what would you do

the black fox

the black fox

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Jeff
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had a mad afternoon trying to buy a item ,visited several shops with no luck at all .. came home and did a internet search to find them available but best multi buy price worked out at 73p per item ,amazon or e.bay both the same .
in the end I sourced the makers and rung them up ,to ask if they sold to the public . yep was the reply 15p each I promptly ordered 100 for personal use .. .

now the quandary is do I order a few hundred more and resale them at a good price as obviously the other retailers are taking the pee or just forget it . dont really want to start another business up left all that behind me but its so tempting ???
 
It's a 50/50 - make money or don't. You would have to sell lots to make it worthwhile which means counting, handling, packing, posting etc. All that adds up and eats any profit.

Toss a coin if it's that hard a decision. ;)
 
Or you could just tell us what your talking about so we can ALL share in your good fortune?
 
Stumpy said:
Or you could just tell us what your talking about so we can ALL share in your good fortune?
Click to expand...
Nope as that would give you a inroads , I already know it’s a hard to source item , the sell them yourself idea came from the manufacturer ,it’s tempting but I’m hovering due to age and time
 
I once went to B&Q to find they had reduced a garden planter from £5-99 to £1 while stocks last. I emptied the shelf (10) and asked an assistant if they had anymore she said we have more in the stock room how many do you want, all of them I said, she came back with two more. I pictured I was going to make a fortune on ebay, ah well.
 
My nephew and his Mrs have built up quite a little internet based business. He works so his Mrs deals with the orders during the day. One recent order gave enough profit to buy a lap top to add to the printer they'd previously bought. I don't know how much they're making but if one order pays for a lap top it looks like it's paying at least decent pocket money.

So, the moral of this story is that if you see an opportunity it's up to you what you do with it. Run with it and it may provide some pocket money or even be a nice little or even big earner. If you can be bothered which brings me onto another little story.

A former GF of mine used to make a living buying and selling on line and one thing she used to do was build sites and run them for a bit to show they were profitable and then sell them off. Some would fail PDQ and the reason was pretty obvious, the new owners just didn't put the work in.

Good luck if you go for it.
 
And how many of this stock item are the other retail vendors selling at 73p each? Is part of the reason that they are retailing for 73p each because they sit there taking up stock space for weeks/months before selling, or just trickle slowly out in ones and twos, incurring comparatively high labour costs to pack and post, so they need to be that price to make stocking them worthwhile?
 
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COGS profit = £58 / 100 less postage + packaging.

Imagine you could sell them in batches of 10 at 65p each. That's £1.50 for goods, £1.53 for click and drop, 50p for a jiffy bag. Say £3 vs a sale price of £6.50. You'll need to allocate money for stock, marketing (probably want to run a 25% affiliate discount) which means you'll want to sell about 4 packs an hour every hour to make minimum wage.

You could save your marketing budget by selling via eBay / Amazon but bear in mind they will want big commission. Also, people watch these markets v closely (esp Amazon themselves who know exactly what's selling). So either you won't sell many or somebody will undercut you (look at all the packs of batteries on eBay for £x.98, £x.97, £x.96.....). That's before the manufacturers spot the opportunity and undercut you all.

You'll probably make a bit of money in the short term but as the Dragons would say it's not scalable, there's no barrier to entry and you are adding no value. For those reasons, I'm out.
 
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JonathanRyan said:
COGS profit = £58 / 100 less postage + packaging.

Imagine you could sell them in batches of 10 at 65p each. That's £1.50 for goods, £1.53 for click and drop, 50p for a jiffy bag. Say £3 vs a sale price of £6.50. You'll need to allocate money for stock, marketing (probably want to run a 25% affiliate discount) which means you'll want to sell about 4 packs an hour every hour to make minimum wage.

You could save your marketing budget by selling via eBay / Amazon but bear in mind they will want big commission. Also, people watch these markets v closely (esp Amazon themselves who know exactly what's selling). So either you won't sell many or somebody will undercut you (look at all the packs of batteries on eBay for £x.98, £x.97, £x.96.....). That's before the manufacturers spot the opportunity and undercut you all.

You'll probably make a bit of money in the short term but as the Dragons would say it's not scalable, there's no barrier to entry and you are adding no value. For those reasons, I'm out.
Click to expand...

Thank you for putting numbers on the reasons my head kept giving for not doing it. Instinct tells me that the margins would be too small, but I was too lazy to do the figures.
 
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