I am frequently looking for quality items to sell online as a side hustle to earn extra income. Although it is not that difficult to determine what is consider ‘hot‘ right now or that sales are trending up for this item or that item. Each platform has some form of analytics that can be used, sometimes for a fee, to see the list of current trending items. Many times these items are easily sourced locally at discount stores or from specific websites where the products can be purchased at a nice discount by using affiliate marketing programs such as Upromise.com, Ebates.com or other cash back types of programs.
So once you have the item the trick is figuring out how to make a profit after all the platform fees have been paid. I have sold a lot of electronics on EBay, which usually sell really well and quickly when listed and priced appropriately. I usually list the items at 2/3’s the original list price, EBay will tell you where prices are trending for your item, and I offer free shipping. Once the item is sold and paid for with PayPal (2.9% fee), I then ship the item to the customer (average cost is about $10) and finally I have a EBay fee (10% of the final sale price).
This usually puts me at half the original sticker price for the item that I am selling after all fees. Yes, I can still make an OK profit depending on the item. However, on Amazon, I can typically get a higher price for new electronics which is nice. Everything else is the same as far as the efforts to list, prep and ship the item.
The other major difference is that Amazon collects 15% fee on the final sales price. Sometimes this trade off is worth the extra fees if you can get the higher sales price enough to cover it.
Do you sell items online, what has your experiences been?
Are there other platforms that are better with lower fees?
Please comment below!
Great article Tom. I’ve sold on both platforms and greatly favor eBay.