How we sell on ebay and amazon

Many friends have asked us about where our products come from, and how we go about selling on ebay and Amazon. I'll share a few of our tips below.

1) It starts with an order. We've spent time researching suppliers from companies manufacturing special products, to wholesalers who supply excess stock at discounted prices, to factories that will manufacture for us. For most wholesalers you need to show that you are a trade customer. For us this just meant providing some basic info about our business, which we had built up from gradual ebay trading.

2) Listing the stock. We recently got in 3 different styles of maternity jeans which were overstocks from a high street fashion store. We calculate how much it costs us to buy each pair, plus the listing and selling fees for ebay and Amazon, the postage costs etc and then set a price which gives us a small profit. We invested in digital scales and made ourselves a postage rate table in order to sell cheaply overseas. A significant number of our customers live in countries outside of the UK. At the moment we sell a lot across Europe and in Australia.

Ebay and Amazon have simple templates to help you get started with selling, and then they can introduce you to business packages. For example we have a 'shop' on ebay which allows us to display all of our items together and also to benefit from cheaper listing fees. We rarely deal in auctions and sell everything as 'buy it now' just like a normal website. Therefore we tend to have a set price and stick to it.

3) Posting the items. Each morning we print off the sales orders from all of the sites and then go and pick the stock. We have a barn in our back garden which is the official stock room. We've gradually added more and more shelving to make it easier and faster to collect the stock. We have plastic mailing bags of various sizes, plus all the stationary we need, eg return flyers and address labels. The packing is done on the kitchen table, and any of our children who are around love to sit and make pictures with the remains of our packaging. We have a daily collection service from Royal Mail, so we sort the parcels into which region of the world they are going to and prepare them for posting. We can now print our own stamps and pay online. Our postie comes at 12.30pm so we have a mad rush to get everything sent off in the morning. After that we have more time for customer questions, returned stock and ordering new stuff in.

So that's it in a nutshell! We gained 'top rated seller' status on ebay by always dealing with problems head on and by communicating clearly with our customers. We try to go out of our way to resolve any problems, and we offer an honest service. As parents ourselves we source and sell things which we would want to use ourselves.

Thanks for reading. Any questions?