@caninekopz wrote:
Try this for an expierement
do a search for an item, not really something that is a one of a kind, but does not have to be popular either, but must have over a page of choices. Search for that item by , lowest price+shipping first. see what pops up. Now click on that lowest price item and then scroll to the bottom of the screen and you will probably see other items of the same search for even lower prices.......
True, for the most part, however, this does not keep people from buying my parts because I am well known as a good supplier, and I sell as many as I ever have.... if anything, my sales are actually up.
And your education about profit is what you pay for a product initially is not true. You may pay a low price for somehting and it sits for a year. You pay ebay .10 per month to list it, and you MAY eventually sell it and probably at a discount. While you can spend a little more for something that is current and will sell easy and then you can turn more money faster. There are MANY ways for one to look at economics. Not all are right, not all are wrong.
Oh, but it IS true. Absolutely true. If you pay too much in the first place for whatever it is that you're selling, you simply will not be able to compete with the low price sellers. Your time of purchase of product is where you are able to leverage your profit to be higher by negotiating a better price per item on your end. So, yes, it absolutely IS true. Further, if you can't get a price to the point you want it at, you can change suppliers and try with someone else.
And for your last comment, you are probably in a niche market. I am not. We can not compare how we operate. I carry a lot of overhead, you don't. Until recently I sold 20 items a day on each of my stores (3) and more than that on Amazon. So you may not need to sell your one of a kind or limited product while I have to move mine. Ebay no longer is even close to being fair about showing products as a customer request them to be seen.
I agree with you in not liking the current search engine that eBay uses, Cassini falls short in a lot of ways, I just thought the old search engine was more straightforward. That said, I have plenty of overhead, however, I got smart and gave up on paying taxes on commercial property. How many people do you know that SOURCE items from factories in China, in order to get them made to their own specs? That would be ME, at least on a couple of parts I sell, some I have made for me here in the US. I have hundreds of guitar parts on hand. Warehoused on site. As much as when I had a brick and mortar commercial storefront downtown. I DO carry specialized items, and am considered an expert in my field. How my carrying specialized items makes my experience or expertise in my field or opinion invalid when my proof is the success of my methods. Further, this IS my living, so yes, I HAVE to make sales the same as you. However, I DO have a physical shop here, and I use many of the parts I sell on eBay in my own shop. I have done over 100 instrument repairs in my shop in the last month alone. I have to compete with Guitar Center and Amazon and Sweetwater and Musician's Friend and all the other mail order 'stores' on pricing or people will bring me parts from those places to install on their instruments.
Thanks for the time....
Rich
I had a brick and mortar store for about 24 years before closing it down 4 yeasr ago. I went to work after that as the repair tech at the largest instrument store in western Kentucky. That store recently closed after a battle with it's insurance company over a building flood caused by the landlord. The store owner was shorted almost 200,000 dollars on his insurance claim because the landlord had already been sued by 8 or 9 other store owners in the complex we were in . The landlord decided at the end of December that it would be a money saver for him to turn off the heat in two empty store fronts in our strip mall complex. He never thought about the fact that we have single digit temperatures that time of year or that the sprinkler lines are against the roofs of the buildings.... well, the sprinkler lines froze and burst in the two buildings with the heat off, and the entire complex was flooded. We were lucky that we were the last store front in the complex, so we were the farthest away from the source of the flood, but we still had almost 4 inches of water in our building. Our neighbor next door was a liquor store, and they had 9 inches of water. They had to prop their doors open and let it run out for an hour before they could get in to shut off breakers and get the flood cleanup company in. It was a bad situation. Our owner filed a $325,000 insurance claim, and they paid $150,000. Got us out of debt and back to zero, but didn't replace ANY lost inventory. Owner did not want to start back up with a load of debt (which he would have been forced to do since insurance didn't pay him for his lost inventory, he would have had to either borrow against or floorplan new inventory), so he was forced to close after being in business 30 years.
Needless to say, I do understand full well the brick and mortar retail game, and I stand by my statements because they have proven to be true. You're right about using profits to pay for things like mailers, but the fact is that you DO still purchase them, and you're STILL better off to buy them in as large a quantity as possible because you're better off doing so, so you were actually in agreement with my point about buying in numbers. Most people operating out of their homes likely don't buy 500 or more mailers at a time, however.
With regard to what you pay initially being the controller of your profit, that also is absolutely true. I can buy basically nearly the same parts that I sell from industry suppliers like Allparts or WD, however, they will typically charge 500-600% MORE than I pay by sourcing them from a factory myself. So, by buying in as big a number as I can swing at the time, I always get a better price on my end. I'm competing, by the way, with those same industry suppliers because they both sell to stores AND to the general public directly, so obviously, I have to be able to beat their pricing or I won't get sales. And I'm pretty sure that they're buying from the same factories that I am buying from.
