Method #2: Wholesale

The number two popular method of selling is wholesale suppliers. Much of the same rules for dropshippers also go for wholesalers. You don’t want to sell what everyone else is selling. You also want to make sure your supplier is not also directly selling to eBay buyers. If you're competing with your supplier, you're cooked. Hang it up. You're doomed. So, don’t do it.

The tricky way is to ask them if they do that. If you think somebody is them, then you find out you can't trust them, go to somebody else.

You also want to buy and stock the minimum amount of items as possible. Anybody reading this who has been selling on eBay for a while, I'm sure you’ve got some dogs in your basement that you can't get rid of. That’s just part of the business.

The moral of the story? Buy product in the minimum quantities possible. Keep tabs on inventory and reorder as needed.

I'm going to be straight with you. In the past few years the eBay competition has continued to increase. It’s getting harder for the little guy to find a new wholesale product to sell.

There are some deep-pocketed sellers on eBay who simply have more purchasing power than the little guy. It’s the big fish that are swallowing up the little fish.

But, don’t fret; don’t worry. I'm going to share with you some million-dollar ideas on how you can deal with this.

Personally, I have not had much success with big national wholesalers. I have had, though, success in dealing with smaller, lesser-known wholesalers.
Why?

Don’t Be A Copycat On eBay!

Many different reasons. First of all, don’t do what everybody else is doing because you'll be competing and everybody is dropping the price. You don’t want to do that. Stay away from the big suppliers, the mainline product.

I'll give you an example of why I like small suppliers. First of all, they're personable and helpful. I found a small importer in the southern part of the country.
He directly brings in products from China. One thing he sells is shipping scales. He had one model of a shipping scale that I could buy for $50 that compared favorably to a $360 model.

As far as I know, he was the only person in America that was bringing this in from China. It was an excellent product, excellent quality; it was stainless steel and it was just fantastic.
For almost a year, I would ship three to four a day.

Normally I sold them for $115 and I made over $50 profit on each one. I sold close to 800 of these before my supplier ran out and wasn’t able to import any more. Man, I really miss that product! It was so sweet to sell.

Another advantage was that I was dealing directly with the owner of the company. He would call me and tell me, “Mike, another shipment is arriving in three days. I have another XX. Do you want to buy them?” I would say, “Yes, send them to me.”

The key point? Too much competition on eBay will kill you.

Finding Misspelled Items On eBay

Did you know that it is common for some eBay sellers to misspell keywords in their auction title and description?

For example “daimond” or “dimond” instead of “diamond”.

The result is that you can often buy these items at crazy low prices.

There are simply too many people trying to sell the same stuff to a limited number of people. No one is making a profit. Don’t do that to yourself. Stay away from that method of selling.

You want low competition items and you want to get them as close from the manufacturer as possible.