea of what you are doing.

If you find a good VA and develop a relationship with them, then over time you should find that you will be able to bounce ideas off of them, and get their feedback on areas that they are familiar with.

Upskilling

One other benefit from getting a VA, is that over time, you can train them and upskill them to take on other responsibilities within your company. Start them off on low level tasks that they become expert at, and then gradually introduce new activities for them to take over.
In the long term they can even take on the role of training other VA’s in the role they were originally hired for as they progress up the chain within your company!

Tips to Hiring a Good Virtual Assistant

If you’re thinking of hiring a VA then there’s a few things that you can do to make your life a little bit easier and give yourself the biggest chance of finding a great person to work with:

Create a Sample Test

Virtual Assistant Tests

Once you’ve got your potential shortlist of VAs then I would highly recommend that you give them a sample task to complete, so you can really see if they’re up to the job.

If you have a few candidates to choose from then this can really help you decide.


I used this test recently and it helped me to select an excellent VA for my eBay dropshipping store.

Create a Proper Brief

This can be either a written brief or even better, a video capture/screen share showing yourself performing the actions that you would like them to perform.

You really should try to communicate every detail and every step to them.

Remember that some things that may be natural to you, because you’ve done it for a while, will be completely new to them and they’ll be prone to error so give as much detail as you can to minimise the potential ambiguity.

Download a free copy of my eBay dropshipping brief here

Check everything

Thinking that hiring a VA will just solve all of your problems and they’ll be able to do everything as well as you, instantly is a huge mistake to make.
For sure they will make lots of mistakes to start with so its key that you check everything they do until they’re up on their feet.
Always give constructive, detailed feedback and with a bit of luck they should learn from this and you can mould them into the employee you’re looking for.

Planning is Key

Once you have a VA on board, your role will be different and you need to focus on carefully planning out their work.

I would suggest that you give them an overall plan of what you want to achieve, but give them weekly targets of what they should be doing, so they don’t get overwhelmed.

This is also a great way for you to keep a closer eye on what they’re doing.

Where Can you Find a Good Virtual Assistant?

There are loads of sites out there, but probably the leading site is upwork.com where there is a huge selection of remote workers, who cover a massive range of skills.

The good thing is you can choose by region, price per hour, language ability and even check out different tests that they’ve completed.

You can either post a job yourself and wait for the replies to come in or just search for the person you are looking for and make them an offer.

All payment and contracts are managed via Upwork itself… It couldn’t be easier

Qualities of a Good Virtual Assistant

Attention to detail

This has to be the most important for me, as it gets really frustrating if they just rush through the task and ignore the instructions you’ve given

Good level of communication English

Depending on the task this can be crucial. You might end up paying a bit more for better English but you’ll save yourself hours of pain and communication issues

Makes suggestions / improvements

This is a really ‘nice to have’ skill but if you can find a VA, who has a bit of drive and passion, then you’re onto a winner.

How do I Know this?

• Firstly I took David Vu's excellent eBay Dropshipping course
• Secondly I’ve been doing this for the past few months so have in my eBay store but working with offshore workers for years

...What are your experiences like?

Let us know anything good, bad or funny that’s happened with your Virtual Assistant and any tips you use to improve your working together.

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Filed Under: Dropshipping Tagged With: ebay Dropshipping

Interesting Ways to Make Money Online

4th November 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Make Money Online 2016
Quick Navigation

Blogging / Website Monetisation
Social Trading 2016 Review
Matched Betting 2016 Review
eBay Droppshipping
What Did I Achieve in 2016?
How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I can’t believe it, but it’s been almost a year since I started this blog so I thought it would be a good time to look back and see what I have achieved, what I haven’t achieved and whether it was possible to make money online in 2016.

I’m also going to be fully transparent about my earnings from this year, just as a benchmark for the future.

My intention last year as described in my first article was to dedicate my time across 3 ways to make money online:

  • Blogging / Website Monetization
  • Social Trading
  • Matched Betting

In this post we’ll look at each of these in turn as well as my latest business venture with eBay Dropshipping

Blogging / Website Monetisation


Website Monetisation 2016

Well I came into this as a complete newbie and a year later, I’ve got 2 websites up and running and have learnt an incredible deal about internet marketing, SEO and how you can make money through websites online.

I always knew that you could make money through advertising if you had a successful site, but wasn’t sure about the details of:

  • How you make a site successful
  • What a successful site looks like
  • How you make money through a successful site

I’m no expert but I think I’ve got a much clearer picture of all 3 of these things now, and after a year of learning, I need to start applying this knowledge to my sites.

In my mind the answers to these 3 questions are:

  • Through keyword research, great content creation and link building
  • High quality interesting content, generating over £1k of income per month with growth potential
  • Pay per Click (Adsense), Affiliate Revenue (Amazon), Building e mail lists

Content Creation

From the information that I have digested I’ve learned that making money in this way is a lot more complicated than it was a few years ago, where you could just throw up a website that focused on long tail keywords, create some product reviews, generate some links from a Private Blog Network and you’d be in the money.

Now, the focus is much more on providing great content that is actually useful and solves people’s problems rather than just promoting products.

There’s been a shift in thinking from creating niche websites to building broader authority sites that you grow with time, and as they grow in size they have the potential to bring in much bigger revenue streams.

This shift largely came after a couple of Google updates, that basically wiped out the traffic of a lot of the niche sites.

Your typical site such as ‘bestpaintbrushes.com’ that was made up of review articles and was stuffed with affiliate links would have got one of Google’s ‘Thin Content Penalties’, which effectively removed it from the search listings as part of Googles purge on poor content.

The key now seems to be really finding a niche that you can develop and grow over time, and put systems in place so that others can do a lot of the more labour intensive work for you.

This includes outsourcing things like content creation, link building and formatting of blog posts to free up your precious time.

Website Monetisation 2016 Summary

It’s been great learning so much, but I really need to put this in practice. The main issue here has been time.

I’ve had so much going on that trying to write, publish and promote articles is something that I’ve had to neglect and hence I’ve made no money at all from this idea this year.

I think I’ve got a solid base to move forward, next year and with a bit of luck I’ll have more time to dedicate to this next year as it’s definitely something I want to pursue.

Money Made this Year:

£0

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read more about my year Learning Internet Marketing

Social Trading 2016 Review


eToro Best Traders

I’d never heard of Social Trading before I stumbled across an article on it and thought that it looked like an interesting idea.

I’ve got a bit of experience with investing in the stock market, but Social Trading seems like a novel way of investing your money.

I’ve done a full review of my year here but if you haven’t heard of it before, social trading or copy trading as it’s also known, is where you invest in traders and make the exact same trades that they do, in proportion to the amount you invest.

This means that you don’t necessarily need to know too much about markets, commodities and forex trading as you can leave that to the experts, but rather you invest in traders based on their performance and other indicators such as their attitude to risk and the maximum amounts they’ve lost in a single day or week.

There are a number of sites out there but I’ve been using eToro as it’s got a really great user interface and is easy to start to use.

They have a virtual portfolio that you can use to start with where you can invest virtual money in your traders before you throw your hard earned cash at it.

I do quite like the Fantasy Football nature of this idea and it makes trading a lot more accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested, however, I can see how people could get carried away and lose a lot of money as well.

On an initial glance you can see a lot of the traders reporting really high yields, however, when you drill into their stats you soon find that a lot of these investors have lost big at some point as well.I invested $2500 at the start of the year and am probably going to make a maximum of $100 at the end of the year, which isn’t a great deal, however, at least I haven’t lost anything.

Social Trading 2016 Summary

Realistically, I don’t think this is a great money making scheme and out of everything I’ve tried this year it feels a bit like you are investing more out of hope than judgement, so probably isn’t something that I’ll pursue in the future.

By the same token I didn’t spend much time on this after my initial research into the shortlist of traders.

Money Made this Year:

<  £500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Find out more about Social Trading in my Beginner’s Guide

Matched Betting 2016 Review


Matched Betting 2016 Review

This time last year, I’d barely heard of matched betting and thought that this was either some kind of scam or was a gateway into gambling.

I’d read lots about people reportedly making thousands each month from this, so thought I’d give it a go, and a year later I can say that it really does work, and IT’S NOT GAMBLING​!

​The process is quite simple and is built on the principle that bookmakers are giving away lots of free offers, and by placing bets on both results happening you can extract a certain percentage of that bet as your profit.

For example, Betfair have a sign up offer where if you bet £10 they will give you £30 in free bets, so if you select your bets well at the bookmaker and the betting exchange you’ll be able to extract about £25 out of that total bet. I explain this in more detail in my Matched Betting Beginners Guide.

​There are heaps of accounts that you can sign up to and make up to £1500 just by working through these accounts, but then you get to the next level…. reloads.

​For every given day there are 10 – 20 different offers available across the different bookmakers, that you can keep earning money from. For example today, there is an offer with Ladbrokes where if you bet £20 pre-match they will give you a free £10 in-play bet. The trick is to keep repeating these offers and you’ll be suprised how much it adds up at the end of the month.

On top of this, you can then extract money from accumulator bets using either Accumulator Generator or Oddsmonkey’s Acca Matcher Tool.

If this wasn’t enough for you, then you can go a step further and make money from the horse racing offers and things such as the Oddsmonkey Eachway Matcher which will guarantee you returns from races, regardless of the results.

Matched Betting 2016 Summary

Not only have I made money through matched betting this year, but I’ve actually enjoyed doing it. There is nothing more rewarding than getting money for free and as long as you are careful and gradual learn what you are doing this is a great way to earn a little extra money.

The only downside is that it can start to become a bit time consuming, but overall if you’re looking for a bit of extra pocket money, then matched betting is a great choice for you.

Money Made this Year:

£3500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read more about my Year in Matched Betting

eBay Dropshipping


ebay Dropshipping David Vu

When surfing the web and looking into ways to make money online, you come across a lot of rubbish and a lot of people claiming their idea will make you a fortune. In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.

However, every now and then you come across something that might just have potential and in my mind, as long as you’re not investing a lot of time or money into that stream to test if it works or not, then some times its worth a shot.

… so that’s how I got into eBay dropshipping.​

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Travel Like a Boss​ (which is awesome by the way) and on one of his episodes he talks to an entrepreneur called David Vu who offers the following course on UdemyeBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

His course teaches you the basic principles of dropshipping​ and how you can list a product on eBay, and when someone buys the product from you, you buy it from someone else (at a cheaper price) and they send it to the person who bought it from you. 

Sounds complicated? Well it isn’t and the best thing about it is that you get to keep a healthy mark-up on each product and you never have to worry about stocking products yourself.​

eBay Dropshipping Summary

I’ve been doing this for a couple of months now, and yes, this really works and after you have done the hard work to set up all of your products in eBay, it becomes fairly passive.

​The only work you need to do on an ongoing basis is processing your orders, responding to any queries, and making sure you can always purchase a product somewhere if someone purchases it from you.

The model is simple… the more products you list, the more sales you make, the more money you earn, and you don’t need to invest a penny up front.

Money Made this Year:

£500

Earning Potential:

Passive Rating:

….Read my detailed eBay Dropshipping Review

What Did I Achieve in 2016?

Overall 2016, has been an amazing year and I’ve learned soooo much, and discovered so many things that are both interesting and are potential ways that you can make money online without necessarily being tied to a specific location, or needing to slave away for 8 hours a day.

​I feel that I’ve put the groundwork in this year, for some of the ideas that I want to focus on in this next year and the more that I have learned, the more options and business models that I have discovered that have been proven to work, and are attainable if you just put in the hours to start with. 

If anything, the hardest thing that I’ve struggled with this year is having the time to dedicate to the different streams of interest, especially as I have a demanding full time job to attend to as well.​

I guess the main thing that people care about is how much money I made this passed year. It’s not a huge sum at all, but it’s given me money to invest and build on next year and is a great starting point….. drumroll please……

£

How Will I Make Money Online in 2017?

I had planned to take 3 months out in February so I could focus on these business ideas, but my work has declined this request, so inste​ad I’ve requested to go down to 4 days a week. This is probably the safest option in the short term, until I can get these ideas fully off of the ground.

I’m swamped with ideas at the moment and there are soooo many things that I want to get working on, that it is driving me crazy, however, my shortlist is:

eBay Dropshipping – Build my store up to 1500 products and employ a Virtual Assistant to work on the product listings to build the store even further and automate the processes. Once this is set up this should give me a steady stream of income, which will allow me to work on other things.

Focus on Niche Sites – I have 1 Adsense site that I have already built and written 10 articles for and since neglected, that I really want to dedicate time to and see if I can start to get this to rank.
I also have 1 site that I have bought from Human Proof Designs which they are currently building and will need some of my time to market.
If all goes well with this, then I’ve got another great niche that I want to get into

Amazon FBA – This has been pretty much the buzz and excitement of the year, with many people making a great source of income by whitelabelling their own products from China and selling them via Amazon, who also hold your stock and manage all of your distribution. Could have huge potential, but requires a bit of up front investment and research.

Drop Shipping Store – I’ve heard a lot about setting up a dropshipping store with Shopify and would really like to take the Drop Ship Lifestyle course at some point. Again, this one will consume a lot of time, however, I really like the idea and am interested in learning more about this business model, especially as more and more business is going online!

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Filed Under: blog, Make Money Online Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, ebay Dropshipping, matched betting, niche websites

eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory

19th September 2016 By martinos74 10 Comments

I haven’t made many updates to the site recently as I’ve been focusing mainly on my latest make money online scheme… eBay dropshipping. EBay whatshipping I hear you say, well let me explain!

If you’ve never heard of dropshipping before, then simply explained the following happens:

  1. You advertise a product somewhere
  2. Someone buys the product from you
  3. You buy a product from a manufacturer
  4. They send the product directly to your buyer

Simply put, you make money by charging more for the product than the manufacturer sells it to you.

There are a heap of benefits from setting up this kind of business model, as opposed to a traditional store where you ship your own products, including:

  • You don’t need to invest a lot of money upfront, as you only buy a product when someone buys it from you
  • You never need to handle any stock
  • You don’t need any storage facility
  • You don’t need to worry about posting and distributing your items
  • You don’t need to handle returns as these are sent directly back to the dropshipper

Basically you are just acting as one massive middleman, who passes the product from the buyer to the seller.

You’ll find examples of dropshipping everywhere from niche websites, to Amazon and EBay and strangely enough some of the large high street stores are actually just big dropshipping agents.

Yes, that’s right, if you buy from some of the UK’s major retailers, you’ll find that their products are bought and shipped directly from a third party…. That’s dropshipping.

EBay Dropshipping – David Vu Course


David Vu Dropshipping Course

In most cases dropshipping will involve building up a relationship with a dropshipping supplier, however, there is actually a much simpler way to do this, which I learned about on David Vu’s course: eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

The approach that is taught to you on this course, is that you don’t need necessarily to bother with a dropshipping supplier, and instead you can just sell products from any online retailer.

That’s right you can simply go to a major retailer like Argos, or Walmart in the States and resell their products on EBay, and if you add a decent enough markup, you’re going to make some money!

How Does eBay Dropshipping Work?

David Wu’s model is quite simple:

  1. You list a product on EBay with a mark up of 40% on top of the retail price
  2. ​You optimise your product titles so you can attract as many people as possible
  3. ​You sell a product, deduct 10% EBay fees and 3% Paypal fees
  4. You get to keep the remaining cash

Why Would Someone Buy a More Expensive Product from you?

Ok, so the reality is that the products that you are selling are going to be a lot more expensive than the same product listed either directly at the source, other websites and even other EBay sellers, so you’re probably thinking why on earth would someone buy your more expensive product?

Well there are a couple of reasons really:

1 – People are stupid and lazy – Most people will only buy a product from the first 5 listings that they see on EBay, so if you have good feedback and well optimised titles then there is a good chance you’ll be in this top 5. People who come to EBay are still under the mindset that they are getting a bargain, so won’t always check other sources online before purchasing on EBay.

2 – Reach – If you use the full 80 characters available in your product title field and optimise your title, then you will reach a lot more people than other listings for the same product might reach, which could mean you would appear as the only listing for certain search terms. For example the following title [insert example] would reach a lot more people than this one [example]

3 – EBay’s Global Shipping Programme – This is something that EBay recently introduced and most EBay sellers do not take advantage of yet. If you click a checkbox to sell via the Global Shipping Programme this means that your product will also be listed on other EBay sites around the world and you will be listed as an International Seller. You would have seen examples of this on listings before where it would say ‘Shipped from China’ for example. The good thing about this is that all you have to do is pay the postage to the UK EBay distribution centre, and they will pay the rest of the charges around the world.

Are Retailers Happy with this?


Dropshipping Shops

Well, in truth a lot of the retailers aren’t so happy for you to resell their products and a lot of them will cancel your order if you send it to the Global Shipping Programme address.

I find this a bit bizarre really, because you are giving their product free promotion and sending sales to their websites, so why on earth would you try to limit this?

I guess the reason is that they still want to retain a certain amount of control over their pricing policies so aren’t so keen with this practice.

In the past I’ve used Argos, John Lewis and Homebase without a problem

However, if you do a bit more digging there are plenty of other suppliers out there who will be willing to ship your products.

There’s nothing illegal about this practice, but you want to make sure your supplier doesn’t mind you selling their products, otherwise you might be stuck in a situation where someone buys a product from you and you can’t fulfil their order.

How Much can you Earn from eBay Dropshipping?


eBay Sales

I’ve only be doing this for about 3 months now but I can say that it does actually work.

The graphic is from my actual account and so far I’ve sold over 30 products in the last 2 months. If you take out eBay and Paypal fees you’ll probably make about 20% of the sale price.

The beauty of this money making tactic is, that the more products you list, the more you’re likely to sell, so you just need to beef up your store with as many listings as possible.

Realistically I think you need to have about 1500 products in your store to be able to make £1k a month from this business model.

The idea is then that after you get to a certain threshold you can then keep scaling up and pay a Virtual Assistant to do a lot of the mundane chores such as listing products, fulfilling orders and even providing customer service.

2018 Update: I currently have about 4000 products in my store and am making about £500 a month profit after I take out expenses. This isn’t a huge amount, however, I invest very little time in this at the moment. I have a team of listers who add the products for me and all I day is deal with customer service and managing the orders.

How Much Time do you Need to Invest?



Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to success and like any other way of making money online, you’re going to need to put in the hours.

Once you’ve chosen the product to add, it typically takes about 10 minutes to add a new product listing to eBay and to correctly format the titles and source the images.

On top of this you’ll also be spending time on the following:

  • Buying the actual product (10 mins per sale)
  • Uploading tracking numbers and comms with the buyer (10 mins per sale)
  • Answering customer service and product enquiries
  • Managing stock levels (Yes, even though you’re not stocking any products you need to ensure that the retailers don’t run out of stock, otherwise you’ll be left with no product to ship)

What are the Drawbacks of eBay Dropshipping?

This all sounds great so far, but there are a number of things that aren’t so great when you get involved in this:

  • If you don’t have an old eBay account and need to set up a new one, then you are initially limited to listing only 10 products. You can contact eBay to increase this limit after one month, and then every following month you’ll need to contact them again, which is a minor irritant
  • It takes a long time and is a really laborious task to source products, copy their pictures, add all the product details and optimise your listings titles
  • Trying to monitor stock levels is a major pain and you’ll often find that you’re supplier is out of stock, which can leave you having to source the product from a more expensive alternative or a less reliable source, which could risk your reputation
  • Once you start building up your eBay dropshipping empire, you’ll quickly realise that this is going to tie you down too. One of the key metrics that eBay uses to give your seller rating is whether you ship your products out within your specified timescales and how quickly you can add tracking numbers. Basically this means that you need to be able to get access to the internet at least once per day, or risk running behind on orders and affect your ratings.

Summary

Overall, out of everything I have been looking into this year, I really would recommend this way to make money online for a number of reasons:

  • You’ll be able to make your first sale really quickly, which is really motivating to see how you can make money out of nothing really easily
  • You won’t need to fork out loads of capital to buy stock, as you only buy something when an order comes in
  • You get to learn how eBay works and also which products will sell well, which can be an essential education for other money making strategies
  • It has potential to become fully automated once you build the business up to a certain level and can be generating the ultimate goal of passive income.

The best thing about this is that you can get started in next to no time and it won’t cost you anything, so what are you waiting for? 

Give it a go and let me know how you got on!!!​

Read more about David Wu’s Course

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