- First of all, change your buying habits.
Instead of driving to the most local mall to buy
some toner for your printer or whatever, buy it off eBay.
You want some paper?
Buy it off eBay.
Then start selling some stuff.
Start selling some second-hand stuff,
lying around collecting dust.
Most eBay sellers started that way,
selling some secondhand junk lying around, collecting dust.
So, yes increase your feedback score by buying and selling.
Change your buying habits.
It's not very hard.
Next thing is, if you're going to talk to wholesalers,
one of the first things they're going to do is say,
in Australia they going to say, What's your ABN number?
And it's their kind of way of sorting out
are you just a private seller, or are you a real seller?
So, they're going to ask you for an ABN number.
And of course it's a very simple thing,
they're free from the ATO and you get instant approval.
I've talked about hurdles before.
So many people won't pass this hurdle,
and I'll go to them six months later, I'll say,
Have you got your ABN number?
No, I haven't got it yet.
Why?
It's, free, instant approval.
What's the problem?
But so many people won't do it.
- [Student] You don't need that
for a hobby account though, do you?
- Only if you want to talk to wholesalers.
- [Student] Oh, wholesalers, sorry.
- Yep.
- [Female Student] Do you need to be an
Australian citizen to get it, or?
- I'll refer to the accountant over here.
- [Accountant] It's better to be, put it that way.
One of the things to get an ABN faster,
is they'll ask you for a tax file number,
because then they can identify you.
If they can't, then the other option is to ring up
the tax office and potentially quote your passport,
and then they can identify you that way.
Because if it's all about identifying you with ABNs.
- [Man] You just need to be a resident
for tax purposes I think.
- [Woman] Yeah, as long as you have
the tax file number it's alright, I guess.
- [Accountant] If you have a tax file number,
you should be fine, yeah.
- [Woman] I was a New Zealand citizen not Australian,
but I was offered an ABN.
Yeah, I do have a tax file number.
- Thanks again, cheers.
Alright, cool.
Alright, so, everyone when I started,
everyone gets, it's got seller limits.
Everyone faces this when you start off these days.
eBay allows you to list X amount of items, it's only around
two and a half thousand dollars you can list.
Now, everyone starts at the beginning
and it's reviewed on the 20th of each month,
if you get hit this limit,
you have two ways of getting around it.
You sell more stuff, and they'll review it
and raise it, or you ring them up.
Now, the two and a half limit is not two and a half selling.
It's actually listing.
So if you've got, say these to sell,
and you're going to sell them for say, a hundred dollars,
you're allowed to list 25 of them at a time,
then you'll hit your limit.
So I would say to get around that, don't list 25,
list 10 then you've only gobbled up a thousand dollars
of your limit.
And if you've already got another account that's got, say,
10, a hundred, whatever-thousand limit on it, ring up eBay,
they'll connect the two together
and they'll lift your limits
and they'll match the two together.
So reduce the quantity, call eBay, and yes,
if you have a business name, they'll normally
give you a higher limit straight away and also ring them up.
Okay, so if you want to know more about selling limits,
like I said earlier on,
things like this I'm not going to delve right down
because I would be spending forever tonight on this stuff.
So if you want to know more, there's a link
and these slides are available of course,
so just go to the link.
Okay, so, fees.
Now, eBay fees.
There's a listing fee, even though when you start
as a private seller, you're allowed 40 free listings.
When you sign up for a basic store which'll cost $25
a month, you can get 600 free listings
and they have another one which is 1,500,
if this is a feature store, you get 1,500 listings
and it goes up from there.
So, oh there you go.
I wish I could double up, so it's 40 for private seller,
600 for basic store, 1,500 for a featured store,
and 250,000 for an anchor store.
Final value fee is 6% to 10.9%,
based on what store level you have
and it's also different categories.
So, okay, I'm not going to get into depth about that.
It's all there on a PDF.
And get to know eBay fee in Australia.
If you just Google eBay fee in Australia,
it'll show you more.
Yeah?
- [Student] Free listings, is that at any one time?
- Per month.
- [Student] You list 40, and one sells
and you replace it, does that still count?
- Well, yeah, if it's a new item, you keep selling
the same item over and over.
Okay, so PayPal fees starts off at $0 to $2,500 a month.
That's 2.6% plus 30%.
Then it goes all the way up to $150,000,
which gets down to 1.1% and everything in between.
So we use a rule of thumb, when we're looking at items
to work out fees, we use a rule of thumb of 10%.
So it's just a rule of thumb which is rough, wrong,
but it's just a rule of thumb.
Then of course calculate your shipping costs
to your customers, unless you've got free shipping.
We'll get more into that tonight and also packing materials.
So, here's a summary of how to build a million,
or multi-million dollar, eBay business.
You research products, you list the product,
you optimize the listing, you automate the process,
and then you tune it after 30 days, and then you repeat.
In a nutshell, that's it.
And we're going to tonight go into each one
of those parts in more depth.
So, most people when they start off in this business,
they look at what we call the BSS Strategy,
the Best Sellers Strategy.
And everyone zooms in and focuses and tries
to find out what the top-selling items are on eBay or Amazon
and then they discover they're normal things like iPads,
or iPhone accessories, USB cables,
all that cheap stuff because they look at their criteria
and most people when they start off they come up
with their own criteria which is normally,
has to be something really cheap,
has to sell well,
it's got to be small...
That's pretty much the criteria.
So they go and focus on--
Now the downside of the strategy is...
best selling is normally always the lowest margin
because it's got the most competitors.
And it's got another problem that you normally have
to buy the most of these items
to compete because it's got such low margins,
so many people are buying it.
You've got to go and you've got to hire what they call MOQ,
which is Minimum Order Quantity.
So most people booked courses just focused on
the BSS strategy, so tonight I'm going
to show you other things that we do
which gets away from the BSS strategy.
So what would you rather sell?
This item which sells for $2.58 and how much profit
could you make on that?
Or this item for instance, when you found that it,
it was making just over $20 grand in 90 days profit.
In case you don't what it is, it's a portable shampoo basin.
Now most people when they start, they'll avoid
things like this because it's big.
Big I'll tell you now, the bigger it is,
the less competition on average, the higher the profit.
We love expensive big things.
It's got way less competition because
Alright, so the difference between a small online business
and a large one of course is how many
products you've got listed.
So for people who haven't seen this slide before,
I look at every leaf as a product, because if we only do
new products, every product sells over and over again.
So every leaf is basically a business in itself
because it's continually selling over and over again.
So the more leafs you've got the more products
you've got the bigger your business.
Now what happens, though, so many people start off,
and they'll build this, and they'll go, Ah, it's only
making $400 a month, or $1000 a month or whatever.
This is no good.
Well, why are you stopping?
And the reason that they hit this limit
is normally because they do not outsource.
And I tell you now if you want to go from six inches
to seven, you're not going to do it unless you outsource.
Okay, I know some people are going to argue with me
and say, I know someone who didn't, well good on you.
On the law of averages, you've got to outsource.
You've got to outsource your labor because you'll hit
a limit, there's only so many hours in a day.
If you have kids and family and you want
to have a life, you've got to outsource.
You can buy an hour of life for $1, $2 an hour.
One or two bucks you can buy a whole hour of life.
- [Student] That outsource question, or that comment,
I've looked online and had a chat
in the last month or so with a few individuals
and I've found it'd be about $10 US a month.
So you can definitely find them for a couple bucks a month.
- Totally, 100%.
- [Female Student] What is it that you can get
outsourced though?
- Everything.
Business should run totally without you.
If you can do the task, record your script
and give it to someone else.
- [Student] Where do you find them though?
- Oh we're going to get that tonight.
So when we first started off outsourcing, I used a
company in the Philippines in Cebu called SupportSave.
And I used to pay my VAs $495 US, each, for a 40 hour week.
But the more you do it the better you get.
I've been outsourcing stuff now for about 15 years.
Anyway, we'll get to that.
So, many streams make a river.
So the more products you've got, honestly,
the more money you'll make.
And the way to do it, of course, leverage your time.
So, before we get to this, this is one guy who
completely changed my business of course, Warren Buffet.
I think he's currently the third richest guy on the planet.
He would be the richest if he hadn't
given away so much of his money.
He buys businesses, and buys shares in businesses,
and sometimes sells but normally he just buys and holds.
When he does, he doesn't get caught in the .com boom,
he doesn't buy start up companies, he just buys
businesses that he understands like Coca-Cola, etc.
We can do the same methodology with eBay and Amazon.
Instead of just finding start up products and going,
Oh I think this will do really well,
just sell proven products.
Way less risk.
So before we did that, Wednesday was our ordering day.
We'd go through all these products and we'd go,
Yeah, we think that'll do pretty well,
and we got some great home runs,
but we also took a bath on other products.
Then when we stopped doing that, our products grew much
better because we weren't taking a bath on some products.
So what I'm going to do tonight is talk
about seller research instead of product research.
Finding sellers, find the top selling items.
It's over ten times faster to do product research
when you do seller research.
So you can either be a tester, it's your choice,
it's your business, you can do whatever you like.
So you can be a tester or you can sell proven products.
So the first rule of business of course is only
sell what the market wants.
What we're thinking the market wants is irrelevant.
It's what the market wants, the market decides,
and they're the ones that rule.
It's not what I think is right, it's not what anyone here
thinks is right, it's what the market thinks is right.
So if you only sell proven products,
the market's already sold it for you.
And we've got the technology, Ill show you tonight,
you don't need to pay, buy any software,
you can do it all for free as I show you tonight.
So, for example, I'm always amazed
at the quality of these screens this place has got,
it's staggeringly good quality.
So anything you want to know the price of,
like stainless steel straws,
put it into the search box on eBay,
hit search, then click sold items
and it shows you the price they sell for.
Cause of course on eBay,
one thing is how much something's selling for
and then how much something is sold for
is two totally different things
because a lot of people say,
it's on eBay for this, it's selling for this.
Well are they selling, have they sold or are they selling?
Two different things, if you click the sold items button,
all the prices turn green,
which means they've actually sold.
And it'll show the date they sold,
and you can obviously see the amount.
So you can see how much anything is selling for
just by doing that.
Now, next thing you can also do,
is when you see something that's already sold multiple times
like this item, as an example has sold 2169 times,
that's actually a hyperlink,
and what that means, normally a hyperlink is blue
with a line under it, means you can click on it,
it's a clickable link.
If you click on that 2169, bingo,
you can now see exactly the price they sold,
the date and time they sold.
So now you can calculate the velocity
by how many items are sold on any item on eBay
in any country.
And this'll show you for 90 days
every single sellings there are, yep?
- [Audience Member] I was actually having a look
at an auction on eBay and it said like 10 sold
and I clicked through and there were only two items there,
does that mean the other eight were older than 90 days?
- Correct.
So, how to find any eBay sellers top selling items,
so you can go and find,
look at any eBay site on the whole planet,
and eBay is in 37 different countries
and you can look up any seller
and find their top selling items, this is how you do it.
So anyone who has done the
drop shipping stuff with me before,
you'll know this is the column C.
So, over here it says advanced,
and when you click on advanced,
then you click on by seller,
put the name of the eBay seller here, hit search, bingo,
now it shows all the items
that seller has got listed right now.
One more step, you go and click sold listings,
now you can see every item that the seller has sold
in the last 90 days.
So the price it sold for and the date,
and of course you can go into each one of those
and see exactly how many times each one of those has sold.
The next thing we do is we sort by highest price first,
cause we want to care the most about the most expensive items,
cause it's generally got the most profit.
So sort by highest price first and then bingo,
you've got all the information you want about any seller,
all for free, any questions on that?
- [Audience Member] How do you know what to search?
Which name of the, what's good name to put in there?
- Okay, tonight I'm going to go through
how to choose some power keywords
and then you can just use any of those keywords.
So you can put in any keyword you want into eBay,
I'll talk about this, how to get those keywords yourself,
people put solar power, generator whatever your interests
and you'll see all the sellers
and then every time you see an item being sold,
you can see the eBay name.
But if you look at any eBay item,
it's got the name on there.
So, Ill get to that tonight, the power keywords, yep?
- [Audience Member] How do you know the seller
is a drop shipper or not?
- How?
I'm not going to go into all about drop shipping tonight,
We did drop shipping not this one the last one before,
I just don't have time to go right through that.
But you don't unless you do some research.
Okay, so sort by highest price first I've done that,
record all items which have sold more than twice
in the last 30 days.
So these are the items that you want to look at yourself
as possibly listing.
Any item that's sold twice or more for drop shipping,
for those who don't know what drop shipping is,
I'll get into drop shipping shortly and explain it.
For importing we want to see at least 15 sales per month
for the last 90 days.
I'll get to what the difference is shortly.
So, how to find overseas suppliers, simple,
you go to Alibaba.com, put what you want in there,
stainless steel drinking straws, whatever, hit search
and you can find suppliers all over the planet
Yes?
- [Audience Member] Has Alibaba
kind of got the monopoly on this whole side of things,
is there any other competitor?
- There's plenty, we only use Alibaba
because Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined.
- [Accountant] There's DHK.
- Yeah, I'm going to get to those tonight
so there's many of them so just choose whatever one you like
and life doesn't reward us for being a jack of all trades,
life rewards us for what we master,
so just choose one,
for me if it's not on Alibaba I'm scared,
why aren't you on Alibaba when Alibaba is the biggest.
For those who don't know,
Alibaba is owned by a guy called Jack Ma,
it's based in China but Alibaba is all over the planet,
so you don't just have to buy it from China,
you can buy it from every other country,
you can also sell from Australia.
There's a huge opportunity for us in Australia
to sell back to places like China,
so if you've got access to things like a pack of wool,
honey, macadamia nuts, baby formula, whatever,
you can sell it back to Asia and they love it,
so Alibaba's all over the planet so put in that search box
what you want, hit search, bingo, find it,
and that's how you find your suppliers for importing.
So, you got a choice though,
you can either pre-purchase inventory
or you can use virtual inventories.
So when you list something on eBay,
you can either purchase the items first,
that's called pre-purchasing,
or you can drop ship,
which means that you list items, and then when they sell,
you get paid, and then you order it from the supplier
and the supplier ships it direct to your customer,
and it's your choice.
Yep, at the back?
- [Audience Member] What forum are you using
to sell to the Chinese?
- Alibaba.
Like tonight, you can go and set up an account on Alibaba
right now.
Yep?
- [Audience Member] What are the risks
in using drop shipping
if the supplier doesn't supply the product?
- We'll get through that tonight,
I'm going to give a little bit on drop shipping tonight.
So when you pre-purchase though, most people on average,
you need to spend around 30 to 40k
of pre-purchasing inventory upfront
to generate $1000 a week profit.
And the reason why is because when you order something
from, say, China you got to pay deposit,
they make the product,
then they send it to a freight forwarder,
then it gets shipped to Australia,
then you get it through customs, then you release,
and then you list it on eBay, you sell it,
you put the money in the bank, and then you reorder,
it's called a stock turn.
Now that's normally the figure you'd need.
Now I know there's people out there that will say,
oh I know someone who did it for far less than that,
sure, there's always the gold nuggets
at the end of the rainbow out there,
but we got to look at the reality
and look at the law of averages.
On average, you need to spend 30 to 40k
to generate a thousand bucks.
So someone comes to me and says,
oh Neil, I want to leave work, I want to do importing full time,
I'll say how much you want to make in a week and I'll ask them
how much have you got to invest in inventory.
If they say like five grand, forget it,
it's just not going to work,
you just can't generate enough cash.
So, you can do either.
So when you start off on eBay from scratch,
you normally start off by selling
some used items lying around collecting dust,
everyone's got 'em, then you can purchase some used items
from picking and flipping.
Picking is when you go to things like garage sales,
you pick items, you often bundle them
so how much for these 10 items, then you take them home,
you unbundle them and you list each individual item.
There's flipping, drop shipping which I'm going to touch on,
I'm going to talk about more in a second.
There's importing, like from China wherever.
Private labeling I'll talk about tonight as well.
There's a Shopify store,
I think I've answered the Shopify store question,
unless anyone else wants to know more about it.
Your website, if you want to have a website.
Sell on Amazon of course.
You can sell off of niches which I've talked about.