Starting an online store?
I may a little extra income buying cheaply priced clothes books and other items at local thrift stores and selling them online for a profit. Problem is use amazon and ebay for this, and losing between 12-15% of my sales it's really starting to eat profits making even some markups of 1000% unreasonable to do due to time it takes to list ship ect.
To solve the problem I want to create a website that sells the items and only deal with paypals fees which by themselfs will be much more reasonable. I have no qualms in creating a website buying hosting and such, but i do run into a few problems.
My stock of items is only around 30-40 items, i work and go to school full time, money is short and I really lack the funds and space to hold on to any more items. I fell the chances of someone coming to my site and seeing something they genuinely want is slim to none. In that lies the second problem. Ebay and amazon work because they get so much targeted traffic searching for my specific items, but having my own site, even if someone is searching for clothes i sell, my selection is so limited I don't feel like I'll be getting enough sells to be able to cover the cost of hosting and still make a profit. Basically it comes down to not having enough of what people are going to want. Why buy from some unknown dealer who has only a few random items when you can go to a well known respected site and find much more variety at competitive prices?
I did some thinking and have come up with a few ideas to get this off the ground. I'm going to start my site as more of a marketing approach aimed at instructing people on how to resell items from thrift stores for a profit. I'll probably include a cheap ebook I'll put together that elaborates further on the topics discussed on the site itself. Then on a seperate page on the site list my items for sale. That way i'm bringing in the revenue from the site while adding on the extras to make a little extra. As i profit from ads and the ebook on the site ill be able to afford more stock and hopefully at this point be drawing in a larger customer base who trust me. I also plan to start building a list off the site alerting people to when I have new items posted for sale.
Does this sound like a feasible plan? Granted I still have to do some keyword research, but assuming that it all check out as good is this a decent plan or should i just suck it up and stick with the fees?
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