I recently made my first venture into selling stuff on eBay. Nothing major; just a few shirts that I designed and had printed up. These are the sorts of things that would sell for less than $20 each.
What about Amazon’s marketplace? I’m sure that at least some of you folks have used it for selling stuff. What is it like, and for small items, is it really worth it? Would you favor Amazon or eBay, and under what circumstances?
I’ve sold some esoteric/technical books on Amazon Marketplace and it’s been quite good. For mainstream stuff, it’s mostly impossible to compete with the big sellers, who may be making their entire profit margin from the postal charges.
Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I was under the impression that you can only list items for sale in Amazon Marketplace if they are already listed retail products in the system - if that’s true, I don’t know how you’d get your custom shirts in the system.
Yeah, that’s the sort of stuff that I’d be interested in learning about, Mangetout. Thanks.
You have to pay to be a pro seller to add items to their marketplace, but it can be done; however I doubt a handful of shirts are going to have the volume necessary to pay for the pro charges.
Seems to me something like custom-made shirts would do better on Etsy than on Amazon. I’ve never sold on Etsy. but other Dopers have and I am sure there are existing threads about it.
Thanks, folks. This kind of info is extremely useful, and clearly, some of it is the kinda that one wouldn’t find just by reading through the Amazon.com instructions.
We have had our own retailing site for 10 years, but I think we could get more exposure on Amazon (and as a customer I like Amazon). But Amazon requires that the products we sell - at least in our category, art prints - have UPCs. The publishers don’t apply UPCs to the prints, and the cost of acquiring UPCs ourselves wasn’t worth it, absent assurance of success on Amazon.
I imagine you’d have the same issue with your custom shirts.
We dropship DVDs for several sellers on Amazon, Alibris, Barnes and Nobles and half.com (EBAY). We’ve been doing this since 2002. Our set up is very simple and will require a little research on your part - finding the DVDs that we sell which you’ll be able to mark up to a point that will make you some money. (We sell the movie DROP DEAD FRED, for instance, for $19.99. This DVD can typically be sold on Amazon for $40.00 and more. We have quite a few DVDs like this. You just have to do the research yourself.)
Our dropshipping guidelines can be found here: http://www.sasquatchvideo.net/pages/dropshipping
We have unlimited stock on most titles, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask. The majority of our stock is imported from Brazil. The DVD covers are in English. The audio is in English, sometimes with foreign subtitles that can be activated or turned off. The DVDs are formatted for US and Canadian DVD players. In other words, they look and play the same as those made in the US. The only difference is they’re far less expensive and more available.
What you’d need to do is simply find which DVDs you’d want to list, list them, then when you make a sale, make the purchase at our site: http://www.sasquatchvideo.net You’ll want to make sure to add a note stating that it’s a dropship order so that we can leave out the invoice. But you’ll read all about it on the Guidelines page.
So if you’d be interested in our dropshipping services, feel free to start listing our DVDs on Amazon and wherever else you’d want to sell DVDs.
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