RSTGarage Assisted Selling Site Examples eBay & Amazon

As we built our first website we knew we wanted a quick way to sell our products. One way to do this is use an assisted selling site where basically they charge a fee to list and sell your products. The benefit is that you get a quick and lasting exposure to their huge traffic and customer network. We did an article on all the assisted selling sites we recommend. For this site we have focused on eBay and we are working on setting up Amazon.

FIRST WE TALK ABOUT eBAY

One disadvantage is that these sites may charge up to 20% of you final selling costs. This can be a steep cut into your margins but the chance for immediate sales and profits can help with getting your products and business up and going.

We chose to start with eBay as a way to start selling our products. We started out with a few listings and kept going until we now have over 1200 listings with average sales of over $12,000.00 per month. In order to sign up for an eBay account you will need to do the following;

First setup an eBay selling account. You will need all of your business corporate information if you want to setup as a business seller or you can setup a personal account. At first you will be limited on how much you can sell until you establish a selling history. Work hard and fast, even if you only make a few dollars of profit, to sell up to 10 items to establish your sales history quickly.
PayPal and eBay are jointed at the hip and you need one to be successful on the other. Also it is the best way to accept payments easily on eBay, pay for eBay seller fees, and pay for items you may buy on eBay. Both eBay and PayPal are free to signup on. They only charge if something is sold. One eBay there is a small charge to list something, and you are charged a final value fee if an item sells. PayPal will charge a small fee for processing the payment which is normally what a credit card company charges for merchant account privileges.
Shipping labels for your products can be printed within the eBay system using USPS and pretty much everything else you need to maintain your accounts are included or available through third party vendors on eBay.

Once we setup our initial account we worked to get the amount of products they allowed us to list. I believe it was 30 products or up to 1000 dollars. We focused or products that we knew would sell well and priced them to sell fast. Once you hit your limit for the month you cannot relist or sell additional stuff you simply need to wait till the next month for it to reset.

Once you have established a sales record you can call eBay and ask to have your limits raised. As you continue to prove yourself you can have your limits raised to meet your selling success. PayPal may also restrict your payments, in other words, they may hold your payments until your product has been received by the customer and positive feedback received or 21 days. This may be a hassle in the beginning but you will soon have the restrictions removed and be on your way to selling success.

KEEP AN EYE ON TWO THINGS WHEN YOU SELL ON eBAY:

First make sure you have everything in stock and ready to ship for what you sell. The faster you can ship the item the happier your customer will be. This leads to the second thing.
Make customer service your biggest priority. Answer questions quickly, respond to service issues as fast as you can, and ship product as quickly as you can. Try and make your customers experience buying from you a positive one because eBay will measure these metrics and your account standing is affected by them.
- Ship quickly as DSRs are the first thing eBay will look at when raising your selling limits. DSR stands for detailed seller ratings and focus on item as described, communication, shipping times, shipping and handling costs, with a 5 star rating system. You want to stay away from 1 to 2 stars and focus on 4-5 stars.
- Focus on making sure all items have tracking information uploaded quickly. If you print labels within eBay this is not a problem but if you drop ship you will need to manually upload it within 1 day of shipping.
- Make sure you get positive feedback. A good feedback rating over 90% will make sure your account is in good standing. There are three ratings Positive, Neutral, and Negative.

It took us about 3-4 months to get us up to a sales history to sell about $100,000 dollars a month. Currently we are way above that. In a year we have listed over 1200 products. We could have done over 3x that much but we did not have the infrastructure to handle the distribution. Currently we have looked at setting up two more eBay accounts with totally different business entities (you shouldn’t setup multiple eBay accounts for the same company) for increased sales.

So we would recommend after you setup a “product” website that you first open up an eBay and PayPal account and get started selling your products on their. Please note this is a very active way of selling as you will have to ship products and maybe stock them. It is perfect though if you want a product based business rather than a virtual or digital goods type of business. But this will also work for drop shipping of goods as a more passive income strategy.

SETTING UP AN AMAZON SELLER ACCOUNT

Starting on August 4th 2014 we will begin the process of setting up an Amazon account for the RSTGARAGE.COM example of an Online Business Reef. Here are the things we had to do in preparation for finally activating and to be able to begin to list products for sale on Amazon.

First we signed our business up for a seller account on Amazon.
Because we wanted to sell in the Automotive category we needed to email Amazon for permission as this is an approved seller category. Other categories you can list and sell in right away.
Amazon has their own payment system built into the seller account. And unlike eBay and PayPal you will only get paid about every two weeks so you will need to be aware of the cash flow problems this may present
Next we needed to provide our Amazon category consultant a list of a minimum of 40 products that they could link to Amazon ASIN numbers so you would have listings setup and ready to go.
Our next step as of 8-2-2014 (and the writing of this article) is to have a call to finish the setup of our Amazon account.

So we will have our call and report back on the next steps we have taken to setup our account.

So we had our call and it was a very quick verification, just to make sure we setup our shipping parameters and sales tax settings. We had already done that so we were good to start the account and list more product. Here is what happened after our initial setup call.

First Amazon messed up all of our listings and we had to have them fixed. In the meantime we sold on item due to a bad listing so we lost $70.00 right off the bat. Amazon would not take any responsibility for this and we had to take the loss. I guess this is the cost of doing business.
We were charged our monthly $39.99 fee and already we have expenses of $100.00 or more. Not the best start but we have faith we will turn a profit soon.
We started listing more products from a couple of vendors, mainly RUKSE, Explorer Procomp, and a couple of others. We used the Amazon ASIN to quickly list them and only had to put in a unique SKU, condition of product, selling amount, tax status, quantity to sell, and handling time.
To date (8-25-2014) we have listed over 120 items on the account. And have sold 15 products. We have gotten back into the black with our account and are starting to turn a profit.

Our goal is to list about 1000 products. This should provide us with about $6000.00 a month in revenue. So far with the limited listings we do have it has shown some sales success. So setting up an Amazon account for a non-permission category is fairly easy, you still can setup an account in a category that requires permission like the automotive category with just a little more work. So if you are selling a product or want to have a business that focuses on the sale of products then we definitely recommend you setup an Amazon account.