This is the story about how I created two separate short lived EBay businesses that could have been leveraged into a sustainable model, but I wasn’t paying attention to the possibilities that were right in front of my eyes. Two lessons learned!
EBAY “Information King”
This was my first eye opener into the world of selling information. I had found an info product that came on CD that came with resale rights. It was a list of wholesale and drop ship companies with extra stuff included. To tell you truth, I think I glanced at the titles and that was it.
When I got the CD, I made a seller account, made a sales page and I was in business. I was selling the CD for a few bucks and charging inflated shipping and handling fee. When it was said and done, I was profiting close to a $10 profit for every CD that I sold. Figured I could sell 1 or 2 a day for some extra money. Never in a million years did I expect what was about to happen.
I can’t remember exactly how long it took, but it wasn’t long before I was taking daily trips to the Post Office and dropping off boxes full of CD sleeves. I couldn’t believe what was happening. My daily income was close to $100/day. This lasted for about 2 months and then bam. Everybody and their brothers were doing the same exact thing and my business crashed faster than I could blink.
I wasn’t prepared for that. Didn’t give much thought to the fact that others would end up doing what I did. My main flaw with this business was that I didn’t grow it out to eBooks or a website. This would have been a perfect opportunity to establish a list of information buyers. I wasn’t growing and learning more, which ultimately killed my business. Could you imagine how big my list could be right now if I had done this?
Drop ship EBay Business
My next online business was also on EBay. This time I was using some of the information in the CDs I was selling to start a profitable drop shipping business using EBay to sell the products. At this point, I still didn’t understand the value of having a site of my own, but I sold quite a few things on EBay and made some decent money using this model. The primary products that I sold were electronics.
The process was actually quite simple.
- Research the products that I had access to on EBay to see what they were selling for and how well they were moving. Target profit margin was always at least 20% or I wouldn’t touch it.
- Find the best selling copy and “swipe it”. I wouldn’t completely copy it, but I would use the same format and information to sell my products. Don’t change what’s not broken.
- Sell it and then put information into drop ship account.
- Post sale customer service.
I had this down to a science. I was moving tens of thousands of dollars in a month’s time. Again, like the last two businesses I failed to learn to grow this into my own site. At the time, it just didn’t make since to me to do such a thing. Once people started to find my source, prices fell dramatically and profit margins went right out the window. And another business was up in smokes.
