Selling items for people on Ebay. How much to charge?

kbh4031

I have a bit of a dilemma, I posted on facebook that I was looking for ebay work and I have had quite alot of interest.
However 3 out of the 7 that contacted me want to pay me a percentage of what I sell rather than by the hour
Whats a reasonable percentage?
My hubby said 20% but I would need to collect the stuff and sell £100 to make £20
Any thoughts please? xx

forgotmyname

Oh dear... You are selling for people that you dont really know?

So they give you all their stolen and faulty goods. You sell them and pay them minus your commission. Then buyers start asking for refunds and your left out of pocket.
Then the police start calling and want to know where you aquired these goods.

Selling other people's items is not going to make you rich.

Goto the £1 shop and buy some bits and sell it on ebay for 99p + postage. Where you make 20p - £1 extra. Plenty of sellers seem to do this.

You need to find the stuff that sells quickly.

Dont forget to sell a £100 item you need to pay any listing fee. Then the final value fee, Then paypal fee. Out of your £20 you will be lucky to get £1.

shaun_from_Africa

Another very important thing to remember is that by selling goods for others and getting paid to do so means that you will be a business trader in ebay's eyes as well as HMRC and Trading Standards.

This means that you will have far more legal obligations towards your customers and more responsibilities for the standards and safety of whatever you sell.

RFW

Putting aside the risks of selling other people's goods that they could easily sell themselves. Ebay and Paypal fees are around 15% in total (varies depending on selling price/categories, but not much), if you're handling and storing the items you'd need to be charging 20-25% to make a decent profit/living. So the seller would be getting 60p in the £1 for items they sell, not the best for them, if they agreed.

You'd also have to then factor in non payers, returns, lost in post, etc. So if I was going to do that I'd be telling the seller that they would get 50% of the sale price and work my own costs after that.

You really need to have some kind of idea of what you want to sell for others to make it work, if you're just generally asking for stuff you'll end up with a lot of rubbish.

Narrow it down to something you know, porcelain, stamps, shoes, whatever, otherwise it can't work and even then it would be a struggle.

You're also not going to be making much going to pound shops. Yes, some stuff will sell for £3 or more, but some will still sell for £1 or not at all.

If you're planning to give selling a go, do it for yourself and stick with something you know a fair amount about. Then try and source that, either by trade or carboots, fairs and the like, even have a search on Ebay.

Strapped

forgotmyname wrote: »

Oh dear... You are selling for people that you dont really know?

So they give you all their stolen and faulty goods. You sell them and pay them minus your commission. Then buyers start asking for refunds and your left out of pocket.
Then the police start calling and want to know where you aquired these goods.

Selling other people's items is not going to make you rich.

<snip>

^This.

(10 character limit grrrr).

sharpy2010

kbh4031 wrote: »

I have a bit of a dilemma, I posted on facebook that I was looking for ebay work and I have had quite alot of interest.
However 3 out of the 7 that contacted me want to pay me a percentage of what I sell rather than by the hour
Whats a reasonable percentage?
My hubby said 20% but I would need to collect the stuff and sell £100 to make £20
Any thoughts please? xx

This is a business plan which is 1) twelve years too late and 2) doomed to failure because after costs there is just no money to be made.

Sorry about that, but better to be told the truth than trying to run a business which will never succeed.

ballisticbrian

I agree, it's a non-starter. Your petrol alone, running around collecting things and the time spent arranging times people will be home, is your 20% before you start, onto which 10% ebay fees and 5% paypal fees. That's 35% and we haven't covered the other eBay fees like insertion fees. Then your fee.

How much do you plan to earn per hour as a wage?

If you want to take a further 15%, you'll be up to 50% for the customer, and to earn £100 a day works out that's you'll need to collect and sell £660 pounds worth of goods a day.

sequence

Don't do it! Even if it's not a scam, it's really not worth the hassle.

campdave

Kudos to you for looking for work. However you would probably be better advised to spend your time looking for items to sell yourself - more profit for the same (potential) hassle.

soolin

To add to the excellent advice above I would also caution you against the scam ebay jobs. Putting up an ad like that may well make you a target for a company that asks you to sell on their behalf and pay the money across once it arrives and take a cut for yourself and they will drop ship.

The stuff is of course never sent and all your payments in and reversed and you, like many others could be left thousands out of pocket.

I buy to sell and it is a very low time effort on my part and something I very much enjoy. I certainly don't work as hard as your suggestion infers, and I keep 100% of the net profit myself (except for the cut for tax and NI)

kbh4031

Thank you all for the replies, I have not put enough thought into this at all back to the drawing board :cool: