how do some people make any money?

ballisticbrian

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

137385 feedback, so another way to look at it is they've earned £13k from going to the post office 137000 times.

Errr, Dave, they probably have a collection once a day.

Brooker_Dave

ballisticbrian wrote: »

Errr, Dave, they probably have a collection once a day.

They may have taken more than one down the PO per trip I suppose.

Still seems like a lot of work for minimum wages.

RFW

molerat wrote: »

Run out of stock. Keeps the listing running, keeps them high in the ratings and can just drop the price when more come in. No one is going to buy at that price so quite safe for them, a fairly standard practice with high volume sellers.

That is probably the reason, but there's not actually any point in doing it, ended listings hold their search qualities when relisted.

nat_85

I would guess they are just using them as a high frequency item to build feedback and push ratings up

These are not going to take up a lot of storage space, they could have been left with these as older stock and just need to clear them to recover any money

Strapped

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

So from 1500 odd sales they've earned £168?

Good or bad?

Couldn't possibly comment on behalf of that partocular seller you've picked out.

I've already said why a couple of these sorts of lines work for me, and the primary reason is not the profit.

sequence

Notice that he has "buy 2 get one free", seems about 30% of people bought two or more. With every extra one sold, he'll profit by the cost of postage as well as the normal level of profit. That probably helps. Could be just to keep top rated seller status, to help with postage discounts, cashflow etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with selling 99p items with free postage. I have a few listed myself.

SSGjosh

sequence wrote: »

Notice that he has "buy 2 get one free", seems about 30% of people bought two or more. With every extra one sold, he'll profit by the cost of postage as well as the normal level of profit. That probably helps. Could be just to keep top rated seller status, to help with postage discounts, cashflow etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with selling 99p items with free postage. I have a few listed myself.

Multiple purchases are a great boost, I have a line that sells for £2.25 and I make about £1.12 profit on that, whereas if a buyer takes two of them the profit is £3, and then £4.93 on three of them. There's quite a few categories that multiple purchases make the difference. For example Incense cone sellers sell with 99p and free delivery but do an offer of buy 5 get one free which looking through the sales history seems to tempt a lot of buyers.

ballisticbrian

You can do your calculation the other way round. Start with what you need to earn, say 35,000 and work backwards to see how many packages you need to ship to make 35,000 profit. Finally divide that number of packages by 12 (months), then 4.2 (weeks) down to minutes in the week to see how much time you have to spend on each one, but don't include minutes spent doing your accounts and research and business trips.