What to sell… Maybe eBayers have insight?
Posted by Andy on March 21, 2007
I had a little free time this weekend so I decided to check out eBay to look at expired auctions and what is hot. It looks like recently they changed this information to subscription only at a cost of $2.99 for 24 hours. I opted not to pay for purusing at this point.
I then headed over to their forums to look at what the sellers were saying about the state of the ebay market place. I’d heard of the concept of “drop shipping” from various sources and I wanted to see if maybe existing sellers were using the technique with any degree of success.
Ultimately I stumbled upon this discussion:
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=1000209529&start=0
Reading through it looks like there are quite a few scams going on, but here are the pros and cons that I can deduce, some are common sense others are from research:
Pros:
- Low startup costs
- No need to pre-purchase inventory – pay as you go
- No need to find someone to handle the logistics of storage or delivery
Cons:
- Scam factor
- You are at the whim of the dropshipper’s inventory and communication protocols
- More middle men to take a slice of the pie.
- The prices actually don’t seem that great. For example, I found an iPod at one of the sites for $359.50 while the same iPod is $349.99 at my local Best Buy.
It looks like the only way they were making money is by going to garage sales and buying people’s stuff then reselling it on eBay. This is a time-intensive task!
I got a general feeling that in order to sell anything you have to purchase a decent quantity of your product(s) to get a respectable wholesale price. Another concern I would have is that the amount of time it takes to manage the dropshipping vendor will be deceptive. You may be able to automate some of it, but I didn’t get a feeling that the entire supply-chain process is easily automated.
While it is the easy way to start, long term I feel there are too many weaknesses in the drop-shipping model. I will have to find another source for my product.
