Online Millionaire eBay Training - product strategies and sources

The trick to online millionaire ebay training is in your product sourcing strategy.

There are essentially two types of sources you can find your products on ebay

1. One-time wonders/blunders
2. Repeatable supplies

One-time includes garage sales, your attic, cute rocks you find at the sea shore or creek. You will probably never see another one like them. They can be wonders or blunders as sales items based on a wide variety of possible variables, your headline, your copy, your photo (or lack of them), your presentation overall - and whether anyone is online when you try to sell it who wants to buy one of those things.

Repeatable supplies are from having access to the manufacturing source - or wholesaler who will work with you. But just because you have a lot of widgets doesn't mean you are going to sell a lot of widgets or that they are even worth what you paid for them.

In both cases, you have to do market research - which is not so scary or intimidating as it sounds (we don't have to be MBA's to do this sort of stuff - and practically, it wouldn't help anyway: just too simple and easy.)

Market Research - simply finding what people want to buy

Market research is finding both supply and demand, then what information you need to know, need to give - and how to supply the best service to your potential clients.

Marketing is both finding a market and building a market for your goods.

On eBay, the best tool I've seen so far was formerly "Deep Analysis" and is now called "HammerTap", after the company which made it.

This anecdote from Earl Nightingale (among others) tells the story:

One of these huge machines in a factory went down and no one could get it going again. So they called a engineer from the manufacturer to fix it.

The engineer came in, listened to all their descriptions, and to all the various attempts they had made to re-start it, as well as all the ideas they had as to what was going on with it.

The plant manager was there, very eager to have this machine running again, as anything not producing something in that plant was costing him and his shareholders money.

The engineer, after digesting all this data, went over and examined the machine carefully. He ultimately went over to one side of the machine and stopped. He put down the tool bag he was carrying and pulled out a small hammer from it. Reaching over to the side of this massive machine, he gave it a simple tap.

Nodding to the operator at the control, the starter button was pushed. And the machine roared to life.

The engineer then got out a pad and wrote out the bill, handing it to the manager.

"5,000 dollars!" the manager exclaimed. "You've only been here 15 minutes and only tapped with with a hammer! I demand a full accounting and detailed invoice on my desk in the morning!" And with that the manager stormed off into the plant.

The next day, that manager found the following invoice on his desk:

"Visiting your plant and tapping with a hammer - $1.00

"Knowing where to tap - $4,999.00"

It is that precision of knowledge which drives sales on eBay.

What threw me off of this subject was the vast amount of auctions which have no one bidding, or only a single bidder. Needless to say, this is a way to rack and ruin if you are trying to make a living from it.

The very smart power sellers make extreme use of this HammerTap tool in order to make their outrageous profits. And it's such a powerful tool that there are many, many ways to use it - but only a few which give you the data needed to create really successful and profitable auctions time and time again. The folks at HammerTap have created multiple tutorials to help people get the data they need to utilize their tool: http://www.hammertap.com/webinars_and_workshops/

I'm going through these and will tell you all the new ideas I find. Just using the tool, or using eBay is worth your own education in this area - I won't be reporting on the common data we both already know, or the specifics of using eBay and setting up auctions. There are too many great books out there (as well as cheesy also-rans) which give you all this data.

Now for the new stuff ...

In this workshop, Long-Term Profits with Market Research and Product Sourcing, Jen Cano discusses some basics from her book "eBay Performance: Selling Success with Market Research and Product Sourcing". These are found in forums hosted by eBay for their community.

She talks here about a Turnover Principle, meaning that your market is constantly changing, and you need to be able to change with it. With few exceptions, you can't continue to just sell one or a few items and not eventually exhaust your market. Unless you sell food and have no competitors, you will have to be researching new products continually as part of your regular routine.

The turnover principle consists of three parts:

1. Research
2. Source
3. Sell

Three benefits she mentions for keeping these three points constantly in play:

• You focus on profit by being pro-actively seeking out new products (or revamping old ones) instead of reacting to unanticipated challenges.
• You have in-demand products in the market weekly, because you're phasing in new products as you phase out the old.
• Changes in demand don't surprise you - you'll know how to predict change and produce your buyers' needs and wants, having it ready for them.

Let's take these three turnover principle points one at a time:

1. Research - use HammerTap/Deep Analysis to find what sells, when, and how. This program can do some incredible things - right down to which keywords are in what high-selling items. And also will tell you if enhanced options (you pay for) have been associated with that item. Using an analysis program like this makes sure that you are always on top of changes and can review your existing items and phase out items where competition has become too extreme, or demand has slowed (snowboots in summer?). Research should be daily or weekly in your schedule.

2. Sourcing should be a regular part of your schedule. Finding new, lower priced, or improved service in your suppliers is a constant. When items get to be more common, your prices should drop from your supplier. Also, suppliers are in the same game of constantly finding new items or better rates from the manufacturers - so that they in turn can sell more, or phase them out when they don't sell as well anymore. So your sources should be improving and helping you with more discounts, or better rates on your dropshipping - or simply telling you that they have a hot new item which should be selling well for you. Always look to improve your sources.

3. Selling is something that you constantly work to improve - usually through bettering your copy or headlines - or simply by using different strategies for selling. Jen's recipe for this:

"Start out simple, by selling smaller, lower margin items.
Earn your customers quickly through loss leaders.
Once you have customers, please them beyond their wildest dreams!
Broaden your product mix.
Get into trends early and monitor their progress.
Up-sell, cross-sell, and add value."

In this, she has three selling strategies - which are time worn:

1. High Volume in listing success rates - high volume sales yield greater profit in the long run, even though profit per listing is less.
2. High Profit in average selling price - greater profits per sale will give you long run profits, even if your conversion rate is lower (fewer completed sales per number listed).
3. Balancing Profits versus Volume - going for the balance between lots of listings completing and the highest possible profit for each one.

Obviously, you can see how these work in various examples.
Wal-Mart and Dollar General are under the first. Stores on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills are in the second. Mid-range store chains like Target, JCPenney's, Walgreen's - these are in the middle tier of these. Even bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Border's and Amazon are in that middle tier.

Your own auctions might have these different strategies for each type of item.

• One-up items might be for best profit per sale. Especially collectibles. List these several times, even with reserves if needed.
• When you have bulk in something that a lot of people want, you might go for more repeating sales and have a higher percentage of completed auctions - and get a lot of subscribers for your list (who you can tell what new items are going up for auction...)
• If you can get a bulk (or small-bulk) amount of a generally higher-priced item that is selling good right now, you could use the best of both worlds and get the maximal profit that way.

Your strategy depends on what you're selling. And HammerTap allows you to simply determine which strategy to apply, based on the records they pull from eBay for you. But check out their tutorials (like the one this is based on, linked above) for the details on how to do this. Being able to quickly digest all this eBay data from a single database screne is much easier (and faster) than trying to study eBay data across their thousands of categories and millions of auctions.

Our use of this is to point out the three strategies which can be used on your own online marketing, regardless of what your niche is. I don't know that eBay data can or can't be used reliably outside of eBay itself. Certainly eBay buyers follow the trends and fads. But you can see how this principle above explains how regular brick-and-mortar sales work - which is the same basis for all online marketing.

Jen next tempts us with other interesting uses for HammerTap:

• Day and hour to begin and end your listing
• Type of listing to choose
• Starting prices which cause a bidding frenzy
• Listing length to capture interest and sales
• Successful title words
• Seasonal trends (you can even check last years trends)
• Size of market for the product
• Whether demand is rising or falling

But again - check out that forum linked above, plus the other links available on the HammerTap site.

Mimicking and Follow-The-Leader

You can learn a lot by doing what other leaders selling your products are doing. Check out their patterns of sales, in all characteristics: copy, start times, end times, pricing, features. By doing what they are doing (don't plagiarize) you can get similar results to theirs.

One caveat - they'll leave the market faster than you and start new products sooner. So you won't make their profits, that is until you learn how they do their stuff and start becoming a market leader yourself.

That requires homework. HammerTap will show you who the market leaders are - and then you can find out what they are selling, selling routinely, and what their completion rates are - how many auctions they post and how many actually finish. That homework will tell you whether you should get into that market at all.

Jen says in her next HammerTap forum that if over 50% of a market is occupied by newby, casual sellers, that market can be occupied profitably.

You want to perform better than average, which means you have to offer specific products and promote them with good headlines and copy.

To determine change in your market, you want to track how that market has been doing. While you could simply track this from week to week, you can also generate weekly reports from within HammerTap's database to see if the sales have been improving or declining. You aren't working with a month's average, but looking at each week by themselves. (And don't forget to check last year's sales trends of this type item to see what the seasonal sales are - but note that new items last year might not sell as well once they reach distribution peak and there is lots of competition for them.

The Product Life Cycle is briefly described as:

• Ascendant - new product, expensive to manufacture, bugs are being worked out, few people know about it.
• Peak - Lots of sales, cheaply produced, lots of distributors - this is where the bulk of sales are done.
• Declining - becomes a niche market instead of widespread. You can get stuck with pallets of goods which no one wants to buy. (Picture a lifetime supply of laundry detergent sitting in your garage.)

Notes on this description:

1. Products can go through this more than once. Especially some 20 years later when someone finds the "retro" look. Collectibles are examples of this - as well as Disney "re-releasing" their "classic" movies as a "limited-time offer".
2. The declining side is also a time to sell accessories or their particular battery. People have the product and now want the stuff to go with it - or can't find replacement parts anymore. There is a local tractor supply business who makes their money buying up old tractors, and then selling their parts all over the planet.
3. With marketing, especially to niches, you can revive the market product cycle - and maybe create a fad while you're at it.
4. A saturated market isn't the place to be. Low profit margins and it easily tips over into a declining market. The two profitable places to be are when the demand is ramping up (few competitors, even though the items are pricey) and the declining side (where you sell accessories and replacement parts - or replacement items).

Time you spend on Auctions - versus the rest of your life

I got a freebie "Interviews with Power Sellers" in the mail, on a CD. (Nice packaging.) When I started going through most of these, I found that they spend varying time on their production. Most over a 40 hour week, one at 60 hours.

Their problem, for the most part (I did find one who only spent 20 hours a week) was that they weren't working efficiently. Sourcing for most of these were through the time-consuming work of attending auctions, garage sales, and clearances. They did no real research through a program like HammerTap and so couldn't work efficiently. Consequently, most were running at about 50% sales ratio. Now, as I noted above, you can definately be profitable at this.

BUT - you can't get time spent back.

My ideal is to replace my part-time day job with my part-time (20 hour's) eBay sales job. And make 2 or 3 times as much or more. The idea here is to enjoy what I'm doing and then get onto something else I enjoy doing. Compartment my week so that I never get "burnt out" on anything, but can move from one to another during the week, or during specific times during the day.

I farm in the morning currently, spend the afternoon and evening on research and studies, then do a couple of 10-hour days on my day job (which just pays my bills). My current research is moving me over into understanding how auction sales works, which will build up my back end (of necessity) and move me over into making profits from all my research and writing.

While I do 60-70 hour weeks, I like everything except the day job. And that's changing.

Here is the reason for the Online Millionaire Plan - move yourself over into control over your own life, making the money you want to buy the things and help the people around you - just the way you want to. The underlying foundation of this is to return choice to your life, over your life. Quit enabling people to control and chose for you, over you. Start living for yourself.

You see, giving up control completely is slavery. Giving up control partially runs the gamut of Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and a whole lot of other -ism's. Regaining maximum control doesn't mean complete capitalism either - but it will mean that you are deciding for yourself within the data and choices you have about what you are going to do with your life and what world you are going to create around you.

- - - -

And so this blog post ends for today.

I'm starting to see the end of my theoretical studies and will probably post some items for sale this week, with auctions that end sometime next week or this coming weekend (depending on what the best days are for these items). Once I get my feet really wet with what I have around the house, I'll probably jump in with Wholesale Brands and start drop-shipping away - small at first and then build up my profit (reinvesting this) to buy larger items with bigger profit margins.

But a few more tutorials to finish tonight and we'll see what tomorrow brings...

Basics of an eBay Online Millionaire Plan

Why use eBay to as a key starting point for an Online Millionaire Plan?
Because it's an established community of buyers and sellers. Almost all the bugs have been worked out, saving those which scammers and spammers have recently flocked to.

Means you can easily and quickly get established with a profitable base, for the low entry cost and know-how every work-from-home Online Millionaire is starting out with. That's why more millionaires are being made through online or online-related venues than brick-and-mortar - low entry costs.

And, where you start with a profitable business, you can then leverage that positive cash flow into other venues. Also, this could replace your day job so that you can then spend more time (with less stress) perfecting other marketing approaches.

I "eat my own dogfood" - with relish.

This hit me when I posted a comment to someone's blog that social marketing is a oxymoron, since you can't build a market, only promote and find unqualified leads through social networks. It's the nature of the "beast". I stated there that anyone looking for sales should go where there is an active sales community, one full of buyers, like eBay.

That was a haunting comment. It was one area of making an online fortune which I hadn't investigated. A lot of that due to the other venues being exclusively concerned with making it on their own, another that auctions hadn't "been my thing," since they seemed filled with a lot of work in order to make any money - the cost-benefit ratio seemed a bit low for what I had to do in order to earn money in that area.

However, when I started looking for data in this area, I found that there was a great deal more data about this than just going to yard sales and putting stuff up for auction - hoping it would sell big. And by cursory investigation of eBay, I saw that a great deal of auctions were completing with nothing bought. You pay your 35 cents and takes your chances.

Auction basics: buy low and sell to the highest bidder - profitably.

Interestingly, I had actually started this research years ago when I stumbled upon a bootleg copy of "Deep Analysis". Like most bootleg copies, it was dated and didn't run all that well. Promising, but not ready for prime time. However, during the years, this had matured into an intensely viable research tool for finding hot areas where there were high numbers of bidders for certain items routinely. In short, you could find profitable "buzz niches" where sales were brisk and hugely profitable.

But where to get these products cheaply and in volume?

While Deep Analysis matured, another company, called WorldWide Brands, had grown from the itch that its founder, Chris Malta had to scratch. You see, Chris realized that his highest profits would be to buy in bulk and sell individually. Simple. Basic to all commerce. However, he had difficulty in finding wholesalers who wanted to work with individual eBay sellers. Either they didn't understand the market possible through affiliates selling their products directly through eBay, or didn't understand the scope of eBay - or were being represented by scam artists, who were simply out to make a buck.

What Chris did was to find the real manufacturers for these items (not the corporate brand names which are on the label) and then contacting those manufacturers for a list of wholesalers they recommended. By contacting those wholesalers, he was able to piece together a list of companies who would actually work with individual eBay sellers.

Chris's work continued, as it was personally profitable to him - but also because he had found a niche others appreciated: validated sources for bulk wholesale items. And so his company now maintains the largest database of its kind in the world - some 9,000 (yes, that's 9 thousand) companies willing to sell directly to individuals so they can re-sell them on eBay.

You might now be asking yourself, "but those pallets of goods arrived on my front step and I filled my garage with these - great. What if the market tanks? Not to mention the fact that I still have to package and ship these by hand."

Ok, we've covered that slightly above with Deep Analysis - research before your buy. But Chris also had that same problem and worked around it with a couple of solutions:

• He found companies which would drop-ship your item directly to the customer with your name on the package. You sell it on eBay, contact the company, they ship.
• He worked with the larger companies to create arrangements where you could buy partial pallet of goods (or just a single pallet instead of twenty). So you can start small and keep on top of the market as it changes, while your overhead (time and money) of shipping is kept low.

Chris Malta's Worldwide Brands isn't the only company like this out there - but it is by far the biggest, well worth their 0ne-time fee for access.

Ok, back to our story of the new eBay Online Millionaire:

Now, I'm going to tell you in the next few posts, of my own experience with this area. I've already published several books on becoming an online millionaire, but have also stated that all this data needed to be tested and verified. I know that the people I've studied had become millionaires through using this data - and either made their millions through the Internet, or added more millions to those they already had.

But most of these didn't really leave a viable blueprint behind them of how to make your own millions.

And that's where my own frustration (at this point, I'm still working on my first million - and still need that day job) lead to my taking a great leap of faith.

I signed up with a company to coach me on how to become a PowerSeller on eBay. Name: Bright Builders. You can check them and WorldWide Brands out on the Internet and find they are both represented far more highly than any detractor can throw mud their way.

The reason I'm blogging as I go is for several reasons:

1. To tell you all this story as it unfolds - and a good story is worth retelling.
2. To add to my research on An Online Millionaire Plan - and I've always blogged my research as I go.
3. Teaching others is one of the most effective ways of learning and retaining new data.

At this juncture, my first coaching session is still over a week away. Too long for my taste.

Since I got access to their website, I started clicking away, downloading everything I could, and digesting all this stuff - comparing it to other data I'd already accumulated in my few years of research into online marketing.

Some data started dropping out immediately.

Napoleon Hill enters, stage left.

I started my whole online marketing research from the point of needing to sell my own published works. And the first of these was "Go Thunk Yourself!" self help techniques. That book boiled down the entire genre of self help into a study of a double-handful of highly successful authors. It turned out they were all running on the same underlying system of self help.

How this ties into eBay Online Millionaire planning? Hill starts out his "Think and Grow Rich" by requiring the reader develop a "BURNING DESIRE". In the coach-speak of Bright Builders, this becomes "Business Vision Statement". Same basic points. You figure out what you want to achieve, write it down in detail - in the past tense, as if you've already accomplished it - and then read this over 2 to 3 times daily so that you constantly hold this in front of you.

Get a copy of "Think and Grow Rich" and read this chapter. See if I don't speak sooth here. While you're at it, take a gander at the remaining ones and see if they don't also apply exactly to anyone starting an ecommerce business.

Reprogramming yourself for entrepreneurial success

And this brings up the next point. You have been trained through public school systems and all your family contacts to be an "employee" - all of your life up to this point. And the ads and programs on TV, radio, "news"papers and other sources all tend to confirm this view. Your highest achievement is to become a junior partner with a corner office. Right.

How about working any hours you choose, on whatever you like to do? And make money hand-over-fist at it?

Well, you're going to have to change that programming that we've all swallowed. This, again, brings up self-help books, tapes, videos, etc. to change your habitual thoughts in this area.

Now any habits, especially mental ones, can be changed in about 30 days - if you constantly re-inforce the new idea daily by repetition. Some people call this affirmation, others used to call it "auto-suggestion". Both have their roots in antiquity, but were most popular with Emile Coue' during the early 1900's. And fell out of favor because people didn't understand why they had to do what they did - and what underlying laws made this work.

While I've gone over this in some detail in my books, Napoleon Hill covers the essentials in his book above.

The simplicity is that you have to turn off sources of data which tell you constantly to remain an employee and surround yourself with new sources that tell you how competent you are as an entrepreneur. The new sources replace the old sources. In about 30 days, you'll start seeing the changes in you take hold. And you will also see some interesting synchronicities happen around you, as your life begins to change to reflect your new attitudes.

This happens because your thoughts and opinions create the world around you. As you change your chronic thought patterns, new opportunities present themselves and you start looking for them - and are prepared to take advantage of them as they show up. (Practically, a lot of these opportunities have always been around, but you never decided to pick up that magazine, or click that link.)

You are going to want to turn off the TV and start listening to MP3's or inspirational CD's on your daily commute instead of the radio or pop music. Keep a copy of an inspirational book or article to hand at the office, for times when you are put on hold or during your breaks. And if you get to listen to podcasts at work, then fill it with such recordings.

Listen to these recordings over and over. You learn with repetition, especially when you come back to it after a time away from it. Eventually, you'll find the datums in these recordings start to prompt you with solutions - even if you never learn the whole recording verbatim. Getting the concept and understanding of it is the way to really learn anything - not just the rote words.

End Notes

Ok, that's enough for today. There are a lot of technical details in this and I'll be going over these in future posts. They all relate to brick-and-mortar basics, most of which I've covered in the earlier posts on my blogs, but have also published in the first sections of An Online Millionaire Plan.

Here's to all of us creating the best luck possible! Cheers - and - Good Hunting!

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