ADVANCED EBAY - PRICING YOUR ITEMS

Ebay – Advanced Techniques Only

On this site we are only going to discuss advance Ebay techniques only. The reason being, there are a gazillion (…and that’s a lot) of sites where they give you the basic ebay tutorial. Buy crap at garage sales, clean the stuff, take pictures….zzzzz..zzzz…Oh sorry, I dosed off. None of this information serves the ebay user who is trying to make some real money.

Just to make sure you are at the right place, this site is for people trying to make REAL MONEY!! We are real guys doing real things. We can’t be more honest.

In order to properly tackle such a big topic such as ebay in the detail that’s needed to help our readers it has to be done in bits. Today’s “bit” is regarding how to price your items. No one tells you that you can get burnt, big time by pricing your items the wrong way. We run two eBay sites, and we are PowerSellers on both sites. We will only discuss profits and issues with our gift store: http://stores.ebay.com/Money-Saving-Mikes


Branding is important so we have a cute logo, and we sell a lot of diverse items to help drive traffic from various places. Power Sellers either sell $1000 worth of merchandise per month, or 300 items per month so we kinda sort of know what we are talkin’ bout!

PRICING
In the beginning we used to wonder why after Ebay hit us with the monthly charge, was our PayPal account not swollen the way we needed it to be. The issue was, we were losing money with each sale. Our initial strategy was to just try and sell stuff for a few more dollars then we paid for it. What we didn’t realize was that there are a ridiculous amount of fees associated, and the mark up has to be considerable to make any kind of real profit.
Here are a list of fees that need to be considered with each sale:
1. Sales Tax
2. Listing Fee
3. Pay Pal Fee (approx. 7%)
4. Est. Actual Shipping Cost
5. ebay commission (approx 11%)

The addition of items 1 thru 5 represents your total out of pocket expense. It represents the minimum amount of money that you will have to get out of the buyer just to break even. If you purchased an item for $10 you would have to sell it for approximately $20.03 to cover your costs. That $20.03 can be divided into $15 for the product and $5.03 for shipping, $20.03 with free shipping, or any other creative way that you would like to break up the cost.

Items 1 thru 5 are estimated on the high side, and the more money you have for shipping the lower your ebay fee will be, but higher shipping costs will get you penalized in your buyer ratings so that becomes a delicate dance.

To ease things we created a pretty sweet excel sheet. When we are looking to purchase items from a wholesaler we pop the purchase cost in the sheet and out pops are potential sell price. If it looks like we can sell it to Joe Public for that price, and it’s comparable to other ebay stores, we go for it.

Since we are here to get money together, if you would like a sample of this sheet, send us a comment with your email address and we will email you a copy of this excel file.
There are also a bunch of other calculators available online. We like ours but there is also a pretty sweet free one here: http://www.rolbe.com/ebay.htm

This is an essential tool for the advanced ebayer. If you have any questions post them and hopefully we can get them answered.

Let’s go!
-The FTB Blog Team

Oh yeah we created these bannes to post on our blogs to help drive traffic to our site.