Friday, April 25, 2008

EMS Shipping

EMS shipping is the local Post Office's Express International. The minimum cost is $25.00 whether you use an envelope or bag. When you go over 1 pound, the price on the bag goes up. If you can still get it into the fixed price envelope, do it.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

International Payments

When selecting banks, and checking accounts, ask about how much it cost to transfer internationally. One bank may charge $40, and another may charge $25. Getting this out of the way now, may save an added hassle later.

Generally, you have three payment methods: T/T, Western Union, and Paypal.

Paypal - If they take paypal, they are likely places you should not be dealing with. Is this a blanket statement? Yes. But once you get into it you will start to see the difference between a manufacturer, a distributor, and a middle man. Middle men take paypal, manufacturers do not.

Western Union By Phone- I sent about 10 transfers in three months. Each and every one of them became longer on the phone, more hassles, and more garbage. They would not allow me to set up a business account, without a monthly transfer cap. Currently, it is something like $3000 per month on the website, and $5000 per month on the phone. Once you start doing serious business, these caps are a joke. Not to mention they do customer security to the point of agony. On my last dealings with them, They would not accept the transfer, but they wouldn't tell me why either. I strongly recommend not using them if it can be avoided, even if it means a slightly higher transfer cost. My average time on the phone was 45 minutes, plus call back verification.

Western Union At Location - If you walk up with cash it's pretty easy. Bring two forms of ID to avoid hassles. Takes about 10 minutes, and the money is available anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour later. Don't forget to email the recipient the tracking number, or else they won't get paid. The downside is that you have to wait until the next business day for China to process your order. Over the phone you could have gotten the price, and sent the money and been done inside an hour. Oh well.

T/T - This is a standard bank wire transfer. Get the manufacturer's bank info, go into your local bank, and give them the information. You can be in and out in about 15 minutes. Transfers should be available in about 4 days. This is where Western Union get's you.

Multiple Accounts

I have found that having multiple accounts on Amazon to be a huge help to my business. Despite the extra $40.00/mo for a second account and extra steps in processing orders from the different accounts, it is paid back in several ways. One is that by staggering the pay day, I can get paid weekly instead of bi-weekly (major Amazon drawback). It also means that I can compete with myself. That sounds silly, but it gives the customers the illusion of choice, and I get the benefit of double the chance they would select me, instead of my competition. You would think that it would not matter, however my sales doubled, so go figure on that for a while. Another huge benefit is if one account gets negative feedback or other hardship, the other account can still stand strong while I try to fix whatever happened.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Starting Up

Getting started requires more than one product, or even one company to do business with. For a fully successful end of the day sales, you need to carry many items, from many different distributors. You need to take their disorganized mess of products and updates, and convert them over to a master list in excel so that it can be uploaded to your store in one batch. Additionally, for maximum sales, you need to sell anywhere you can find. This means selling on eBay and Amazon. Ideally, you should have multiple accounts on each (in case one gets negative feedback, suspended, etc).

This means that you need a master list in a format your own website understands, one that Amazon understands, and eBay understands. It requires quite a bit of data entry to get all the various systems to have the same items. Then it requires daily updates with discontinued and out of stock items. All this is on top of orders, returns, and daily headaches. Properly selling on the internet is definitely not for the faint of heart. It takes many long hours.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Shipping to Canada

If you use PayPal to ship to Canada,your options are fairly limited, and all expensive. If you go into a Post Office and do it there, it could be less than half of your online price. Personally, I started by paying $15 each package. Then I figured out how to do it for $9. Now I can do it for under $4. Always ask, and investigate your options. No one way, seems to be the right way.

Friday, April 11, 2008

My Life

I gotta tell you , I really like my new life. Sure, I have spent the day in front of my computer building my business, but it was from my own office, in my sweat pants, drinking beer, and popping Percasetts (a whole other story). A few weeks ago I interviewed a BookKeeper while I was in my slippers. I felt so decadent. Yesterday, I sold two Paddles and Balls (you know, connected by a rubber band) where it cost me a grand total of $9 to buy and ship it, and I pocketed a profit of $22.65. I just sold some "10 in 1 Game Set" for a profit of about $25.00.

The key here, I am not actually doing anything. An email comes in from Amazon, I forward it on to the warehouse, I keep the markup in between. They do the shipping. Additionally, I only have about 1000 items listed. I have thousands more where that came from, just waiting to be listed. I am trying to figure out why people work so hard.

If anything, this will be an amazing second income once it's all set up. My wife won't ever have to work again. I need to watch inventory levels every few days, but this is nothing terribly difficult.
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