to sell things
Hi,
I am looking partially to shop for things online and partially to sell things. But I guess both would stem from my buying things online, so I'll start there.
I have a lot of wealthy friends who love to look for bargains, so I recently decided to try doing some sales. Anyway, I have looked all over the place and have found some interesting deals, but I was wondering if you could give me some help or just point me in the right direction.
I basically want to find a site somewhere that has very good wholesale prices (like maybe something that some type of dealers would use I guess) on a variety of things.
Maybe I am looking for completely the wrong thing and just dont' know it, so I'll explain my situation to you.
My friends, as well as myself, are interested in buying many different things. They are mostly interested in electronics, video games, sunglasses, and watches. I am interested in those as well as clothes. I want to find these at the best possible wholesale prices so I can order them and then resell them to others. I would not be keeping any inventory. People would just be telling me what they're interested in and I'll try to find a good deal on it, order it, and then mark the price up a bit and sell it to them so I can make some profit but still give them a good deal. An added bonus would be if there was a phone number I could call to get a price for a specific item, as I am not always able to get to a computer or a catalog.
If there are no websites like this, could you point me in the direction of some additional information about wholesale buying and reselling? I am very interested, but most sites that I have found which offer information charge money to receive their "free" information about wholesale items.
Thank you for your time and help.
- Steve
Answer
Hi Steve,
Generally speaking, your idea of buying things for wholesale (in other words, low) prices and retail them to your friends at street prices is good. You have a demand from your friends and you have the source where to buy the needed item. The problem is to keep the balance between the profit from the trade (sure you want it to be the highest possible) and the risk of loosing money buying things on the Web at a very low price.
Online price may differ from merchant to merchant as much as twice (I trace prices for main categories). Two or three years ago www.buy.com was announced to be the first online merchant selling under wholesale price (it used the advertising model of profit). Despite of that, I found some items (I checked prices for cameras) were cheaper at Amazon.com due to running promotion of those items. It is funny that very popular shopping bot www.MySimon.com (price comparison) does not detect the lowest price if this price corresponds to running promotion at merchants' site.
To minimize the risk, it is very useful to evaluate the merchant where to buy. The www.bizrate.com does the job of merchants' ratings very well. If you find the lowest price, you'll be able to assess the merchant (for example, whether its customer service is good enough) to make the final decision.
As to me, I use the golden middle – reasonable discounts and low risk. I have chosen about 200 merchants whose solidity I am aware of. You can do the same using www.bizrate.com, www.gomez.com, www.opinion.com. Then I traced promotional offers (coupons) for those merchants. My profit was 20-30% with every sale and completely no problems with wrong orders and refurbished items.
Finally, last year I published www.asqit.com (the name for “Have a Question? AsQ it!”-is a little bit funny, but my wife and son like it). I found that a lot of purchase through my website is performed by customers ordering 5-10 of the same items at ones. Sure they were of your kind of guys making their own profit. So you can either do in the same way, or copy the list of merchants from my website for the category you need, submit the newsletters (nearly all the merchants offer them) and get the promotional offers right into your mailbox. You of course can copy the promotional codes from my website, but remember that some coupon links are valid from www.asqit.com only.
Good luck in your business,
Sergejs
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