There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there in the internet marketing world at the moment. Google Panda and Penguin SEO updates, the “death” of article marketing, Adsense accounts being closed, Youtube videos taken down, IM products virtually impossible to get approved at Clickbank etc, etc. However it seems I may have accidentally stumbled upon a niche over at eBay where people are making money faster than they can spend it…
As many of you know I live in Turkey. Great country, great people, great climate and I love it there. However there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t buy over there for love nor money. One of those is cigarette papers and filters for hand rolling tobacco (yes I know but with all the antismoker attacks in the UK and elsewhere I no longer care, anyway it’s my only vice :-)). Given that Turkish customs don’t get the concept of people in Turkey wanting to order items from abroad and will either confiscate or charge extortionate tax (i.e. several hundred percent) on imports that wasn’t an option for me. The weird thing is you can probably get away with just about anything at the airports, no-one checks anything there.
Anyway I digress. Every November I make my annual road trip from Turkey to Germany (where my parents live) and the UK (where I’m originally from). This post is coming to you from Germany. So, before I left I thought I’d have a look on eBay and order my filters and papers in bulk (i.e. about 12 months’ worth) and have them sent here. No problem – you would think. Be a nice order for someone – you would think.
I found 8 different so-called “Power Sellers” or “Trusted Sellers” or whatever they call them now. All of them seemed to be businesses rather than some 14 year old teenager working out of his mother’s basement. All of them offered worldwide postage. All had feedback well into 5 figures. The price was around £180 (about $290). OK fair enough. The only issue was the postage – all of them wanted over £200 to send these items to Germany. The weight of them is just under 1kg, by the way.
So obviously their payments page hadn’t allowed for combined postal rates. If I sent them a message asking them to combine postage and asking how much that would be I’d get a reasonable answer from business people keen to do business, right?
Wrong.
Out of 8 messages sent to 8 different sellers I got ZERO response. Nada. Not even an acknowledgement. It’s not like I’m someone who has just signed up with a brand new eBay account from somewhere like Nigeria with zero feedback. I’ve had an eBay account since 2004 with a 4 figure positive feedback rating (as a seller not a buyer). So no need to worry about any kind of scam, I would have thought.
I assume these items have a minimum of 1/3 profit, i.e. £60 (almost $100). Maybe more. Nice easy money for 2 minutes work sending me a message with a more realistic figure for sending a 900g parcel from the UK to Germany. But no. As my (slightly sarcastic) title says, it has got to be real simple to make money selling cigarette filters and papers over at eBay. So simple that sellers are doing so much business they don’t even have to bother replying to a question that will make them a quick $100. Can’t honestly think of any other explanation.
Anyway I found another seller that was charging £35 for postage which seemed far more reasonable to me so I just ordered from them without even bothering to send a message asking for a better rate. You’ll be delighted to hear my parcel arrived in Germany safe, sound and complete 4 days later.
The moral of this tale?
- I should probably quit smoking for health reasons. Not the usual ones associated with tobacco but more to stop my blood pressure from going through the roof trying to deal with businesses that don’t want to take my money. Aarrrgghhhh!
- Business is obviously not as bad for everyone as the media would have you believe
- When I was selling info CDs priced at a mere £1.97 on eBay a few years ago I replied to every single email. Often I got 10 or more queries a day. You would think that with putting digital ebooks onto a CD and selling them cheaply there wouldn’t be many questions to ask. I must have had an average of 5 people a week asking me for a special price for a large number of products combined (30, 40, 50 or more) and 2 or 3 a month asking me how much I wanted for ALL the products I was selling at the time (I had over 500 listings). Nice easy business. One such message led to me doing a Joint Venture with a guy in a completely unrelated field that netted me around £15,000 ($25,000). All because I responded to a query. That’s the point – reply to every customer enquiry you get because you just never know where it will lead.
- Anyone wants to send me $100 I absolutely 100% guarantee I will reply to your query 🙂
Rant over.