Issues I had With My Halloween Affiliate Experiement

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So I just posted about my little make money online experiment with promoting Halloween costume offers on eBay. It was a big success and if I had started the campaign a little earlier, I probably would have easily broken $200 in affiliate commissions. However, like I mentioned, I had a few issues over the last few days and I wanted to touch on them as they are real problems that you could face if you attempted to repeat this process (with any kind of product, not just Halloween costumes).

Like I said in the other post, I searched for costumes that did not have many active listings, but were selling successfully for any listing that was up. So this meant that I listed popular items and with any luck the demand would be high. Well, the demand was high. Total, I had 26 costume sales on eBay, pretty damn good for about 72 hours. It was roughly $1000 worth of business in eBay’s eyes…to me it was $136.

So anyway, here are the problems I ran into.

1. With my first few sales, the price I listed it the costume at was too low to cover the eBay and PayPal fees and to cover the actual cost of the costume. I lost between 50 cents and a dollar on 4 sales, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. To rectify the situation, I increased the listing price and added a a little bit to the shipping price the buyer paid. This then covered the fees and cost of the item and gave me now a small profit of between 50 cents and a dollar on each sale.
2. I placed 6 orders with one company whose affiliate program I was apart of one night. Then the next day I processed a few more with no problems. However, before heading to bed that night, I went to place a couple more that had sold on eBay…yet they were out of stock! This put me in a panic. I had to search for another company that was selling the same costume for the same price or less AND become an affiliate of theirs immediately to be able to process the orders that night. Luckily I was able to find another website that I could use and processed a handful of orders with them.
3. The third day my second ’supplier’ was out of stock when I went to process another batch of orders. Well shit on me! I was even more worried about it now because I knew these were hot items and finding another website that had a good stock of them would be a problem. Luckily I got approved for another affiliate program with costume website and I started processing orders.
4. This past Monday (the 20th) I get an email from the 3rd supplier telling me that they were out of stock of everything I ordered (even though their website showed it was in stock) and that ALL of my orders had been canceled…all 10 of them! I called to find out what the problem was because I placed all the orders on Friday, the 17th and the website said everything was in stock. Well apparently it takes up to 6 hours for the website to reflect the real inventory levels and when the site updated to being out of stock, I had already processed all the orders I had and they could not ship any of the costumes. All the charges I had through PayPal and my credit card had been refunded and all of the sudden I had an extra $600 in my PayPal account. Well, it was a popular costume, and after trying another 6 websites, just to process the orders - even if I could not get affiliate commissions from them, everyone was out of stock.
5. I had to refund 10 orders…this hurt…bad. Not only did I have to go through and individually refund 10 people’s money, I had to make sure they all went through, document the refunds (to make sure I was keeping track of everything), and contact them all to let them know what was going on. I emailed everyone and explained the situation, sent the refunds, and then left feedback on eBay for them all. Some have left feedback for me and I hope the rest will as well.
6. I still got charged the eBay fees!!!!!! When you refund money through PayPal, you get the fee refunded as well - so if you send me $50, the PayPal fee may be $2, netting me $48. Well PayPal refunds the $2 fee if I refund you the $50. BUT I still incurred the eBay fees for each costume purchase (this is about $4.50 a costume). So, now I am going to be down about $40 because of the stinking eBay fees. It’d be nice if eBay could follow a PayPal refund and then you could ‘cancel’ a sale within eBay so you are not charged the fees because the transaction was not completed. Oh well. Luckily this is not coming from out-of-the-pocket money, but it will be covered by my affiliate commissions.

SO, if you are thinking about doing this sort of thing in the future, here are a couple tips I have.

• Contact an affiliate manager and make sure that what you want to do is alright with them and does not violate any terms or conditions.
• Contact the company you want to process orders with and make sure they are alright with you selling on eBay and processing the orders through them.
• Make sure the company has enough of the item in stock to fulfill your demand! If you can, get a certain number of the product reserved for you so that you know you have a certain number available to sell. This is the biggest thing I will try to do next time I do something like this.

Good luck with if you want to do this type of making money online experiment in the future and see how much you can earn in affiliate commissions. When I do a blog income report at the beginning of November, I will include this affiliate commission amount, but I will figure out what the real number is (my earnings of ~$136 minus eBay fees) to see how well I really did.

Need a little cash boost? Sell your “art” online

Today, I am going to share one way that I make a little extra cash online. I sell my “art”. It seems pretty obvious and possibly a bit of a stupid post doesn’t it? Well, not many people actually think of doing it, but I got around $100 profit last month from doing about one days full work (I had a lazy month where I didn’t do much else)!

I’m not very arty at all, but I can paint something onto a small canvas, and that’s all you need to be able to do to bring in some extra cash, in fact, if you really hit it off you could turn it into a small part time business. So, what exactly do you have to do? Well, you paint some original pictures and sell them. It is quite a nice little thing to do, as you don’t have to put much effort in, but the returns are pretty nice!

Step 1: Gather supplies

The first thing you need to do, is to get the stuff you are going to make your art with, now I don’t want to turn this into an art lesson, so I’ll focus more on costs and materials. I buy 50×40cm canvases for just under $4 each from a DIY store near me, seriously, they are pretty cheap and probably cheaper on the internet. Then you need some paint, I find that a pack of 10 acrylics usually sets me back $15 and lasts about 10 -20 canvases (don’t worry too much about quality of paint) so about $1.50 maximum for paint costs. Then you need some stuff to package your paintings, I usually have some stuff lying around, but buying in bulk you can get the cost down to $0.50 a package. So, our total costs are $4 for canvas, $1.50 for paint and $0.50 for packaging. that is a total of $6 for one painting, and you can probably bring the cost down if you buy more from the right places.

Step 2: Paint the thing

Your next step is to paint it. Like I said, this isn’t art class, so I’ll just give you a few pointers:

• Make it original - this is what will sell the art
• Stick to a style - I find modern art is easiest, because it doesn’t have to resemble art that much and gives excuses for mistakes
• Use color - color sells best and is quite attention grabbing, however, saying that I sold a nice black and white picture, but I have quite a few that haven’t sold.
• Don’t spend too much time on it. They are so cheap that if you muck one up, you may as well start again.

Step 3: Sell your master piece

Now you need to sell your work. I use eBay, you may want to try something else it is up to you. The main thing you need to think about here is price. The minimum you want to sell it for is 1.5x, but that only leaves you with $3. I try to price mine at 3.5x the price to produce. In reality, say I sold 10 in one month, 70% of those would go for 3.5x the price, so $147 in total, then I might decide that honestly, I can’t sell two of them (they aren’t good enough maybe) so I might package them as a two for one, or just keep them. The last one might be a lot better so I sell for 5x the price ($30) so I have made up the cost of the other two. You have to really think about the worth of the paintings, and how much they honestly are worth. With the right price though, these things pretty much fly off the (virtual) shelves. Remember, your main selling point here is totally 100% original canvases.

Step 4: Rinse and repeat or expand (and final tips)

So, you can do this a few times and make some extra money, but there is huge potential for you to expand and rinse and repeat this method any time you need some extra cash. If you really want to, you could easily setup an online shop and really boost your revenue, but honestly, I’m too lazy more interested in other things and concentrate on them and just use this as an extra boost of cash if I need it.

Sophie

Be Nice To Customer Service and the Order Department

Hey everyone! Here is a quick video that I recorded about some of the luck that I had with working with a companies customer service and order departments. I got sent this 6 foot tall retail display unit for FREE. In the video I cover a few quick tips on how to be nice to an order department and to ask for free promotional items or discounts on your orders.

I hope you all are staying dry and cool…it has been raining here in Maryland for the last couple days because of the tropical storm. I will be glad when it all wraps up!

Be sure to join in on the fun at the Dorm Room Biz contest! Entries are welcome until September 19th!

Testing out different product markets on eBay

Previously we have discussed expanding your business and deciding when to add more products. We have also touched on different ways to make your eBay business better.

Today I wanted to discuss testing out different product markets on eBay and how you can decide what products you want to carry in your eBay store. Over the last 2 years I have tried out a lot of different products and categories to sell on eBay. It is always a process to figure out what will work, what doesn’t, and how you can make your listings better. In the past I have sold: glassware, coins and supplies, stamps and supplies, jewelry, rock climbing gear, camping equipment, new toys, used toys, first aid equipment, books, and a lot in between.

More recently, I have been focusing solely on the outdoor sports equipment/gear. My current product lines include rock climbing ropes, camping equipment (cook sets, fire starters, and other equipment. With these areas, I have had a lot of success and they continue to boost great sales for me. However, as you can imagine, I am always on the lookout to expand my product line. Just last week, I established a dealer account with probably the largest manufacturer of adventure first aid and medical equipment – Adventure Medical Kits. This has opened up a whole new product line to me and once I make my first order, I should be able to make pretty good profits for the kits.

As I had mentioned previously in other posts, when establishing a dealer account with different vendors, most of them will require references to provide you with a line of credit. So to overcome this, I have been using a credit card to pay for my inventory orders. This has worked pretty good so far, but I’d prefer to start having some lines of credit with the companies as opposed to carrying a credit card with the potential of getting slapped with interest if I can’t make the full payments for some reason. To be able to swing my first round purchase of first aid kits, I am going to have to hold off on reordering another product that I carry – rock climbing ropes. Both companies have high minimum purchase amounts ($350-$500), so right now while testing out the market; I can’t afford to carry both. The profits of the climbing ropes can be anywhere from $15-$40 each and the profits from the first aid kits will be smaller, $5-$20 depending on the item. However, I’ll have a lot of different items to be able to make up the profits in the long run.

If I can create good profits from carrying these products, at least $150 from the whole order, I will definitely reorder. If not, I’ll have to think twice about it and probably hold off. I definitely want to continue to carry the ropes because of the higher profits on fewer items, which is always a bonus on eBay.

Here are some of the different things to consider when testing out a product area or niche on eBay.

• Always search for the item you are going to be selling. Look at how many other listings there are of the same or similar items. Also, try to determine how many other sellers there are (maybe 7 sellers/stores make up 95% of the listings for the same items or similar items or there could be a lot of individual sellers selling the same item).
• Research the completed listings for your item. After you search for the item in active listings, check the box on the left to narrow your results to just completed listings. This will give you a listing of all the completed listings (sold and unsold) over the last 30 days. This will help you see what prices the item is selling for and what is too high of a price for the item.
• After you look at the completed listings, determine if you can compete in the market. eBay is extremely competitive! If you need to lower your price too much to compete, look for another item to sell. However, if you can make a comfortable profit from the item and still be a bit cheaper than the competition, you will have some success.
• When people buy on eBay through auctions, they are usually not in a hurry to purchase a product and will wait to find the best deal. This means if your starting price is a bit lower than the competition, the likeliness of your sells is higher. If you get more people to watch your item, then you can create a bidding war for the item when it comes towards the last hours or minutes of the auction. This is great to have happen because sometimes your item will sell for a higher price than the competitions did.
• Add listings for the item you want to sell to your Watch list. Watch the action on the auctions for a few days until they end. If you see a lot of bidding going on, you can assume that there are a lot of people interested in the item. This is even better if there are a limited number of sellers.
• Look at what time auctions are ending. Most items are better to have ending on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday evening. These are the most likely evenings that people are browsing eBay because the week is winding down and they have more free time. Also, you don’t want your listing to end too late at night or too early when people would not be around the computer. Any time between 6-9 PM is usually a good time. Also, Sunday evenings are a good time, but you can also do Sunday afternoons as many people take Sunday’s easy and are around the house.

A Pretty Good eBay Guide for Beginners

As you have probably noticed, I have started running some affiliate offers through Market Leverage on Dorm Room Biz. While my intention is not to spam you all, my dear readers, I do want to put out offers that I think you all would consider useful and help you reach your goals of making money and starting a business. With that being said, every once in a while as I switch up the offers on Dorm Room Biz, I’ll highlight one of them to bring them more to your attention and share it with you. The ones that I do share with you will most likely be ones that I have personally tried myself.

With that being said, there is a pretty good offer in the sidebar for people who are looking to learn more about selling on eBay and want to grasp the opportunity to make some money from the online marketplace.

The offer gives you access to a GREAT ebook and CD titled “Auction Professor” as well as some other good resources. One of them is access to a wholesale supplier website which has thousands of different products for you to access at great wholesale prices. The offer does have a cost to it, of only $2.29. For this price, you get the eBook “Auctions Professor” on CD so you can take it with you anywhere.

Here is how you can also benefit from completing the offer
So, because this is an affiliate offer that I am running, if you were to sign up for the trial experiences and pay the $2.29 for the CD, I will make a little bit of money for the referral. HOWEVER, what I want to do is something a little different - I want to pass some of that earnings back to you, my readers. So if you sign up for the offer and complete it (and contact me to confirm it) I will send you $10 (a $7.71 profit for you) for just a couple minutes of your time. Not too bad right? Even if you were not interested in selling on eBay, this is a quick chance to bump up your PayPal account with a few extra bucks. However, if you are looking to gain some tracking by using eBay to make money online, then this is a win-win situation for you.

Have questions? Be sure to ask! A final important thing to remember - if you do not want to continue using the different websites that you gain access to, then you will need to cancel your subscriptions or you will be charged.

Ways for eBay Businsses and Entrepreneurs to Go Green!

For today, I put together a short video on the ways that eBay entrepreneurs and businesses can go green and reduce their output or waste. As an online business, people may think that there may not be many ways for them to “go green” or reduce their waste or businesses by product. However, there are a few different ways that you, as an ebay entrepreneur, can help to make a difference - these I highlight in the video.

eBay Entrepreneurs Go Green - Here’s how!

• Reuse your boxes - As ebay sellers, we get a lot of mail and a lot of packages (usually our inventory that we are selling on ebay or other things that we buy). So when you ship out your next package, look at your boxes and see if you can reuse any of them. Don’t just throw them away, save them up over time and you will have a good supply to choose from. And it is important to remember that you can make a box that works for you out of another box that may be too big, just get your box cutter or scisors out and you are ready to go! Another way to reuse boxes is to visit your local retailers and see if they will give you any of their old boxes. Places like Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, and Food Lion will be more than happy to provide you with boxes (for whatever purpose) if you ask them and are there at the right time (usually early morning or late at night).
• Combine your trips to the post office - One of the issues with being an eBay seller is that you are constantly at the post office it seems. During the spring while at school and selling on eBay, I think I was at the post office everyday for weeks in a row. However, now that I am home and working full time, my parents are able to take some of my packages on top of things they may have or I can put smaller items in the mailbox. If you have auctions ending at different times throughout the day then save all your packages up until the afternoon and head to the post office then. Or, the better option may be to go in the early morning (because everyone else waits until the afternoon). Better yet, go every other day or only a couple times a week. Put this in your eBay policies and let your customers know that you are attempting to make your business green and I am sure they would be happy to hear that.
• Use the USPS Carrier pick up - If you are printing your shipping labels off the computer and pay for them online, you can usually schedule a carrier pick up, which could be the same time that your regular mail man comes to your house or office anyway. This will save you from having to go the post office at all and also save you on using more gas in your vehicle!
• Use less paper and recycle what you do use - When I ship out an item, I usually include two things: an eBay invoice and a “thank you for shopping with us” business card. The biz card basically lets the person know that we are thankful for their business and also to leave feedback for the item. By including these, I use a good amount of paper and ink. If I just stopped including the invoices, I would save a lot of paper. But the point is if you have some pages that didnt print right, print on the other side of use them for scrap paper or even packaging material. If possible, write out labels for your packages instead of printing them and using labels and more ink.
• Use packaging material from around the house - Do you get the newspaper everyday? So do the rest of us. Now instead of throwing it out or recycling it every week, use it as your packaging material for when you ship out items. This will save you from buying either packaging peanuts or tissue paper or other items. Also, if you have a cross cut shredder, you can use the shreds from your basket for packaging - it basically looks like confetti! A cool way to mix it up is to shred a couple pieces of colored paper with all your other stuff (letters, old bills, credit card offers, etc) to make it a little more colorful.

eBay Project Updates

It has been a pretty long time since the last time that I did some project updates on the different ventures that I am working on, so I thought it was about time that I started putting together some new ones. I’ll be updating you all on my eBay business, my website design and development business, and other side projects. Today, I’ll be touching on the eBay business, Radford Auctions.

Over the past few months, I have really been comtemplating what I wanted to do with this business. When I launched Radford Auctions with my partner back in 2007 it was an opportunity for us to learn about starting a business, expanding on something we knew (eBay), and also making money. We started out with the consignment store mentality where we would sell other peoples items for them. We quickly learned that unless we put some money into the advertising of the business and invested in some software, that we would not be able to do it as effectively as we wanted. Instead, we kept with that idea, but made it a second focus of the business. Our first focus became purchasing inventory and reselling on eBay. I quickly scooped up lots of rock climbing equipment and camping equipment that we sold on eBay seperately.

From there, we expanding into offering brand new products that I purchased from the manufacturers. This worked out very well for us! However, our product line was not as expansive as we wanted so we started looking for other options. Now we are dealing with three different manufacturers of outdoor equipment and looking to add a forth in the next month. This has expanded our opportunities greatly! By now selling more products, we have been able to make a significant amount of more money. Our profits on products went from being a couple dollars to $20+ dollars on each auction. With this strategy, we have also been able to increase our overall sales figures per month and are quickly approaching becoming a Power Seller. I need to have sales of $1000 per month, for three months in a row to achieve the status and then maintain that. Now that I am selling a lot of items that range in values of $50 - $150, this should not be too much of a hurdle to jump over and I am looking for to it!

With the increase in product offering, and the more focused related industry/niche, I have been considering changing the name of my eBay store. I currently operate as Radford Auctions and my username is radfordauctions. However, your store name and username do not have to be the same. I have been thinking of changing my store name to TheGearHouse to coincide with my website - www.thegearhouse.com. This would be a great opportunity because then I can cross promote and sell products directly from my website and the eBay store. I have been working on doing this, but I have been a bit hesitant because of using two differnet names. The other reason I am hesitant to make the switch is because I sell a decent amount of stuff that is not outdoor gear related such as coins/stamps and supplies, jewelry, books, clothing, and more.

Some numbers:

• $900+ in sales in the last 30 days
• $2,000+ in sales in he last 90 days
• Top performing categories: camping/hiking/backpacking, rock climbing - ropes, coins and supplies
• 60 successful listings in the last 60 days (includes store format and auction format)

Do you sell on eBay? I’d love to hear your experiences and stories! If you have any questions about eBay and being a seller, feel free to ask!

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Did some yard sale shopping for eBay Last Weekend

Last weekend I set out early on Saturday morning to hit a couple yard sales in the area and see if I couldn’t find some good buys to be put up on eBay or Amazon. Well, I didn’t have much luck. I only picked up a few books, a game, and a few beanie babies. So, I am hoping the few items that I did get will at least bring me in some money to put more gas in my Jeep.

When I go to yard sales or thrift stores to search for eBay or Amazon items, I usually focus more on books and DVDs. My reasoning for this is because I know I can sell them and I know that if they are not “worth it as a single item” they could be sold in a lot of similar items (a lot of dvds or a lot of books on the same topic).

But I am curious if you guys ever head out to the yard sales and see what you may be able to find? Withing planning for a wedding and also moving in with my Fiance soon, I have been thinking about them more lately as a great way to find deals on things we will need like furniture.

Anyway, just a quick post today about yard sales. Our community is having one this coming weekend and I am going to set up to try to unload some left of products from Valentine’s Day as well as some other stuff for my parents!

Met with an accountant yesterday; here are some of my thoughts!

Sunday I blogged that I was going to be meeting with an accountant and listed a few questions that I was going to ask him to dive deeper into the realms of setting up a business entity, such as an LLC or a C corp. The basis for the meeting was because with the amount of money that I had been bringing in recently from ebay and my website development business, there was some money that was not being reported as income and instead was just being deposited and not being accounted for. So there were some worries about the possibility of getting audited or having different problems with paying state taxes.

So, I wanted to learn more about my options, discuss my ventures, and see what may be the best idea for me as an entrepreneur. Now, before I go any further, I want to STRESS that this is advice that was given to ME and is specific to my case. That being said, it is always best to get your own advice from a certified professional such as an accountant or lawyer or both! So, with that, I am going to just talk about some of my different options, the answers to some of the questions that I asked, and what the future holds for how I do business. Read more »

I Am Selling My Motivation - Need Some? Find it on eBay!

Random I know, but I am selling off some of my motivation, and I know you need some! Basically, I have some different posters/prints that I purchased when I moved out of the dorm room and into my apartment to hang on the wall to get my inspired.

Well, now that I am graduating college and moving home in a couple weeks, I wanted to sell off some of the stuff I have around the apartment. I started doing some searching on eBay and there are some other people out there selling these similar motivational/inspiration prints and thought I would throw some of mine up there too.

They are basic 8 by 10 inch prints. They come with a piece of cardboard behind them to keep them flat and safe. You can even opt in to getting a black wooden frame to go with it!

Anyway, they are up on eBay for pretty cheap and reasonable. Check them out if your interested in getting some motivation! I have about 10 of these but have only put up 4 of them so far.

Command: The power to impress - the design to conquer & the ability to command respect.

Group Effort: It is the ability to work together which determines success.

Authority: It is the strongest who prevail.

Success: Success is not happiness - happiness is the key to success.

Drop me a line if you are interested in any or all of them or seeing the others that I have! I’ll update this post later this weekend when I get them all on eBay!