Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Researching on eBay - The Online Market

If you want to sell products in an eBay store, even before you aquire inventory you need to check the prices on eBay. You may find that your absolute best cost will leave you with no profit margin on eBay. I'll give you an example, because this happened to me.

I went to Best Buy to buy an iPod back when they were just coming out. It cost just over $400.00 CAD and I didn't want to pay that much, so I tried to find a deal on eBay. What do you know! I could pick one up on eBay for roughly $230.00 CAD.

Now instead of buying it right away, I waited a week and checked the prices just in case I could find a better deal. Sure enough, I waited a week and was able to grab one for $180.00 CAD.

At this point, I'm happy that I have my iPod and didn't pay close attention to what just happend. The market on eBay for iPods was 50% cheaper than in retail stores. I checked onto my Doba account to see what I could get the very same iPods for, and my best price was $180.00 CAD (I couldn't order for myself because Doba doesn't ship to Canada :(

When looking at the details of the iPod in the Doba site, it showed MSRP (Manufacuter Suggested Retail Price) of $409.99 and our wholesale price was $180.00. That looks great on paper, but if I wanted to sell this on eBay, I would lose money.

So before you are going to sell a product on eBay, do your research before you purchase a wholesale lot.

Take Care :)

Barry Deen

1 comment:

Val said...

Yeah, I've made that mistake too many times ;) I suggest to do ebay research before actually selling something on ebay, saved me more than once.