• 18Sep

    Why is every idiot and his dog constantly posting all over the place trying to get wholesale iPOD’s at 1/2 or 2/3rds off retail with minimum order of 5!

    Forget it. Big brand consumer electronics suppliers and wholesalers operate on very small margins (usually between 1 and 10%). Dell, the king of cost cutting has a profit margin of 6.3%.

    If you can find brand name consumer electronics that will let you have them for a decent margin and a low order you can bet their doing something similar to the iPOD scam.

    Your only hope is to find generic brand usually Chinese manufactured consumer electronics, which may allow you a decent margin.

  • 18Sep

    At the time of writing, this information is consistent with eBays policies.

    You may:

    * Provide a contact email on your listing page, this can only be used to discuss the listing and cannot be used as a way to circumvent the auction process. Smart buyers will realize that there’s probably a website of yours attached to that email so this can generate traffic.

    * Link to a page which further describes the product. The primary purpose of this link must be further describe it, meaning you cannot give the user the option to buy it on that page, but eBay says

    “That page may contain links to pages which do contain items not listed on eBay.”

    Remember, the primary purpose of the further description page must be to further describe the product, so keep the links to other pages discreet.

    * Use your further description page to highlight your other eBay auctions.

    * If you own your images, watermark them with your website address.

  • 18Sep

    Navigating your way through the myriad of alleged wholesaler’s and dropshippers can be difficult. The first thing to watch out for is a scam which you can usually prevent by doing a search here.

    The second trap is the middleman. Buying low and selling higher in lower quantities, he passes himself off as a legitimate wholesaler.

    There are a couple of things you can look out for to unmask him:

    1. How low is the MOQ (minimum order quantity). Generally, genuine wholesalers will require around a $500 minimum order or more. A typical middleman may have $100, $70 or even none.

    2. What’s the going rate on Ebay. If the prices he’s offering are around the same or higher then on Ebay thats a dead giveaway.

    Middlemen wholesalers and dropshippers will spend a lot of time SEO’ing (search engine optimizing) their site, which will mean a search will usually place them up the top. So you might have to dig a little deeper, use the advanced search feature so you can display 100 results at a time.

  • 17Sep

    The success of the iPOD has led many manufacturers to copy the design. Some have merely imitated the iPOD style, branding it under their own brand, but others have directly copied the packaging and the iPOD itself trying to pass it off as genuine.

    Image

    Heres a post that will help you identify the fakes, Faketalk

    You can also source legal, ‘iPOD style’ mp3 players from my site The Wholesale-Hub.

  • 17Sep

    Postal Gouging, as it is known is done to keep the listing price of the good as low as possible while making the real money in the shipping.

    Ebay’s policy is pretty clear on this and basically states that sellers may charge the actual shipping price (inc insurance, tax, etc) and at the sellers discretion a nominal handling fee to compensate for packaging, tape etc.

    An example listed on the policy page:

    • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (2001, DVD) BIN: US $1

      Shipping: US $11 First Class USPS

      Explanation: The actual cost to ship this DVD would be less than $3 using First Class Mail stated in the listing. This seller is charging all costs for this item in the shipping price thus hiding the “true” cost for this item from buyers.

    Although this example is clearly against their terms, I can see grey areas that sellers could half-legitimately operate in. For instance listing a low priced item usually listed at $2 at $0.001 BIN, and then charging a $2 handling fee on top of the $2 shipping fee.

    As I see it, the difference between the handling fee and the listing price shouldn’t raise alarm bells, but shipping or handling charges more then about $2 over actual cost should be avoided.

  • 17Sep

    I’m an auction seller, but primarily a webmaster, so heres a few tips to help you get free search engine traffic.

    Decide on what keywords you want to target, using Overture, you want to target terms that have a high search volume, but not so much competition. Once you’ve found a few words that suite your niche, search for them in Google and have a look at the first few sites. You want be specifically looking at their title (the words in the blue bar up the top), and their page rank.

    Ignore the millions of other pages Google found, you can easily beat them, its the top ones you have to worry about.

    If their title is exactly the same as the keywords you want to target, they’ll be your direct competition. If their PR is any higher then 5 your going to struggle, the lower the better. PR is indirectly responsible for Google positioning. It is a measure of the quantity and quality (as measured by PR), of the links that point to that site.

    Use Yahoo and type  linkdomain:www.theirsite.com -site:www.theirsite.com to find all the sites linking to them. If you think you can beat this then you have a good chance of ranking above them.

    Link building is hard and time consuming, some strategies can be found here, but above all a quality site will naturally get incoming links.
    Onpage optimization: Create your homepage title to match your keywords, if your targeting more then one phrase use the | key (shift + key above enter), so it will look like this; keyword phrase1 | keyword phrase2 | keyword phrase3. I wouldn’t recommend going after any more then 3.

    Within your text on your page you want to make sure you’ve got your keywords - a ‘density’ of about 5% of the words of your page should be your keywords.

    You can repeat these step for every page on your site, though its easiest to get links to the homepage. The age of your site is also a factor so you may have to wait up to 9 months to see your site in Google, though MSN and Yahoo are more forgiving.

  • 17Sep

    Ok, this story is old news but in case you missed it:

    LVMH, owner of the Fendi brand sued Wal-Mart in June for selling fake Fendi handbags, wallets and key chains in Wal-Mart owned Sam’s Club stores.

    “The company cited one example of a Sam’s Club store in Las Vegas selling one of its handbags for $295.03 (£160) compared with the recommended retail price of $925.” read more.

    A fake Louis Vuitton handbag on sale in Beijing Silk Street market

    Although mums and dads selling fakes is a widespread problem on ebay, it also goes on relatively unnoticed in shops and now apparently, in corporations.

    One Tool I use to question if the supplier I’m working with is legitimite is Rip Off Report.

    If your supplier has been in business long enough to rack up some complaints, you can generally find them on there.

  • 30Nov

    Ok, this is the first post so forgive me. I’ll try to get a a better template as soon as I can figure it out.

    Basically the idea of this is to share tips, tricks and news of the industry. I’ll try to keep it relevent and provide actually useful information in every post.

    About me, I’m from New Zealand and have been selling on the local ebay type auction site for a while now. I also run The Wholesale-Hub.

    Anyway on to the useful stuff, off the top of my head heres a list of wholesale directories:

    Wholesale Central (who wouldn’t take my $299 this week to be listed because apparently I’m a compeditor).
    Wholesale Dir
    Wholesale Gopher
    Wholesale U
    Esources (UK)
    Top Wholesale Suppliers
    Dmoz

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