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.