Thus far all of my reselling has been through Amazon and specifically Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA). With FBA all I do is ship the product off to Amazon and they take care of the rest. Amazon takes their fee and sends me the difference. I have had pretty good luck so far. But for the cell phone power bank everything else sold within a day or two. But there have been some drawbacks to using FBA that sort of make me crazy.
The first, is the time it takes to ship something to Amazon. I don’t know why but it would seem that everything I ship to FBA is routed to the east coast. I know there are Amazon warehouses on the west coast, hell the damn company is headquartered 3 hours north of me, I don’t get it. What this means is that it takes generally a week for an item to reach its destination. Which, all in all, would not be too bad but about half the time Amazon then decides distribute the item to a different warehouse. This can take another 4 or 5 days. I’ve had items take close to two weeks to get to wherever they are supposed to be going.
The good news is that once my item is in the buy box it sells within a day. However, this leads to my next beef. Amazon holds on to the money for two weeks and is then disbursed at the end of you next disbursement period. This means it takes 3 weeks to get your money once an item sells. You are looking at a minimum of 4 weeks from the time you ship your item to the time you get paid. That sucks.
That is a long of way saying that when I bought two iPads off Staples for a $150 discount I thought I would try my hand at Craigslist. I have sold lots of used goods on Craigslist and it is amazing the random junk people will buy from Craigslist. It would appear, however, that people only buy random junk off craigslist. I have not received a single email, text, or phone call since listing the iPads on Craigslist. I have sold cardboard boxes on Craigslist but I can’t sell an iPad. I guess people generally aren’t looking for new stuff on Craigslist – hell they probably assume anything new is stolen. It was a good effort but Monday these iPads are off to Amazon.
Have you consider selling on eBay? if you haven’t, why not?
Also what about selling on OfferUp, have you heard?
Hi Scott, have you tried reselling on eBay? if not, why?
Also have you heard about OfferUp? have you tried it?
I have not heard of offer up. I have tried selling on eBay in the past but I prefer FBA. It is less work in my opinion as I don’t have to worry about customer service or shipping to the buyer. Amazon takes care of all that.
Hi Scott, sorry for the double post, I thought the message I sent yesterday didn’t go through. Yeah OfferUp is really nice. It’s like a way more secure Craigslist option. My niece has been selling stuff that she doesn’t need anymore and it sells like cake. I am not sure how it will be with new stuff like iPads but it will worth give it a try. maybe you can document it if you decide to push any iPad there?
Thanks for the heads up, I will definitely look into it. I also plan to try LetGo but it also looks like it is mostly used stuff.
Yeah, also wallapop. All these new apps can help, at least they will worth a try.
One more question Scott, have you consider the possibility of reselling gift cards? I mean you have mentioned cardpool before and it just dawn on me that buying gift cards (either Egift or Voucher) at a nice discount and reselling them on Amazon or eBay for a small profit will probably work too. This will probably won’t earn you points but you also won’t have to deal with physical stuff like shipping boxes, etc.
Have you thought or considered this idea before. If so I will love to see you trying it and document it. I wish I had more time to do this myself but is quite impossible for me at the moment.
I’ve thought about gift cards but you need to do high volume to make it worth it. I still consider my self a hobbyist so I prefer low volume and high margins.
Make sense. Thanks Scott!