Member Avatar for AndersLarsson

So I just released a video about flipping products on Amazon and selling them on eBay. Then use SwagBucks to recover a fraction of the cost.

The first question is about eBay listings.
Is there a limit to the number of eBay listings that you can have?
If so, how do you deal with the competition?

Second, will US citizens have an unfair advantage over people living outside the US?

I'm giving much more clarity and context about what I learned and what I mean in that video, but basically, if you're limited to the number of listings, then you really need to know that the demand is high enough and the supply is low enough to make it worth putting it on eBay.

Maybe it only works for people that already have a website and a decent following. For example, I use Fiverr and Etsy as examples. Fiverr has a limit on the number of gigs that you can have. People resort to, for example, sending fake visitors to manipulate Fiverr's algorithm.

I did some research on Etsy a while ago to give people a clear idea of how fierce the competition is. I created a tool to scan a couple of thousand accounts, and I found that less than 3% were actually able to sell anything on Etsy in a time span of about 6 months. So the failure rate is huge, and it is just ridiculous, in my opinion, how people haphazardly recommend Etsy and Fiverr as a way to earn extra cash.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

For the question of how many listings on eBay I'm thinking of a company which I won't name but they had thousands of listings. It was maintained by two full time employees.

As to the US question, since the company and items was in the USA the advantage was all about shipping costs and currency exchange.

The products were mostly odd lots or returns. Prior to eBay the company would sell all this off to a jobber. With eBay it became practical to sell the returns, discontinued items and odd lots themselves.

Failure rate? They had a set discount system so if items stuck around too long they would reduce the price till it sold.

commented: About the discount system. I'm sure if EBay had one, influencers would probably not tell people about it. I mean if there is a referrer commission +0
Member Avatar for jwenting

flipping schemes like this aren't the purpose of places like Etsy...
And most of them are scams anyway, promising shipment of items that don't exist until they are sold, mostly. Often the seller takes the buyer's money, invests it in something (often crypto), and either never ships the actual goods (because they never existed) or waits weeks or months to make a profit on investing the money before buying and shipping cheap knockoffs sourced from aliexpress.

Etsy has pretty strict policies that help reduce the incidence of such schemes, by handling the payment process themselves and being able to force chargebacks on the seller in case shipments don't arrive in a timely manner.
I've had to use that once so far when a seller had marked an item as "shipped" (which is when they get paid, Etsy holding the funds in escrow until then) but a month later having to admit that they'd never actually even had the item...

If you have a quality product though, and good customer service, your sales will take off.

commented: How can a potential buyer tell that the product is flipped? +0
Member Avatar for AndersLarsson

Just to be clear, I've never heard about people promoting flipped products on Etsy. I wouldn't even try that on Etsy because of the less than 3%.

What I learned was to sell products on EBay instead and use free listings. It costs money to list your products on Etsy, and that is another reason I wouldn't try it.

Someone else mentioned to me that eBay allows up to 250 free listings.
Let's say I list a product on eBay. Wouldn't it look like a normal product and not a flipped product to a customer?

Member Avatar for rproffitt

There are no set limits as you can request to have them raised if they don't automatically raise. Example: https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/selling-limits?id=4107

The company I wrote about was not reselling or flipping. They had product, did shipping and all the other work involved such as returns and more. Flipping sounds dangerous as what if you flipped a high value item like a macbook and it was drop shipped then found out to be nothing but a brick? For me this sounds like a dead end.

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