My Story: A Summary of the Last 20 Years of My Reselling Experience
In 2004, I was in the movie theater and the commercial advertisement before the movie was featuring the new Yellow Silicone Bracelet that was Sponsored by Nike and one of the top athletes at the time Lance Armstrong. The movie theater offered to sell them for a dollar. After the commercial, an employee of the movie theater apologized that they were sold out.
When I got home later, I looked on eBay to see if I could find one and found them selling for $10-$20 dollars each! Was I reading this wrong? The cheap silicone bracelets we just selling at the movie theater for $1.00! I started calling around local business’ asking for the Livestrong bracelet. Everyone was sold out.
A couple days passed and on my drive home from working I noticed my local university bookstore had a yellow banner reading “Livestrong”. I went inside and asked if they had any bracelets left and she responded “about 300″. I politely asked if I could buy them all. She looked puzzeled and went to ask her boss for permission. She came back and said, ” My manager said I can sell you 150 of them”
I listed them on eBay for auction pricing and they were ending in between $8.00 and a few went for over $20.00 for a single bracelet I bought for one dollar plus tax!
I thought I was RICH! I was so proud of myself and thought I would never have to work a ‘regular’ job. After about one week of telling everyone how great my eBay sales were and patting myself on the back, I noticed the auctions I was listing were no longer selling for 8-10 dollars, now they were selling for 4-6 dollars. This was not good because shipping at the time was around 2 dollars. I got online to see thousands of sellers now had the Armstrong bracelets in stock. I would see them at stores on the shelf now too for everyone to buy. No longer were my Yellow Silicone bracelets cool.
I was at the Nike outlet soon after the craze and saw the Livestrong bracelets at the checkout register. I went to get a closer look and next to them saw a new cooler looking bracelet. It was the Nike version! I love everything Nike so I grabbed a few to see if they would have the same effect on eBay. These were more than the Livestrong bracelets. Nike Charged $5.00 for a package but you could sell them for about $15.00. I sold these for about a year. Also during this time, Target sold one that read: ” Hope, Faith, Love”. This was their Breast Cancer Awareness version. I bought and sold hundreds of these as well. I ended up having about 10 different bracelets in my eBay store at that time. Some of them were “Autism Awareness”, “Support Our Troops”, “Aids Awareness” After about a year, I noticed these were not selling like they used to. I was taking 20-40 of them a day to the post office for about 3 months then it started turning into 3-5 packages a day until it started turning into 3-5 per week. I had built up an inventory with around 3,000 misc. bracelets that I no longer wanted. I sold them in lots on eBay for other resellers to fight over. I was happy with my run but new I needed a new Niche.
In months to come, I listed some of my personal DVD’s on eBay. A couple of them went for higher amounts than other. Quite a bit higher actually. One in particular was my Scarface DVD. It was the Anniversary Edition that had just come out about 2 years earlier (2003). Other DVD’s were selling for around 4-5 dollars but the Scarface DVD sold for $25 dollars! I wanted to find out how to get Scarface DVD’s cheap and sell them! Well that’s not exactly what happened next but it led me to a new eBay venture.
In searching for other Scarface DVD’s online after mine had sold, I noticed a seller who had a lot of 15 DVDs for 40 dollars but one of them was the Scarface that I had just sold for 25 dollars! I thought to myself, I can sell the Scarface one for 25 dollars and have the other 14 DVDs for 15 bucks! I bought them and found another one in the lot to be a little more valuable and that movie was “One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest” with Jack Nickolson. That one sold for $12 dollars! Now I owned the last 13 DVDs for 3 dollars. I had no interest in any of them but they were all fairly new good movies. I sold them in a lot and earned 26 dollars for the DVDs I owned for 3 dollars! So, now started my DVD venture.
I knew that DVD’s pricing varied movie by movie so this would not be like my previous venture of selling the bracelets. What I decided to do was get an average for the price DVD lots were selling for on eBay. I searched “DVD lots” and looked at sold listings. I recorded the past 2 weeks sales and wrote them down. I had about 100 DVD lots with the average amount of DVD’s per lot, and the price they sold for including shipping. My average came out to about $2.50 per DVD. You have to really look at the listings to comb through sellers that try to include “filler” DVDs. Filler DVDs are the less desirable, low budget movies that you can find at the Dollar store and similar places.
After plenty of research, I began buying lots of DVD’s on eBay. I came up with a formula of what the maximum amount I would pay for each DVD once you factored in the eBay, PayPal and shipping fees. I came up with an average of $1.65 that I would pay per DVD. So if there were 10 DVDs in the lot, the maximum I would bid was $16.50. 100 DVDs, $165.00. This had to include shipping too. I would bid on all the DVD lots that had good movies with no filler movies. If i saw a filler movie, I would not count it in the lot. Out of every 10 lots I bid on, I would only win 1 or 2. This method of buying and selling can be applied to many Categories on eBay. In general, if you use this method in another Niche, you should still only be winning a small amount of what you are bidding on.
For sourcing DVDs, I would use keywords like “Personal DVD Lot” or “Collection of DVDs” on eBay’s search. Once I had about 250, I would sell them in a lot. They would fit in one giant box that Walmart sold. I would sell them for about .35 cents profit after eBay and Paypal took their part. Also, shipping costs were calculated. So shipping pricing was based on weight of the package and how far it needed to travel. Each lot would pay me around $80 dollars profit. I ended up cashing out 1500 DVD’s and going to Italy in 2007 with the Money after doing that for about 6 months or so.
While in Italy, I realized that all of my eBay efforts had just been cashed in and that when I went back home, I had to start all over. I began searching again for new products to sell. I needed bigger profit margins than the DVDs now and I wanted the money to come in sooner. With the DVDs, I might not be able to “cash in” again for 2-3 weeks with this method. I would buy the DVDs on eBay, have to wait until I got them in the mail, then had to post for sale and wait for someone to buy. Also, I had to wait until I had 500 or so for the lot to sell at the price per DVD that I wanted. What else could I sell?
One of my favorite things to wear is a polo shirt. I have always liked wearing Polo shirts. Around 2008 when the Real Estate market started to crash, I noticed my regular job was not paying like it used to. I normally would shop at my local Macy’s for name brand Polo’s but began to look online for lower pricing to save money. I saw sellers selling the name brand Polos I was buying at Macy’s for 55-80 bucks for only 25 or 30 bucks!
After more searching, I found sellers selling them in bulk. 100 at a time or even 500 at a time! I ended up buying 500 of them for $5,000 dollars from an eBay seller with perfect feedback. She explained they would be coming from overseas so to be patient and I should have them in 3 weeks or so. I was so excited. Imagining selling them for 30 dollars, I would triple my money!
Finally after the longest 3 weeks the packages came. The cardboard was thin and worn out from what looked like a very long travel! When I opened the packages and saw the shirts, they did not look like the same quality of the shirts I had been buying from Macy’s. I grabbed one of my Polos and compared it to the others and realized I had just bought 500 fake Named Brand Polos for $5,000. I sort of knew it was too good to be true but I went forward with it anyways. Other sellers were obviously selling the same ones I had! They came in the same fake packages with the same fake barcode that was matching on all 500 Polos!
I ended up selling them like crazy. Sometimes, one at a time, sometimes, in a lot with your size and all 5 colors. I ended up having quite a selection. I was selling about 90 polos a week! People were buying them from me 6 for 140 bucks or 80 dollars for one at Macys. Every so often, I would get a message from an upset customer that the polos were not genuine and I would offer a refund right away once they were returned. After a 6 month run at this, I had collected too many complaints to eBay and had my Paypal account locked and eBay account was terminated. I had about $4,500 in my PayPal account that would now be locked for 180 days while eBay/PayPal waited to see who complained and wanted their money back. I was so mad at eBay and PayPal but there was nothing I could do about it.
Lesson to be learned on this one, don’t take shortcuts by selling counterfeit stuff. It might last for a little bit but in the end, you won’t feel good about your sales, and you will eventually get caught. Not having an eBay account sucks! In General, don’t try to be sneaky on eBay because someone has already tried it and eBay is ready for you to try it so they can weed you out!
Now that I am kicked off of eBay and I have no money, what are my options? Well, I guess I could ask a family member if I could use their eBay account but how would I get the money to buy and sell like before? I searched for a while and found a new method at the time called drop shipping. Drop shipping allowed me to advertise someone else’s items for sale and once they sold, I would pay for it and keep the profit. The other company would create them item and ship it to the customer for me.
The company I found was Artsnow. At the time, they had about 400 items that you could personalize with your own photos. Items like Coffee cups, hats, shirts, watches, etc. I created thousands of items in my eBay store.
