There’s nothing quite like the feeling of making your first sale online – whether on eBay, Amazon or that website you worked so hard to set up – particularly if that sale brought in a nice bit of profit!
When you first start up your Internet home business it’s probably enough of a decision to keep on purchasing that one particular product to resell. After all, this one successful product is also one reliable income stream for you.
So, sourcing your first product and then making regular profits from it is a fantastic place to start. But… and you knew there’d be a ‘but’ right?… how can you keep the momentum going and ensure you make a regular online income.
Once you’ve got that one product up and running and profitable, that’s the time to start adding more items to your inventory to bring in even more money.
How to ensure you keep making a regular online income on eBay and Amazon
There’s no resting on your laurels here – the profit that your one product brings in is great, but you must ask yourself, will this product bring you profits of £1,000 or £2,000 per week? The answer to this question is that it’s highly unlikely.
Making that amount of income per week is certainly possible, yes, but you won’t see figures like that unless you continually add new items to your online inventory and that’s the one thing you should do in order to become successful.
The maths behind the sales
If you have been reading my articles for a while you’ll know that I often reiterate the point that it is essential to make as much profit as possible on every one of your online sales and this applies to all products, large or small. This means that the price your buyer pays you must cover what you initially paid for your product, plus your postage and packaging costs, any online sales fees and still leave you with some profit.
So, let’s be optimistic and say that the one product you have been selling successfully is making you approximately £5.00 net profit per sale. If your item is particularly popular and you have plenty of stock you will easily sell at least fourteen items a week (that’s only 2 a day!) making you a tidy £70 per week.
That’s not much you might say – but it is if you’re just topping up your regular full or part time income. What could you do with an extra £3,640 a year? Because that’s what it amounts to!
So think about this. What if you source a second product that you can also sell fourteen (or more) of in a week? Suddenly your income has doubled to £140.00 a week. That’s £7,280 per year which is on a par with some part time salaries – just for sending out 28 parcels a week – it’s really not difficult or strenuous is it!
So, continue this process and, before you know it, you’ll be selling ten different products fourteen times a week and finding an extra £700 a week delivered to your bank account within that time frame.
That’s £36,400 a year before tax!
This is very simple mathematics and I hope that it will allow you to see that this sort of income is entirely within your grasp!
Of course if you want to be successfully selling ten or fourteen of lots of different products every single week then you’ll need to find consistently hot products that will sell over and over again – products that are always in demand – or you’ll need to tailor your stock to the seasons and trends so that once one product dips in popularity you have another one lined up ready to replace it.
Sourcing those hot products to sell online
First, please remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day! I would love to promise you that your very first product will make you a huge fortune from the moment you advertise it online, but this is not the case.
It takes time to build your business. It’s not magic and the key to success using my strategies is to gradually add products to your inventory and therefore, gradually increase your profits over time.
Why? Well I have bags of experience of research and sourcing and I know that it does take time to research new products and then find suppliers who can provide those products for a reasonable price. You’ll also find it a bit overwhelming if you suddenly leap from selling, shipping and monitoring the sales of ten items a week to one hundred items a week in a short space of time! It’s a lot more work obviously!
By building up gradually you will be able to put good practices in place that will help you to maintain an excellent level of customer service and stock control as your business expands.
It’s very important to remember that you must learn to love your research. Every successful online seller spends time doing proper research. Whether you are just starting out or have been selling online for years, this fundamental principle never changes and so finding the hot products that you need in order to bring in the sort of profits that I am talking about here will take a little time.
Don’t be put off by this though – it’s all part of running a successful business.