I m a licensed retailer and I sells new stuff from my wholesale warehouse supplier. Would it be better for me to do that business on Ebay, Craiglist or would it be better to do my own business website?
No. Definitely not. Its not wise to buy from resellers. You can order directly in bulk from manufacturers or suppliers. B2B websites are a better options for you. You will find the manufacturers and suppliers with product and contact details from these B2B websites for free. Try http://www.hellotrade.com/business/compu�� and http://www.digitivity.com/
Rather than asking us, do a few clicks and find out for yourself. Go to eBay, log in, then do a search for exactly the types of products you ll be selling. Next look on the left sidebar and click to see the Completed listings. You will then see a list of all of the items that ended in the last 2 weeks. At the top, set it to show Highest first . The sales prices you see with prices in green will tell you about the maximum you can expect to get for the product there.You have no way of checking Craigslist s existing sales prices, so the best way would be to test. As a retail business, you should get used to doing comparative market testing. You might sell a set number of units on Craigslist and eBay, then compare how well price/post time works for you. Some products do very well on Craigslist. You can survey existing listings to get a rough idea of what existing sellers think they can get for them. But you don t know what sold, so you ll have to find out for yourself.Since the web is a digital medium, there s a huge market for computers and electronics, but it s extremely competitive. I find it difficult to sell many items without pricing pretty low.I would absolutely suggest setting up your own website, even if you primarily sell through eBay, etc. At the minimum, you can set up a small site with an embed of your eBay listings. You might want to look into SEO (search engine optimization) for ways to drive traffic to your site. Also, you want to start an email newsletter and build an email list. These are absolutely gold for an online business. Ii usually takes at least many months to build traffic to a side, though, so eBay and Craigslist are probably your best bets to start. The trick with websites is to find a niche that your business can serve. Eventually, your site might do most of your sales and just use offsite listings for advertising.
There are Community Forums on eBay where you can ask this question of other retailers in a similar business as yours that can give you excellent answers. There are a lot of people on eBay who have been there, done that, and have a ton of experience. Remember that eBay and PayPal both charge a fairly hefty percentage of your ending sale price so keep that in mind. I m not sure how Craigslist feels about retailers using the site but I do see a lot of retailers selling on there. You should check out their rules but I think they re pretty lax and leave it up to the community to settle things between themselves.
Have you looked into ebid.net yet?Free listing, very low final value fees. Loads more flexible than ebay, and clamps down on scammers quicklyhttp://www.helium.com/items/1662609-ebay��