I blog about it over at Flipping a Dollar, but I’m trying to double my profits from last year.
The hardest part for me is actually listing items. I’ll take pictures, get them stored away, but then they’ll sit waiting to get listed. And this is so completely stupid since that’s the only way I’ll make money!
Regardless, I’ve integrated my eBay and Amazon “you listed something” e-mails with Beeminder using Zapier. I’m trying to list 15 items a week.
Really love the automation fact since it will force me to actually list the items. On top of that, I’m using guilt by having the road on my blog’s side bar.
Holy crap, this is such a beautiful case study in so many ways! Sidebar widgets for social accountability, Zapier automation, and it’s kind of the equivalent of our UVI goal applied to your side business.
(I kind of want to edit your title though so it’s less likely to get caught by spam filters (including mental spam filters where one’s eyes pass over things with “eBay!” and “profits!” (: – kind of like banner blindness).)
LOL about the title. I know, I try to have generic titles but I then second guess my SEO. I’m really an amateur in that arena.
Most of the time, I write my post and then figure out a title using the most common words. Work was in there, so I tried to figure out a non-spammy way to throw it into the title. Apparently, I did not succeed…
Yeah, I guess I forgot my audience. My blog readers like to see real numbers and hard goals, so it’s weird for me to be so generic. Either way, hopefully this works out!
I like your goals, dollarflipper, even if I’m not into reselling as such myself (I do list household stuff that we no longer need though).
Anyway, this tickled my fancy a bit since I just (an hour ago) read about some local[1] students that are startup’ing with an advertising app (iPhone only for the moment, but soon coming to Android - https://itunes.apple.com/app/id948050708) called ‘Tise’. [2]
They got their idea from a recent popularity of local buy-and-sell groups on Facebook, at least around here - I have no idea if it is common over there - and the point with the app is to make it Instagram-easy to create new ads that you can share. Edit: It should be noted that just creating an ad, will add it to their listing, whereas sharing it to other services is something that comes after (or possibly automatically).
So the ideas that I thought you may be interested in pursuing dollarflipper (or laugh at and ignore) are
Use Tise (or not) and use Facebook groups or other additional sales channels (I can see that administration overhead may make it less desirable)
Get in touch of with the developers of Tise as a potential heavy user to help them shape the app for your use cases - maybe that means integrations with eBay or Amazon or similar
Is it so that eBay and Amazon really don’t have apps that make listing of items exceptionally simple? Finn.no (our craigslist so to speak) makes the process of listing stuff absurdly easy including photos, descriptions, categorization and paying (for non-free ads).
In any case, good luck!
[1] Local for me means Trondheim, Norway
[2] I’m not in any way affiliated with the Tise guys beyond once having studied at the same university, and being myself part of the software development scene of Trondheim, I’m likely to meet these folks at some point or another. I just happen to find a self-interest in promoting increased business locally
The Tise app is interesting. eBay has a lot of metadata associated with each listing which needs to be added during listing. The issue is that eBay has a ton of one of a kind items. Amazon is just a barcode which makes listing super simple. I’m also looking forward to Tradesy and their stuff (tim ferris had a podcast on it).
Right now though, I’m still just focusing on eBay mainly, and a little on craigslist. I just have a nice system with eBay that’s working well.
