NetBrowser07

1. If you sell on Amazon, does typically you ship it yourself or send it to Amazon (thereby using Fulfillment by Amazon)? I know Amazon offers both options.


2. If you do ship it yourself, what do you use for the return address? Do you enter you address or just use a name?


Regards


Mods: Please merge this into the appropriate thread (if one exists).

lovenola

I've sold on Amazon for about 5 years now, about 100 or so transactions a month. I have never let Amazon ship my stuff, because I looked into their terms about inventory management and found them not to my liking.

I use my address as the return - you really should in case there is a problem and someone has to make a return.

hitman1420

How much time does that take? I would have thought giving everything to Amazon and letting them do all the work would be much less stressful. Whereas when you do your own selling, you have to be constantly on top of things.

kn9ght

Have you ever sold on ebay? How much do you have to pay for fees on Amazon? I just want to compare between the 2, currently I have to pay roughly 6-8% (paypal+ebay) fee + shipping for my listings.

kxc262

Fee list for Amazon. It is much higher than eBay in my experience.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custom...nodeId=1161240

Worst case, eBay charges 10% final value fee and Paypal = 2.9% of payment + $0.30 per transaction.

Astrophsx

Didn't FrequentMiler do something on this?

rdover1

My rules of thumb for this:
You need to buy at least 30% under common sales price of an item to come out above water with fulfillment by Amazon when all the costs are added in.
It is a huge time sink as a way to do MS.

miniaturekat

I sell a lot on Amazon. To answer your original question:
1 - I ship it myself. I drive by a USPS and a UPS store every day. There is no additional commute time for me to ship items I sell.
2 - I use my own address.

I tried eBay, didn't care for it. For me I want this to take up as little time as possible while still generating miles. Just as a point of reference, I generate about 30k/month re-selling with an investment of 3-5 hours a week - you can do more or less depending on the amount of effort you want to put in. For me 5 hours is about my upper limit since I've already got a full-time job. But if you're in college or generally unencumbered by full-time employment you can generate a significant amount of miles/points by reselling.

I sold a number of items on eBay where someone won the auction and then simply never paid for it. Then I had to re-list it, wait another 3/5/7 days, and try again. I'd estimate that 10% of the auctions ended this way. Amazon's fee structure is higher, but it's a known commodity. I set a price for an item, I can see what others are selling it for, and I can adjust it any time I want. An order doesn't actually come to me until someone has paid for it, so that headache is eliminated by selling through Amazon.

As for shipping, your other option is to drop-ship, where you list the item on Amazon and then when someone buys it you just order it from a shopping portal via your retailer of choice. Although this reduces fees, there are some drawbacks
- Your completely at the mercy of the retailer in terms of getting your item shipped. If your retailer takes a week to ship something, your Amazon customer will be unhappy (wouldn't you)
- Returns/exchanges are more complicated
- Some retailers don't like you doing this
- Some Amazon customers will be unhappy when they realize what you just did, realizing that they could have bought it at the same discount you received.

I would agree with rdover in that you generally need to be purchasing your item at around 30% under common retail to not lose money per transaction.

For example, say you want to re-sell widgets. If you take a widgetthat normally sells for $100 on Amazon, you need to buy it for $70.
Purchased for $70 + tax (8% ?) = $75.60
In order to sell it quickly, you sell it for $95
Amazon also charges the customer $6.99 shipping on widgets
So the item sold for $101.99 to the customer
Amazon takes, we'll say 15%, on widgets. You get $101.99 * 85% = 86.69
You still have to ship it, which we'll ballpark at $10
So, even though you bought it for $30 under retail, you paid $85.60 (75.60 + $10 shipping) and got $86.69. So for all your research and hard work you just got $1.09. Hopefully the miles you got made it worthwhile

miniaturekat

Oh, and one last lesson I've learned. I was disappointed to learn that, like most things in life, re-selling for miles isn't really 'free'. You're still investing your time.

The amount of miles you'll get out of it are commensurate with the amount of time you put in. As you do more research on what sells for how much, which stores offer discounts, etc. you'll become much better at re-selling.

tys90

I use Amazon FBA just for the time savings. They are definitely buyer friendly so there are a number of things you can get screwed on but eBay has it's own set of problems as well.

Since you can ship stuff to Amazon whenever, not just when you sell something, I let my products pile up then just schedule a UPS pickup. Costs $8-10 but is well worth the trouble, especially when I can't get everything to the UPS store in one trip.

As long as I break even on $$, the extra points/miles make up for it. Sure I could make some money if I went the eBay route and shipped stuff myself but that's a HUGE pain.

Astrophsx

I think what I didn't think about is taking returns and when taking returns what kind of shape the goods are returned in. That's also a good point about the amount of time invested in selling.

hitman1420

Excellent post, thank you for taking the time to write that. Do you have any experience on drop-shipping? I've heard so much about it.

miniaturekat

I used to drop-ship exclusively when I started out reselling, but I only rarely drop-ship nowadays.

So one of the merchants I do still drop ship with is Sears, because they tend to ship stuff pretty quickly. I won't tell you what I re-sell because I don't want to invite the competition, but there's plenty of stuff at Sears to re-sell effectively.

So when you drop-ship it, it basically breaks down like this:
- You have product X listed on Amazon. You determine how many you have to see and what price you're selling them for.
- Customer comes and buys a product X from you on Amazon
- Amazon sends you a notification via e-mail that customer bought a product X and that you have a few days to ship it to them. Important note: at this point you don't receive any money from the sale. You receive the money to your Amazon account once you confirm shipment.
- You go in and buy the item, say from Sears. Use your account, but you ship it to the person who bought it from you on Amazon
- When Sears sends you an e-mail that the item has shipped, you go in to Amazon and confirm the shipment on the same page

So in order to drop ship successfully, you:
- Need to find a product that you can buy from a retailer for 20-30% less than it retails for on Amazon.
- Need to find a merchant that ships out pretty quickly. If your merchant of choice takes 4-5 days to ship stuff then the whole equation falls apart. If you take too long to ship stuff it hurts your Amazon seller rating. seller rating goes to low, your account gets suspended.
- Taking too long to ship stuff also upsets customers. Upset customers leave bad feedback. Bad feedback is not only a deterrent to future customers, but also lowers your amazon seller rating.
- Need to find a product that doesn't change in price too often, in either direction. I've had a couple products where the price dropped across the board and I had trouble selling them (since everyone else was getting it cheaper as well it dropped all the other sellers' prices on Amazon). I've also had items whose price went up across the board. One morning it went up for everyone - resellers, suppliers, etc - and people bought a couple of these (~$400 item) from me. Unfortunately they bought the item after it went up in price but before I had a chance to sell them. So I could either cancel their orders (hurts your amazon seller rating) or lose money on the transaction.
- Lastly, and hopefully this is obvious, but you need to find a retailer that offers enough points to make doing all this worthwhile. I chose Sears because they frequently are offered at bonus pts/miles through the portals. they're at 6x right now on the Southwest portal, which is a lot for general merchandise retailer (Walmart and Target pretty much stay at 1/2x by comparison).

so what else? It's worth noting that there are some drawbacks to reselling by drop-shipping. Time is a major factor. It takes time to learn to do this well. Learn what products work, which don't. Which retailers work for this, which don't. How much time do you have to learn to do this? Also, in addition to a few of the drawbacks above, the other big one is dealing with customers. I hate to say this, but a certain percentage of the population is simply difficult to deal with. They do dumb things, have unrealistic expectations, try products and ask for a refund, or generally expect you to work magic for them in some shape or form. If I can offer two of my favorites from portal re-selling this year:

First one - I had an item (in stock, not drop shipped). Customer bought it on Amazon, Amazon sends me the 'sold, ship now' email. No problem. I ship it to the address I was given. A week goes by after I had already shipped the item, and the customer sends me a note to let me know that they moved, and actually need it shipped to an entirely different address in a different city than what's on their Amazon profile. Let that sink in for a minute - a full week after I had already shipped their item they ask for it to be shipped to a different address. I check, and the product was delivered to the address they had on file a couple days after I shipped it. I explain this to them and tell them that, regretfully, there's nothing I can do since I sent and it was delivered to the address I was given. so rather than chalk this up as their own mistake they file an A-Z claim against me with Amazon.

Second - Customer buys an item, I ship it to them. A week or so goes by and the customer sends me a note that says they want to return the item for a refund. I say OK, here's the policy - unopened is a full refund, opened item is a 20% restocking fee. (FWIW this is actually more generous than the default Amazon return policy). They say "OK, no problem, item wasn't opened. I authorize the return and they ship the product back to me. I see it and immediately laugh - the shipping box is COVERED in duck tape. I mean probably 20' of duck tape on it. I pick the box up and hear rattling - never a good sign. I open the shipping box and the product box has clearly been opened and very clumsily re-packaged/re-taped. I e-mail the customer back and note that, despite what they said, the item was clearly opened and awkwardly re-packaged. I ask how we could amicably work it out and was thinking maybe a 10% restocking fee, split the difference since the item was opened but unused. Rather than trying to reach an agreement at this point, the customer left me 1 star and filed an A-Z claim against me.

I mention these two because they illustrate that portal reselling isn't quite as easy simply drop shipping or re-shipping items. Amazon customers are just regular people and unfortunately a certain percentage of them are idiots, just like the population at large.

alright, this is turning into a novella, I'll stop

hitman1420

Not at all! I loved reading through all that. I had considered drop shipping, but the way you outlined it seems so well-laid out. I did not even think of going through a portal to maximize mileage, that makes this seem all the more attractive.

Although yes, I could see how dealing with the general population would be quite annoying at times!

About how many items were you selling a month by drop-shipping if you recall? I assume you were focusing on only 1 item? Or were you doing multiple items?

miniaturekat

When I was exclusively drop-shipping I kept to about 4-5 items.

Now that I buy/receive/sell/ship I do about 9-10.