Well I want to chime in.. Any dropshipper thats easy to find in the public eye you will be hard pressed to make profits on the initial sale. The problem is that you have kitchen and living room sellers who drop the prices to nothing once they have the source.
I can see selling items at cost or below cost to make a customer lead. For example you sell the heater that was showcased and grant it you sell a few make some small profits or even a loss but that isnt the end of the sales cycle.
I also know wholesalelist101 sells a ebook and other services as well via email broadcasts and social media. So you see once you make the sale on EBAY it isnt the end of the sale. You cant measure your profits on the inital sale anymore you got to measure the total profits over the life of the customer.
Lets say you sell the heater at loss of $10.00 and you acquire Harry Saks as customer from EBAy who goes on to visit your website where you sell tons of profitable items and ebooks and have adsense ads. Harry goes to buy a $50.00 ebook on how to buy wholesale, buys a box of jewelry your selling you make $24 profit on and clicks on a few adsense ads on your site making you another $5.00 So in this scenario yes you lost $10 on the initial sale to make the lead but went on to sell the customer more goods off your personal website and made $74.00 profit....... THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING ON EBAY......
if your the type of seller that is narrow minded and just focus on the one sale on ebay and dont have a other items to sell off ebay via a website or affliate links then your the one that is missing the boat. I know many sellers who sell at cost to generate 200 to 500 sales a month to get the customer data and go on to buld relationships with these customers to do follow up sales of good profit items.
The process is called a Sales Funnel, go google it educate yourself. Wholesalelist101 does excellent business and I just described his sales funnell... For you guys to tear him apart saying he is not making nothing and giving Hotbuy a thumbs down is plain stupidity........ Using Ebay and Hotbuy as combination to make a new customer is indeed a great lead generation formula and if played right can lead to secondary sales in the sales funnel that is profitable.
No person is going to open his books to show you the entire sales funnell as to many people will copy cat and make it tough... Be unique create your backend offers and use EBAY and Hotbuy to make leads. Let this advice soak in cause it works........ For those that want to bad mouth the process or say its BS then if you got something better show the data! Thanks Joe