Successful Product Selection For Your eBay Business: Muffy Saves The Day
You must get product selection right if you are going to be successful working from home on eBay. Without successful product selection for your eBay business, you will not make a profit. EBay is more difficult to sell on than other venues because what is hot and what is not seems to change weekly. There are two parts to this successful equation: a good purchase price and a good selling price. Without these you cannot make a profit.
Here is how I made a great profit with a very inexpensive item. It was late October and the Christmas shopping season has begun. I began looking for items to sell on eBay that would carry us through the Christmas season. We went through all of our wholesalers and found several items that fit our requirements. One item in particular, Muffy VanDerBear ornaments, seemed to have a lot of profit potential. What was special about these resin ornaments? They were collectable, Muffy has a big following on eBay. In addition they were in original boxes, small enough and lightweight to easily ship, and they did not break easily. The price we were paying for a gross (144) of assorted Muffy ornaments was 50 each. This is how to make a successful product selection for your eBay business. Know what will sell, get it at a great price, and sell it for a profit.
The prior sales were checked to see who was selling Muffy and what the selling price was. Here is where timing is everything. There were very few individuals selling these particular Muffy VanDerBear ornaments. We listed one of each type as a test at $5.00 each. They sold well. Even after PayPal fees, eBay listing fees, shipping costs, we still made a good profit on these initial sales. We immediate listed more as each item sold. Other vendors saw what we were doing and starting cutting the price. Finally, the selling price per bear dropped to $1.00 and many were going unsold. This happened in about 2-3 weeks time. I still had a lot of ornaments to sell. My husband and partner in my work from home eBay business is a marketing genius. He came up with the idea of packaging the Muffy VanderBear's together into a set. We had a set of 10 and a set of 5. Nobody was selling the ornaments as sets. The fist set of 10 sold for $45.00 and the first set of 5 sold for $35.00. We were back to making a profit. Repackaging Muffy saves the day for us. The final outcome was that we sold hundreds of Muffy VanderBear ornaments. None of them sold for a loss, and most sold for over 200% profit. When the balance sheet was gone over for this particular product, we did extremely well for ourselves.
Successful product selection for your eBay business is crucial. This case study of how Muffy saves the day is a great example of how purchase price, selling price, timing, and a rethinking of how to present the product put a lot of money in our pockets. Not every product you choose to sell on eBay will give you this kind of result. However, if you study what went right with this situation you will be able to see how you can adopt these successful tactics to your product line. The best advice anyone can give you is know what is selling before you commit to a product. Hot items have a very short life cycle but they will make you a lot of money. The trick is getting to what is hot before everyone else does. Combining timing, correct product selection and price, a good selling point and the ability to rethink the product's presentation, will result in a profitable eBay business that you can work on from home. It's all in the successful product selection for your eBay business. We did it, so can you.