We’ve had a few people emailing us recently wondering what they need to make full use of Salehoo and how they should get started. This blog post then, is your guide to using Salehoo to make a living!

What Do I Need to Join Salehoo?

You don’t need that much to join Salehoo. The most important things are:

1. Somewhere to sell the merchandise you buy from Salehoo’s suppliers

   This could be a website of your own, an eBay account, Yahoo auctions, Amazon auctions, Ubid, your own store, Craig’s List, a local flea market, classified ads in a newspaper or trade magazine…there are plenty of different ways, online or off. You don’t have to choose where you are going to sell your merchandise before you join, but it helps to get it sorted as soon as you can. It’s important to know the market you are selling in because this will alter what sort of products are in demand and how much you can expect to get for them.

   But don’t feel you have to limit yourself to just one selling forum – many of our members use more than one, maybe even three or four.

2. Some money to spend on your wholesale lot.

   This doesn’t have to be much, in fact $50 is plenty to get you started. However, recognize that the more money you are able to invest, the better prices you will be able to get and therefore, the greater your profit margins. For that reason, being able to spend $500-$2,000+ is ideal, but you can take your time working towards this.

   If you don’t have much money to spend, then that’s okay. What you need to do instead is put as much time as you can into your business. If you can replace money with time, you’ll do just as well in the end. Problems start though when new members don’t have either time or money. It’s not an uncommon conundrum! The world being the way it is, it’s hard to find much time in a busy schedule. Yet, even so, we encourage you to try your very hardest to squeeze as much time as you can into your business. Start off with just half an hour a day and try to increase that amount as soon as you can. Remember: If you are really determined to make a success of this, you will. And we are here to help!

How Do I Get Started?

Once you have joined Salehoo, follow these simple steps to getting started:

1. Decide what to sell: This involves getting to know your market. If you are going to be selling on eBay for instance, sign up and start selling a few thing s from around the house to get a feel for how things work and what’s in demand. Make a list of possible things to sell based on your interests, trends and things that you’ve noticed there is a demand for during your time selling bric-a-brac. Narrow this down a bit, perhaps by getting a small wholesale lot (5-10 pieces) from eBay and selling that to test the waters. eBay is an excellent place to find merchandise to sell, particularly if you’re on a small budget.
2. Search the Salehoo database for suppliers: Search by supplier type, country or by a brand name.
3. Compare suppliers for prices, brands and ability to keep up with your business as it expands. Don’t forget that you can get better prices by emailing the supplier and mentioning that you have been referred from Salehoo, rather than simply buying from the website.
4. Order a sample: Some suppliers will send you to this free, others will require you pay for postage, and others will ask you to pay for the cost of the item and postage – it depends on the supplier and the value of the product you wish to sample. A sample gives you a change to test the supplier’s service and the product’s quality.
5. Work out your costs: These include the cost of the wholesale merchandise, any storage costs, auction listing fees or website maintenance costs, auction success fees, Paypal fees and shipping costs. This is a critical step in order to work out whether you can really profit from a particular item. You’ll also now be able to decide what you need to sell the item for in order to cover your costs, be competitive and make a profit.
6. Place your order with the supplier.
7. Store the inventory using an organized storage system when it arrives. It’s a good idea to give each piece of inventory a number as it arrives to help keep track of everything. You’d be surprised how easily items can go missing!
8. Sell your merchandise – whether that be on eBay or at your local flea market. Be sure to invest the profits back into your business to ensure that you can keep increasing the size of your wholesale purchase!

You may have heard that eBay has recently clamped down on ‘bad sellers’ in an effort to improve buyer experience. What exactly are they doing and how can you protect yourself? We hope this post will shed some light on the matter for you and help you avoid facing penalties.

What Happened

eBay discovered that a small percentage of Sellers (1% to be exact) were creating 35% of the bad buyer experiences on eBay. These experiences were often so bad that the victims were dramatically reducing the amount they purchased from eBay, with some giving up on eBay altogether.

What eBay is doing about it

In an attempt to weed out bad sellers and improve buyer experience, eBay has been reviewing each Seller’s negative and neutral feedback activity and Item Not Received rate to determine the level of buyer dissatisfaction. If a Seller has greater than 5% buyer dissatisfaction within a 90 day period, penalty action is taken.

What? Neutral feedbacks? That’s right: eBay is effectively considering neutral feedback to be negative for the purposes of their cleanup, just one of the bones Sellers have to pick over this new initiative.

The consequences of having greater than 5% dissatisfaction are different for casual Sellers and high volume Sellers. Casual Sellers are banned from selling at all for 14 days, while higher volume Sellers are restricted to 75% of their sales volume (based on historical data). After 30 days, eBay manually review accounts to see whether the dissatisfaction rate has been bought down below 5% and then make a decision as to whether the Seller can return to their usual level of sales.

Note that different action is taken if you have a dissatisfaction rate greater than 10%. In this case, you have a full selling restriction.

See a full explanation on eBay Chatter.

The Problems

As Scott Wingo points out in his eBay Strategies blog, 1% of Sellers is rather misleading in that it sounds like a very small number of Sellers affected. According to his estimate, 1% actually represents around 15,000 sellers when put into concrete figures. And that’s a big number!

There are also a number of other problems:

• What about non-paying bidders who leave negative feedback in retaliation? This is nothing to do with the Seller.
• In my experience, some products are more likely to attract negative feedbacks than others. Products with a broader target audience are going to have far more problems than those with a smaller niche audience.
• Neutrals are now negatives? I can see eBay’s reasoning: most neutrals are given after a not so great eBay experience, but it’s their system after all! If they consider neutrals as negatives, they need to change the feedback system first to just the two options.
• And probably the biggest problem is - How do you work to improve your business when eBay has just guaranteed that you will lose 25% of your revenue?
• Plus: We all know some buyers will always cause trouble no matter what you do. How can Sellers get around that?

What You Can Do: Strategies for Avoiding and Removing Negatives and Neutrals

Clearly eBay need to refine their new policy further and yes, some buyers will give you negatives no matter what. However, there are some things you can do to limit potential negatives and also resolve negatives you already have.

• The majority of eBay negatives are in relation to shipping and communication. Make sure both of these processes are automated as much as possible to ensure buyers don’t end up waiting too long for a response from you or their parcel to arrive. You could also consider making insurance and signature required mandatory if you have consistent problems with shipping. And don’t underestimate the importance of communication. Buyers will practically forgive you for anything if you keep them updated and reply ASAP to their emails.
• If you haven’t already, put an FAQ section in your auctions and on your About Me page. Thoroughly detail your policies on postage options, packaging, insurance and return policies. Leave no question unanswered so the customer is very clear about what is going to happen.
• Include a note in your About Me page or at the bottom of your emails giving people your contact phone number if they are have any problems. Indicate your desire to work with them personally to resolve anything. This gives people reassurance and a course of action to try first rather than simply placing a negative.
• Review any negatives or neutrals and try to look for any patterns. Are there any weaknesses you need to address in your business model?
• If you do get a negative or neutral, contact the buyer – by phone if possible – and try to get a solution. You can then go through the procedure of a mutual feedback withdrawal.
• Square Trade is the best way to resolve disputes and get negative feedbacks removed. You will need to pay a fee, but it’s definitely worth it.
• Give yourself some breathing room and sell on several IDs. Make sure they don’t link to one another. This gives you an alternative if one account is unfortunate enough to be penalized.

I fully expect eBay to attempt to address some of these problems in the near future. I believe that they didn’t foresee the effect this would have on Sellers, nor the response. It should be becoming clear to them just how much business they might lose if they upset too many Sellers, so I remain optimistic for the future.

We’d love to hear your experiences and feedback about this issue – please share your stories using the comment function.

Auction Selling 101 is the latest product on the scene to teach people how to make money on eBay. Members can login to the Classroom area to access video lessons, a downloadable 125-page ‘Student handbook’, audio interviews with top eBay sellers, a member’s forum and regular virtual classroom sessions with the somewhat mysteriously named creator’s of Auction Selling 101: Mr. Blue and Mr. Black.

Auction Selling 101 isn’t for everyone. As the name suggests, this product focuses on the basics.

If you’ve already got some experience as a seller and you’re after more advanced techniques, then Auction Selling 101 will not provide you with much you didn’t already know. In saying that, Auction Selling is clearly a work in progress (it only went live just over a week ago), so this may well change in the future. 

For now, I recommend this product to new sellers, particularly those who don’t know that much about the internet and are nervous about getting started. 

First: the handbook.  The handbook is a lengthy tome that takes you through every part of selling on eBay from registering, the feedback system, shipping, listing strategies and setting up an eBay store. Overall, I thought the handbook was easy to read and contained a lot of very useful information. I particularly liked the way the authors  take the time to go through the registration and ID verification processes – something many eBay products just assume people will know - and explain what you need and why. New sellers should feel very confident about what they need to do to embark on their eBay career after reading this info.

In my opinion, the strongest sections in the handbook are on searching and listing techniques and customer communication. New sellers consistently underestimate the value of good search for finding items to resell, checking out completed listings and average sale prices and looking at competing listings. It’s not a matter of entering a single keyword – it involves much more than that. Knowing how to search eBay and the search engines properly will give you a much greater insight into the market for your product and will also save you literally hours of searching time too.

Aside from the information on listing strategies there is also an excellent listing example and product photo to demonstrate what you should be aiming for. However, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t much information on taking product photos or editing and uploading them. Let’s hope more appears on this topic in the future!

Many sellers overlook the fact that their customers are the key to their business success. If the customers aren’t happy, your business will quickly disappear down the plug hole. Auction Selling teaches how to deal with both good and bad customers, which you’ll find very useful as you meet all sorts on eBay!

All in all, the handbook provides some great information and I believe that the forums and the virtual classroom sessions will probably more than fill the gaps I’ve mentioned. For that reason, I recommend printing off the handbook so that you can add notes from your chats with Mr. Black and Mr. Blue.

Now for the videos: At this stage there are 27 videos in the library with the promise of more to come. These are not the slickest videos you’ll ever see, but they do provide good step-by-step instruction on many of the topics in the handbook. Nothing beats having a personal guide to take you through the exact process of carrying out tasks within eBay and I’m certain new sellers will find them beneficial.  You should definitely watch these videos a couple of times each as there is a lot to take in. Once again, there isn’t much in the way of advanced techniques here yet, but I expect this will change with time.

Finally, I’d also like to give a mention to a couple of other Auction Selling 101 features which I was very impressed with: the eBay/Paypal fee calculator and an eBay search tool that provides a quick and easy way to search eBay for misspelled items. 

Auction Selling 101 is currently a very valuable resource for new eBay sellers. The virtual classroom sessions and the forum mean you will also be able to get answers to your own specific questions - and the value of that one-on-one help is probably worth more than the rest of the info put together!

I look forward to seeing Auction Selling 101 grow in the future – it’s gotten off to a strong start.

You can learn more or join Auction Selling 101 here

There are numerous ways to sell your items both online and off.

Other Auction sites:

Ubid

http://www.ubid.com/

Ubid is an online auction site that has managed to gain quite a bit of popularity – some of our members say they actually make more on Ubid than eBay! While it doesn’t get anywhere near the traffic eBay gets, it can still yield quite a few sales. The site promotes itself heavily on TV and the internet which plays a big role in getting the traffic required for sales. Ubid’s most attractive feature is the lack of listing fees – you don’t pay anything until you make a sale. On the downside, all buyers’ payments go through Ubid and it can take up to 15 days before they pay you. For new sellers in particular, this can cause some serious cash flow problems.

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/

Amazon gets good traffic but the main advantage is a much higher profit margin. Amazon shoppers tend to pay a lot more for their items than eBayers. On the other hand, there are reports that Amazon’s returns policy can be ruthless. If a buyer complains – even if they have no proof of the claim – Amazon has been known to insist the seller refund the money (grrr!). Another count against Amazon is the fact Nigerian spammers seem to particularly enjoy sending their emails to sellers so you do have to be prepared to give you mail box a thorough purge each morning. Still, if you can put up with these difficulties, Amazon is a good place to sell - particularly items such as electronics where the margins are practically non-existent on eBay.

eBid Auctions

http://www.ebid.net/

The second largest auction site in the UK. Also available in Australia, USA, Canada and Ireland. Unfortunately it is also very slooooow…There are no fees, which is great, but we haven’t heard of many people having a rollercoaster success here. On the bright side, it is fraud proof and you can post as many items for sale as you want. It’s worth listing on this site as an additional to your other sales channels.

Oztion

http://www.oztion.com.au/

Oztion is an Australian auction site although you can list from overseas. Again, there are no fees, but unfortunately it also suffers from sleepy-town syndrome and listings take about three times longer to sell than eBay.

Google Product Search

http://www.google.com/products

No one can question the almighty power of Google. Their product arm – Google Product Search (used to be Froogle) - gets a lot of attention from avid Google users and it’s free to list there if you have your own website. You can also incorporate Adwords ads to drive more traffic to your Google Product Search listings – although whether that is more convenient for you or for Google remains in question.

Classifieds

USFreeAds.com

http://www.usfreeads.com/

List your ads for free. You won’t get many sales directly from these ads, but it can also be a good way to direct traffic and links to your website.

Craig’s List

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/

Craig’s List is a great way to sell locally if you are willing to organize pickups. There are no listing fees or selling fees, but there is a lot more effort involved fielding emails and nothing can be automated like the auction sites. Plus you also have to arrange pickup or delivery. However, Craig’s List is used by a lot of people, particularly in the US, so it can be a very lucrative way of selling.

Newspaper classifieds

Newspaper classifieds can cost a bit, but if you have 20 or more duplicates to sell, you’ll easily make enough to cover your costs. The best thing about newspaper classifieds is, while there is more effort involved, newspaper audiences tend to be willing to pay more compared to eBay buyers.

Free classified newspapers

How often have you nearly stumbled across those free newspapers sitting in a pile outside your local supermarket or mall? They don’t look like much, but plenty of people take them to browse while they are having a Saturday morning coffee. Listing is generally free and you will get buyers!

Trade magazines

Trade magazines are an excellent way to sell to a specialty audience. Choose your magazine carefully to match your item. Good items to sell through trade magazines include golfing equipment, cars and car parts, antiques and collectibles and craft items.

Other ways to sell:

Website

Your website is one of the best ways to sell of all - provided you can drive traffic to it successfully. A website of your own gives you the most freedom of any listing option and apart from maintenance and hosting fees, it doesn’t cost a thing. Read more about starting your own website here.

Flea markets

Flea markets can be a profitable venue to sell - the catch is that the market is even more intent on getting a bargain than eBayers! With this in mind, you need to choose your product carefully. People will buy higher priced items, but only if they represent a good bargain – e.g. home made furniture priced 30% below similar items in retail stores; fake electronics and designer brands at a fraction of the retail price of the real thing.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences selling through any of these mediums - or tell us about one we haven’t mentioned!

Post your comment below.