1 BEST ANSWER
Accepted Solutions
If you are bleeding red after two years in a row you have been and are doing some thing wrong not eBay. Suggest you look real hard at all your selling costs and profit /loss margins for each item you have sold - are you trapping all selling costs; look at things like are you selling at market price or below; do you have enough built in margin to negotiate with the "haggler" buyer (if you elect to haggle - you can always say no to the potential - your call), can you buy inventory at a lower price?; look for other products to sell that would be more profitable; are your shipping/handling charges sufficient?, can you find a less expensive shipper?, can you cover your tax liabilities?, etc.
We used to sell 20-30 items/month and we knew how much $$ we made before the item was handed off to USPS. We don't sell that much any more but will guarantee you if we sell 1 or 30 items we will make a real decent profit. We will not operate as an ONFPO (Obviously Not For Profit Organization). We identify our bleeding right now. A simple rule of thumb that we use when we buy stuff to sell is what every the item costs is we need to sell it for at least 5 to 6 times that amount to make our profit target and then charge extra for shipping/handling - if we can sell it for more than that amount we certainly will.
Below is a simple excel spread sheet example of what we record for our eBay transactions - some information we also record is not shown for a valid reason.
CIAO! DUDE1
