[buymycards]

Hi,
I normally have between 500-1000 items on ebay at any one time. (I am taking the summer off, so I don't have any listings right now) This requires constant work. Every morning before work and every evening after work, I am shipping cards, answering questions, responding to offers, etc. Every weekend I am scanning dozens of items and listing them in turbolister before I upload them to ebay.

Having a successful ebay store requires constant work. You have to be willing to let go of slow moving items at a loss so you can buy more inventory. It can be tough to find enough inventory, at the right price, to keep the store stocked. Most of my items are BIN with best offer, and I nearly always accept any offer that is 40% or more of my BIN price. If I buy at the right price I can accept 40% and still make a profit and the whole point is to sell the cards. I would rather make two bucks profit on a card and move it right away than let it sit for 2 years so I might possibly make $10.

When I think about quitting my job and doing this full time, I start doing some math. If you look at my salary, vacation, sick leave, life insurance, health insurance, retirement plan, etc, I take the annual total and divide it by 250 work days. ( Mon through Friday 50 weeks per year). Now I know how much PROFIT I need to make every day in order to match my current income.

Let's say that profit number is $250 per day. Now, I need to have enough daily ebay sales so that I can make $250 per day. That means that if my state and federal taxes are 35%, and my social security and medicare is %15 per cent, I have to make a before taxes profit of $500 per day. Now, if you figure the cost of the items that you sell, ebay and paypals cut, shipping expenses, utilities, ink for your your printer, and all of the other costs that come with it, I would probably need sales of $1000 per day in order to end up with $250 in my pocket.

If you are selling items at $10 each, that would be 100 sales per day, 100 invoices to print, 100 packages to mail, 100 cards to scan, 100 cards to list, plus you would need to be super organized so you could find the cards right away to prepare them for shipping. That is a lot of work for $250 per day.

Not only that, but if you are using BIN's rather than auctions you would probably need to be running 2000-3000 items in order to sell 100 items per day.

You can supplement your income on the weekends by setting up at shows. I have set up at shows when I didn't make the $35 table fee and I have set up where I sold every item that I brought, so you never know. In the past I was able to purchase a lot of inventory that customers brought to the shows, but that doesn't happen much any more. The nice thing about shows is that you can normally blow out a lot of junk that won't sell on ebay.

A brick and mortar store would be great, but the overhead would be a killer. The great thing about having a physical location is that you will get a lot of people coming through the door looking to sell their collections. The perfect solution would be to have a regular store, an ebay store, and set up at shows on the weekends, but it would be one hell of a lot of work.

Good luck with your decision, but make sure that you fully analyze your costs. The general rule for most start ups is figure what you think your start up costs will be - then double it, and you will still be short.

Rick