I would like to talk in this article about other way to use ever so popular eBay auctions. As you know we cover mostly drop ship business model and dropship success cases on the pages of this website. But today I would examine a bit different approach.

Nowadays there are some companies that offer sellers franchises for brick-and-mortar eBay stores. Thus, we can claim that eBay has moved offline. These drop-off spots take customer items, evaluate, photograph, and list them online, collect the payments, and ship the items to their buyers. In other words, they do all the work— surely, for a percentage of the selling price.

If you are a beginner in the field of marketing and just going to open a physical drop-off location, you can get acquainted with the following pieces of advice which surely will help you:

Identify your location

Get a good broker to help you identify convenient retail sites. It’s important to be in a high traffic area, because you will obviously get more money. Consider about a place frequented by upscale individuals. To get high-quality merchandise, you need a higher level of clientele.

Take store layout into account

As your business goes on and becomes bigger, you will obviously need more storage space. So you should take a bigger store layout into account. In order to avoid growing pains, you are to consider whether a building that you are taking as store layout will fit your needs for future expansion.

Be careful with what you take up.

Choose the items very carefully. Don’t waste your time with the products that are not worth the energy and effort that you put into them. Don’t occupy your precious time dealing with piles of junk, or products of very little practical value. You are to be realistic with your clients, and counsel them what will and won’t bring in money. That way they know what to expect, and they aren’t disappointed by their final prices.

Charge a reasonable amount for your services

Keep yourself in line with what others are charging, rather than trying to undercut everyone in order to compete. You’d better add value to your services by means of focusing on areas at which you excel. If you have a staff member who specializes in a certain area, encourage your customers to bring in items in that field because you’ll be able to get them the maximum prices on eBay.

Provide excellent customer service

Your customers should be people towards whom you orient. So exceed your customers’ expectations. Build your positive reputation and get good clients who will characterize your company from the best side. It requires some time and a lot of efforts.

One thing is to run a dropship business that gets 500 unique visitors monthly and another – 50,000. There are certainly other important metrics when you analyze online businesses:

• average order amount,
• page impressions,
• conversion rate,
• return rate,
• SKU number,
• and more…

But my point is that you earn as much as you aim at. Yes, eBay market is great as you can tests products and reach customers there in no time compared to running your own website:

• Marketplaces has approximately 83.9 million active users worldwide.
• Marketplaces net revenues totaled a record $1.48 billion in Q1-08, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 19 percent. With 45 percent from US operations and 55 percent from our International business.
• In Q1-08, gross merchandise volume [GMV], the total value of all successfully closed items on eBay Inc.’s trading platforms, was $16.0 billion. [Total GMV for the full year 2007 was more than $59 billion.]
• eBay.com users worldwide trade $2,040 worth of goods on the site every second.

Nonetheless, my personal opinion is that eBay loses its attractiveness due to high seller saturation and rates (from my personal experience) and should be just ONE of your sales channels.

Final goal of any online business incl. dropship should be something like below case study. I still believe that it is possible to achieve that scope starting with any of the listed dropship merchant list sellers (they cost a few dollars and if you can’t afford that then you are destined to run 500 uniques per month business) and after careful analysis of many case studies published on pages of our website.

Below come the details of really BIG drophip business:

Work from anywhere in the USA – No auto experience needed

• URL: www.partsgeek.com
• Established: Mon Mar 31 2003
• Uniques/Month: 43,279
• Page views/month: 4,000,000
• Monthly Revenue: $141,000
• Google Pagerank: 0

Description:

Here is your chance to purchase a Virtual Auto Parts Store and work from your home or office –even if you have no prior automotive experience. The owner’s spouse has become ill and he can no longer dedicate himself to operating his business and needs to sell the business.

What you are buying:

1. A turn-key, Active Business that in 2007 had sales of $1.7 million at 30% gross profit. (Sales and profit are increasing each year)
2. 53 domains (.com’s and .org’s) with May’s 2008’s actual Unique visitors registering at 43,279 that month. Averages between 40 – 60k per month of uniques. 4,000,000 (million) hits per month is a rounded down estimate. Only 14 active sites are active, others are ready in waiting to open up.
3. Database of over 132,000 customers – nearly 30% are wholesale (dealerships and repair shops)
4. Gain of nearly a dozen different Internet Catalog Licenses that are not avaialble to the public.
5. Gain of our eBay and Amazon stores
6. Ownership of two established US trademarks
7. Owner will train on-site (I will travel to you) and via remote computer and phone and make transition smooth (assume 30 – 60 days to learn business and advertising; with one year of phone support afterwards).
8. Owner will sign a non-compete agreement
9. 3 dedicated and protected servers in 2 different states
10. Customer retention rate of 20% (this is incredibly high considering we do not market to our customer base)
11. Web design staff, tech support, IT support, cart support and all integration is seamless and included in the sale
12. An Advertising spend of 12% with Google and Yahoo (industry average is 20%) that has been operational since 2003 and Google algorithms always like the older ad campaigns overt the new ones.
13. Optional Bonus – One part time (30 hours per week) sales rep who works from her home 50% sales and she handles 50% of the customer service. She has been employed over 3 years with us and is a 1099 sub-contractor.
14. Optional Bonus #2 – One part (30 hours per week) employee 1099 sub-contractor, customer marketing, order sending, order sourcing, etc.
15. This is not an affiliate deal, or a franchise offer. This is a one of a kind, fully operational business for sale with the owner leaving the industry. The owner averages about $10,000 per MONTH in draw salary, and the growth potential is incredible.

Revenue Details:

$1.7 Million per year in sales @ 30% GP.

This is not an affiliate deal, or a franchise offer. This is a one of a kind, fully operational business for sale with the owner leaving the industry. The owner averages about $10,000 per MONTH in draw salary, and the growth potential is incredible.

Traffic Details:

Domains (not all are live, but all are owned) included in sale: 53

For a person who has just started selling on eBay it can seem confusing how to begin. Nevertheless, it will be much helpful to orient to those people who have an obvious success in this sphere. Without any doubt, it will be useful to adopt some winning techniques of these successful entrepreneurs, to learn their lessons, so to say. Here I’d like to present six techniques for you: study and learn them, and then you will be a prosperous online retailer.

Identify Emerging Markets

First of all, you should identify emerging markets. An emerging market is a market where the bid rate is growing at a greater rate than the listing rate. While a hot market has reached its capacity, an emerging market has room for growth. You will be aware of what people sell and what customers need. The rule is not to chase after hot-ticket products with saturated markets. You should search for neglected niche markets where demand is greater than supply. Turn to Andale.com and Hammertap.com – two good research market tools which can show you this information.

Look at Your Competition

The second rule is to look at your competition. You are to identify who are your rivals and how they reached the top. You even can borrow some of their most successful techniques, but don’t copy all the tactics. While borrowing be sure that the primary idea is yours and don’t forget add something specially yours in order to distinguish yourself. You are to be unique to build your own niche market and create your loyal customers.

Set Your Prices

The technique number three consists of looking at your competition’s prices. Thus, you will make it possible to set your own prices. Also use market research tools – they can give you the item’s average selling price and moreover they will show you the factors that can influence the prices. The tools also interpret the data for you and show you how to get the most from your item: for instance, the best day and time to end an auction, which listing features draw the highest bids and so on.

Know Your Seasons

In order to sale well, you should know the right season for proposing right products. Remember that everything is good in its season. If you know products’ seasons, you’ll know the best time to list them. If it is right season, you can sell products immediately. If the season hasn’t come, it is right time to stock the product. You can stock it up now and sale it later on, when you will be sure that you will get the most of the product.

Create Effective Titles

Titles are the face of the product, so by choosing creative and original ones you will provide a certain attention to your product. By words you specify your market and help optimize a search engine. If you don’t want to be lost in the crowd, but on the contrary, you are eager to get to the top, use special tools for making up effective titles. Try Terapeak.com – the tool designed to help you create optimal titles for your merchandise based on eBay data.

Keep Records

And the last but not the least, you should keep records and analyze them. Study why some products emerge only for some time, and some trends are afloat from season to season. Analyze not only the latest sales results, look from year to year. Mind that your business requires long term thinking, not just day to day. Studying a longer period of time will give you an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how trends and seasons affect your market.