How Do You Grow Your Business As a Reseller From Sourcing, Listing to Shipping
Those who are new to running an eCommerce store should opt for reselling as a business opportunity. Reselling is beginner-friendly and offers many opportunities for growth, profit, and scaling. Reselling businesses are an excellent option for entrepreneurs just getting started with eCommerce, it requires a lot of patience, dedication, and hard work. Along with all that, strategy is equally important. In this blog, we’ll give you some tips on how to grow and scale your resale business from sourcing to listing to shipping. Whether you’re a beginner or a veteran looking to hone your strategies, this blog will help.
Sourcing Inventory
First, let’s start with Sourcing Inventory. Product sourcing is central to the growth and success of eCommerce platforms. You need to know where to source your products, which products will bring you a profit, and what kind of margin to look for.
1. Where should the products come from?
One of the biggest issues resellers face is where to source products from. There are a few following ways you can get your products for resale.
LacROI – LacROI is one of the best research tools to find the best ROI of products on marketplaces to sell for an increased profit margin on eBay and Amazon. With LacROI, you can easily find out the best products by analyzing and optimizing your product offerings.
Consignment – The next way to get your products for resale is through consignment. In consignments, you are the consignee who receives the products from a shipper. If the product sells, you earn a profit. If not, then you return the product to the consignor.
Thrifting – Thrifting is another great way to get access to best-selling products. Thrift stores sell used products that are in excellent condition and can be used by a new owner. You can take great products from thrift stores and sell them for a profit.
Garage Sales – Garage sales and thrift stores are pretty much the same thing. However, garage sales take place on a smaller scale and are not tied to fixed locations.
You can pick up things like furniture from garage sales for a low price and sometimes even for free and resell them on eBay.
Liquidation Pallets – Another great way to source your items is through liquidation pallets. Liquidation sales have a low price, and you can make a quick profit by reselling liquidation merchandise.
The best way to profit from liquidation is to automate every process as much as possible. By automating your liquidation processes, you can easily scale.
You can combine the above methods to shape your sourcing strategy. There is no wrong or right way to procure; there is only one way that works and one suboptimal way to procure products. When it comes to being successful on eBay, there are only two models that work.
One is expensive, while the other is cheap. When you sell cheap products, you take fewer risks; there are fewer scams; anyone can work for you, etc. You get less money per sale. In contrast, with the expensive model, you sell expensive products with more risks, more frauds, returns and refunds.
However, with an expensive model, you get more money for selling the products. Choose wisely which model works best for your online business.
2. What kind of margins should you look for?
Bundles are a great way to increase your profit margin and improve your low margins. Consider the clothing niche; you can bundle your list of used jeans by picking a few from the list, rather than selling a pair and paying shipping once for them.
You can also bundle cameras for margin, which means you get a camera, strap, tripod, chargers, battery, and a bag to put it all in. You can google these products and you’ll find that most sellers sell them in bundles.
A GoPro camera is available for 349 from gopro.com, while a GoPro with all the other gear sells for 3 to 419 from a reseller on eBay or Amazon. Another thing to keep in mind is that just because an item has been searched for many times doesn’t mean it’s profitable.
3. How do you know how much the product can sell for?
Calculating how much profit a product can bring is another factor you need to consider. As mentioned earlier, the most searched items do not equal the most profitable. You need to balance traffic with availability.
A great example of this is books; even though books get a large amount of traffic, it doesn’t mean they will make you a lot of money because there are millions of copies of each book.
You need to find products that get a large amount of traffic, but are rare and harder to find. About 50% of eBay items sell for less than $12, and about 90% of items sell for less than $30.
Your job as a reseller should be to learn how to find these rare items and sell them.
4. How to Outsource the Sourcing Process?
Outsourcing your processes will help you succeed because it saves a lot of time that you could be spending on doing other activities. Sourcing processes take a lot of time, and it makes more sense to hire people to do it for you when you scale.
Why you should hire a scouter vs. wholesale
Figure out what you are best at. If your problem is money, you should focus on doing everything yourself because that’s the surefire way to make sure all the money ends up in your wallet.
However, if your problem is time, you should focus on hiring scouters and outsourcing your work to save time. Even though scouting means you have to spend more money, it also means you make money by doing less work and in less time.
Listing
Listing is the next point you need to consider as an eCommerce business. Listing is an integral part of eCommerce online stores that can either determine the success or failure of your online store. Here are some tips to create a great strategy for the listing process.
1. How To Create A Process For Listing
Here are some processes that you can implement in your listing strategy.
Sort, Classify, Test.
The right process is critical to listing. When you sell on eBay, you may find broken items that you need to either recycle or get rid of altogether. The other items are cheap products that are not worth the time and energy it takes to list the product.
After buying these products, you need to sort these products into three categories as mentioned above. The third category is the high-end products that will bring you a profit.
Start building connections so that you can give the other products to recyclers or wholesalers so that you can get rid of these other products. Sort through all the products in your inventory and get better at it because it takes a lot of practice.
Sorting and inspecting go hand in hand. Determine the condition of the external and internal parts of the items, check for corrosion, etc. If you have a system to repair broken things, then the items with a significant profit margin are worth repairing.
You can either do the repair process yourself or hire someone to do it. If you do it yourself, you will make a lot of money, but it will take a lot of time. Decide if it is worth it to repair the products yourself.
If the products can be repaired or are in great condition, you should include them in your listing. However, if the products are not suitable for your business, then you can wholesale these products.
Prepping The Items In Time
Preparing the items the day before is crucial. For the items that you sell without measurements, you can save a lot of time; for the items that you sell with a barcode, you can save a lot of time.
For the expensive and high-end items, you need to put more work into it, such as more photos, more descriptions, and better staging than for the low-priced items.
Do The Descriptions And Photography At The Same Time
Take your photos and do the item descriptions at the same time. Assign a SKU to your products so you can track your products and make sure your products are within the profit margin.
Staging items requires perceived value. As you take your photos, take your measurements and record them.
2. What’s the Best Way to List and Photograph Each Item
Photography is necessary to attract customers to your products. Here are some crucial components of photography for your products, the order, the background and the item itself. To save time, make sure you take all measurements at about the same time when photographing your items.
Choose a standard white background; you don’t need to focus on adding detail to the background. Keep everything simple. Buy some good lights to accompany you while you are photographing.
Make sure the lighting on your products forms a V formation and that the products are visible in the picture. Take two photos, one of the front and one of the back. Edit these photos and then add them to your listing.
You can either do all this yourself or have someone else help you by hiring people. Using a Hammoq takes all the worry away from you as everything becomes mobile. All you need to do is fill out the Hammoq item specifications.
3. What Marketplaces Should I Sell on?
Which market is the best to make profits and traffic is another big question people ask. Let’s say you are running a liquidation business; the first source to find products will be amazon.
eBay and other big platforms will also be great to sell your products. Along with these, you can also try the local marketplaces. This can give you a rare opportunity as these local markets are sometimes in difficult physical locations.
You can generate more sales there. Going to social media is also a smart way to increase your sales and make profits. You can lower your sales by placing ads on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram.
By lowering prices and similar offers, customers will have an incentive to drive to you, and so you’ll experience a lot of traffic. Cross-platforming is valuable; use multiple platforms to generate traffic to your online stores.
Traffic equals sales. The more traffic you can bring to your online stores, the more sales you can generate. Since Amazon has higher traffic, the platform experiences more sales.
Shipping
The last thing that we are going to talk about is shipping.
1. What Is The Best Way To Price for Shipping?
The best way to do shipping is to do 10 at a time and use eBay bulk shipping. The desktop eBay is better than the mobile one, so go to that app and select the items using that app. Get the labels and pack everything in the correct order.
Confirm the shipping weights, print them out, and then they’re fine. Reconcile everything with the packing list, and you’re good to go. A free return in case the product wasn’t as good as described is also in order.
eBay owns the platform, and therefore you must follow their rules.
2. What Boxes and Accessories Should I Have?
The best boxes and accessories are definitely from eBay. eBay provides sellers with free USPS Priority Mail accessories. They are all free and can be ordered from USPS.
3. What’s The Best Way To Print Labels?
The best way to print labels is to print ten labels at a time. That way everything is easier to handle at the time of shipping.
