I’ve posted a product today. Is a teddy, i only paid 12€ for one and I would like to sell 3.
Should it be like this?
Amazon did not get were they are today by being concerned with your profit, sorry.
3P sellers are essentially under paid stock clerks that burn their time and money trying to chase the “Dream”. While amazon is getting filthy rich.
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Hmm, I was hoping to make a good income on Amazon. Seems unlikely…
Do you have any recommendations for similar ecom platforms with lower selling fees?
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Good luck finding one.
All of them use the same playbook.
If I knew 25 years ago how the online marketplaces would evolve I NEVER WOULD HAVE GOTTEN INVOLVED with them, fact.
Way too much going on with google/alphabet/facebook/meta/ and their relationships with the online market places. It does not appear any new start up will be allowed to gain market share.
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It’s not just you. Way back when, you could figure Amazon would get 30% to 35%. Now it’s even higher.
Open your own Shopify website. We get top Google placement, and exposure to all the social platforms for free, without additional work. Right now, it’s where we are getting most of our orders.
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We don’t use shopify, if it was not for our own website sales we would be finished selling online.
Testing the ebay PPC click, wow!!. Using ebay’s “smart” technology, 56% ACOS!!! Did some manual listings down to 35%.
Not sure if that was competitors burning my clicks or what but that is out of this world. Assumed it was just on ebay proper and not from affiliates. Even at .10 per click its not even remotely close to being viable for us. It has been so many years since we did any advertising with google and amazon, I thought it was bad years ago with them.
Years ago our google ppc budget was 4 digits a month, pretty sure I could burn that within a week or less on ebay.
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I found that Google PPC charges were way too outrageous for us. Then, when they canceled my Merchant Account for missing a tiny piece of information. I went nuts. It couldn’t be appealed. Cost us $3,000 to have an attorney straighten it out.
That was then, this is now.
We don’t pay a cent in PPC charges. Google gives us fantastic placement. We’re always on the first page, and usually top the Seller list, or just below Amazon. This even happens when we don’t have the product.
I started working on my site during COVID, after Amazon closed my account over “bogus” complaints by a person that didn’t exist. No matter how bad it looked for them, they were going to silence the “whistleblower.” Eventually, they dropped all 67 charges, and I was able to get my account back.
I understand about selling online. We have more than 12,000 SKUs in our warehouse. The plan was to turn the family business over to the kids. While they still help with the inventory, I’m not sure they still want to take over. I am adding products as fast as I can, so I can figure out exactly what the business is worth.
I’m figuring at some point I will see if one of my competitors wants to buy us out, or put it up for sale. If it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have this problem.
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The problem I have is that our competitors are broke and cannot afford to buy us out. The bigger issue is the crap economy, I wanted to liquidate the company. Unfortunately I will have to wait a while until the demand for industrial equipment increases. Now, the new machinery dealers are 25% off of new, that is the price my stuff would sell for used when times are better. Selling now would be a terrible decision. We have so much surplus capacity with the ebay sales being down. eBay has attacked my company to the point we are only doing 1/10 of our historical sales on their site. Don’t see that issue ever going away, so my options are pretty clear.
That would be nice, but, around here many of the old farmers are cashing out, Chinese and US Billionaires are buying up all the farm ground. I know exactly where that is going and I am very glad we are old and hopefully the both of us will be gone before that fiasco unfolds. The young ones don’t have a clue of what is going to happen.
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I can see how that would be a problem in your industry. My biggest competitor has the mega bucks to buy us out, and I know he’d love to get his hands on some of our collectibles.
The bigger issue is the crap economy
Yes. That is a big issue. We’ve been mostly shielded from downturns in the economy in the past. This time things are really bad. People have stopped buying toys for the kids. It’s never happened before.
I know exactly where that is going and I am very glad we are old and hopefully the both of us will be gone before that fiasco unfolds.
I also know where this is going, and that it will continue to get a lot worse. Timing is really bad for us.
The young ones don’t have a clue of what is going to happen.
Our kids are savvy. They know what the future holds. So, they’re not making any long term commitments.
We can only take things one day at a time…
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Is that 45% return on investment as that’s good I aim for around 30%
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Thank you for the recommendation @FunkyMonkey. How long did it take for your website to get indexed and start receiving orders on a regular basis?
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Feel very fortunate. Most of the children of parents that own a company have no clue that it is usually the 2nd-3rd generations are the ones that make it big time. They see the parents working hard all the time and want no part of it, you can talk all you want, lazy rules and it is even worse now days.
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My observations specific to Walmart and not an independent reseller are this. Walmart is shooting off both feet trying to catch amazon.
When you go into the walmart they are mostly self checkout, think about this, the labor cost was too high to staff the checklanes. Now, they have “to-go” order pickers lined up packing product out the door and placing the goods in back of lazy folks’ vehicles.
That model is so broken it is not even funny, they are burning money from gross inefficiency its not even funny. The typical wall street retail investor is a “me too” type and they will be the ones losing all their money when it unfolds.
Not sure which one will hit the dirt, pretty sure it will be amazon they have NOTHING of value to the general population. At least walmart has walk in stores and could very easily convert back to having walk-in traffic. Since I lost the point, sorry, it is all about impulse sales, something that is poorly executed online. Walk-ins = impulse sales…The power of real time retail sales.
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It was not long at all. Shopify makes it so simple. You just have to choose the options, and they do the rest.
I did have a problem with Shopify a few months back. Because I sell DC Comics, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, SpongeBob, etc., etc., they wanted to make sure I was authorized to sell them, and they were received from reliable sources. They closed my store until it was resolved. I lost my Google placement, and basically started over. It was a week or so until things picked up again.
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I can’t argue with that.
Walmart, from a seller perspective, is a joke. It so poorly designed, it takes forever to do anything. There are no seller “creature features.” I can guarantee their developers never spoke to a single seller when they designed this monstrosity. I know how that works. Been there, done that. There are few things they can fix right away to make a world of difference, but they are too stubborn even to accept suggestions.
I don’t do much there. As I’m working on my store I come across some opportunities on their platform, and I take the time to list them. But, because you can’t enter quantity when you add an item, you have to make a note so that you can come back and fix it. However, you have to search for it, because the inventory has no logical sort sequence. It changes from minute-to-minute.
Ugh. The things we do.
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The C-Suite told them exactly how to play this out and they did a good job.
They only want sellers around to offset shipping costs, EXACTLY like amazon has been doing for many years. Playing sellers. Sole honeyhole is the brick and mortar stores, relative to that amazon is pimple on walmarts butt. Walmart is doing what ever to pop that pimple. If amazon would go down, I am pretty safe to say the walmart would shut down the grocery side of the website very soon after that. Then find a profitable balance between playing sellers and moving their own goods.
Walmart tried very hard to recruit us for their FBWalmart service. I agreed to use it IF my goods did not go into any warehouse in California or any other state that is planning a nexus issue. They never could agree to that so I passed.
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I think about it from time-to-time, but always reject the idea in the end.
One of my competitors uses their WFS services. She doesn’t use FBA, so I’m wondering if I’m missing something?
At this point in time I highly doubt anything is being missed.
It might be worth a try, I always test if it does not smell.
As it stands now, my thoughts are too pull everything off of ebay that is not profitable and just let nature take its course, see how the Q1 2024 looks(that is our busiest time). I do know that when we run out of stock on ebay they do go over to our website and order so, how much that will help???
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Good point.
I’m too overwhelmed at this point to spend any time on eBay, and Walmart. Amazon too to some degree. If I live to be a hundred, I will never finish adding all of our products.
Right now I am working on 75 totes of our Holiday items. While I’ve got the process down to “warp max” I’m still only 1/2 way through XMAS #17.
I need someone to clone me. 
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Yes, that is a challenge. Back when we sold Industrial machinery auction style on ebay I had a couple of technicians and some listing employees putting that stuff on. At one time we processed around 3 semi trailers of goods per week. At one time ebay was a honey hole.
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