No Capital - Smart or Creative Ways To Pre-Sell 500 Items @ $250 a Pop?

Yes, you're right. If it didn't make the 500 sales that I needed, I would not be able to go ahead. I am assuming that they would even accept something like this to begin with, where a minimum amount must be sold. Doubt it.

In terms of marketing assets, I have nothing. I was thinking a large scale every-door-direct type of mass mail saturation may work well for this product. Compare it to the general appeal an iPhone, iPad, iPod may have. We're dealing with similarly enticing and appealing consumer electronics. This is why I thought a mass mailing of flyers (or better, full A4 page) promotions may work out well.

This was going to be after the pre-sell. I don't think it's a smart idea to mass mail a whole lot of neighbourhoods only to find out that the marketing method works well, but not as well as I anticipated and then be short on orders and thus the orders would need to be delayed until I could find more customers to meet the minimum 500 units.

I didn't know where else to put this, other than offline. Mainly because this is where I hang out at this forum and the guys here seems pretty switched on in real world situations, which I think this definitely related to.

Thank you for your help!

Well, the margins on the product when sold at $250.00 are 20%. However, I want to ensure there is a solid % left over to handle customer returns and warranty issues. I want to be able to service clients properly and obviously need to have a good amount of money if things didn't go as well as planned.

Therefore, I could offer more per sale - but at the end of the day, I know a local e-commerce store here in Aus sold 2,200 of a similar item in June this year, so the market is there if the product and price is good. I was thinking if they sold 500 for me, that's $5,000 for them for just sending their emails out to their list. Perhaps I am too optimistic in this specific regard.

Partnering with offline businesses is a solid idea and is one I plan on taking forward. However, that is only for when I do have physical stock. What I am needing help is how to pre-sell 500 of these so that I have the money to buy the stock and then send it out to my customers. I don't have the capital to buy the stock first.

Your ideas are solid, however, I think I wasn't clear enough about not being able to get the stock with my own funds. That is the issue. Otherwise, I would be partnering with retail outlets where possible. Unless, there is some clever way to partner with stores on a 'pre-sale' bases where perhaps they have a demo in-store and customers are told it is a pre-sale and must wait X period before receiving?

Thanks for your help!