Once you find a good source for wholesale products, how do you go about selling them?
You have many choices for how and where to sell your products, but the product you’re selling has a great impact on where you should concentrate your efforts.
Ebay
The easiest and least cost-prohibitive route for selling things online is to use an auction site, like Ebay.? You technically don’t even need to know any html to list your item.? However, adding pictures and a bit of html and styling will help tremendously.? The cost for a listing is very reasonable, even if you have to pay a small percentage of your sale price.
Once you have your listing up, you simply wait for bidders.? As buyers find your product, they’ll (in theory) place a bid of the max amount they would pay for it.? However, the “price” of the product only goes up by a small increment.? For example, if a product is selling for $1 and I bid $20, the price would only go up to $1.50.? If someone else bid $5 after me, my bid would automatically increase to $5.50 because my max bid was higher than theirs.? (prices are estimates. I’ll have an Ebay primer soon with more exact information.)
When the auction ends, the highest bidder wins.
That’s it!? Buy your products at wholesale prices…Sell them for a higher price on Ebay…Reap the profits!? What could be easier?
Website
Starting your own ecommerce website is *almost* as easy as selling on ebay.? The steps for gettings started are:
- Choose a domain:? This is the name of the website where visitors will go to buy your product.
- Buy Hosting: To put up a website, you need to pay someone to host the files for you.
- Build your Website: Design it yourself, or use a 3rd-party system.
- Add your Products: Again, design the listing part yourself or add your products through the 3rd party software.
- Set up a payment system: Give your customers a quick and easy way to pay you.
That’s about it.? Now for a little mor detail.
1. Choosing a domain:
You’ll want a domain that is easy to remember and relates very obviously to what you’re doing online.? For example, if you sell fire extinguishers, a good domain might be WholesaleFireExtinquishers.com.? Once you decide on a domain, you have to purchase it through a registrar.? A common registrar is GoDaddy.com which sells domains for about $10.
2. Buy Hosting
After you get your domain, you’ll need a hosting account to get your website online.? (This step might be a little out of order since you don’t need hosting until after you’ve built your site.)? The cost for hosting can vary, but you can generally expect to pay $5 to $20 per month depending on your needs.? GoDaddy.com also offers hosting, but I’ve had a better experience through my web host, LunarPages.com.? They’re very reliable, and don’t have some of the restrictions that you have to work around with a GoDaddy account.
3. Build your Website:
This is probably the most difficult of the steps if you’re doing it yourself, or one of the most expensive if you’re paying someone else to build your site.? The cost for a custom ecommerce website starts at about $500 and can easily get into the thousands of dollars.? If you don’t have a huge budget and you’re not a skilled web designer, I recommend using a 3rd party ecommerce solution.? One I’ve used in the past is OSCommerce.? You need to have a little technical skill to get it up and running, but it’s mostly about configuring it to your preferences.? This is the fastest route for getting your site up and running.
4. Add your Products:
For this article, I assume you already have an inventory or source of wholesale products that you’re planning to sell.? If you built your website yourself, this is the part where you code all of your products in.? However, if you used OSCommerce, you simply need to fill in the details about your products and the software takes care of the layout.? As far as maintenance goes, the 3rd party solution will save you a ton of time down the road.
5. Set Up Your Payment System:
If you’re selling products online, you’ll want to accept credit cards.? When customers are at your site, you want to have as few barriers as possible between your potential customer and a sale.? Two cheap and easy ways to get started are PayPal and Google Checkout.? Both are free to sign up, and only take a portion of each transaction.? I believe both are still below 3%.? If you don’t want to deal with contracts and monthly fees, these are your best choices.? If you want to get that percentage down, you could sign up for a merchant account and process the credit cards yourself.? Usually, merchant accounts come with very strict contracts and high monthly fees or minimums.? Unless you’re doing a massive amount of business, PayPal or Google Checkout are the way to go.
Once everything is set up and working properly, all you have to do next is get people to your website.? You’ll want to use a mix of search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and other advertising tools, but we’ll save that for another time.? For now, just get on Ebay or get your website up and running.? I hope this helps you get started in the resale business.? If you have any questions or comments, please use the comment system to let us know.