My First Success

Various Ways To Make Money Online

Ok, this website has changed a bit since I started it in December 2009. I registered www.sell-stuff-online.com and originally meant it to be a resource for beginners who want to get started selling stuff online (hence the name). It was meant for tutorials on how to source for dropshippers, wholesalers, and how to start selling things on auction sites and forums, collecting orders using online forms and such. However, I’ve moved on to explore other avenues like affiliate marketing and blogging as well. This blog accounts the experience I have had, and I hope you find it useful. The following article is about my first success making money online, which was through selling stuff. At present, I am selling things using various mediums, one of which is via an online store selling watches at ULTRANEAT.COM

My first attempt at making money online is through a local community forum (I’m from Singapore), however I believe my example is universal across people from other countries who want to sell things. The idea is simple, buy products and sell them at a higher price for a profit. In my city, we have this really vibrant buy-sell-trade and ‘Mass Order’ community forum frequented by a lot of people. I believe wherever you are from, you have some online community of some kind where people buy and sell things. As long as you get people to notice your product and get interested, you could be making some money. In this example, I sold stuff through an online community forum. All items were sold to people in the same city as me. I understand that there are many other avenues of making online sales – the most popular of which I would assume is via Ebay. In the other sections of the website you will find resources on other online sales avenues, including dropshipping techniques. This is by no means the ONLY way to make money selling things online, but just to show you how I got started!

Looking for Affordable Christmas Gifts

My first mass sales was in early October 2009, when I was thinking of where I can get affordable but innovative Christmas gifts for my friends in December. After doing some surfing around on wholesale websites, I stumbled upon this:

It’s a credit-card sized piece of plastic with a ‘light bulb’ that can be flipped up. When the ‘bulb’ is flipped up, it glows brightly. When flipped down, it turns off, ready to be stored in your wallet. Pretty cool huh? I capitalised on the fact that Christmas is nearing, and people are looking for gifts that are cool but not too expensive. When I came across this product on DHGate, I was thrilled. DHGate is a leading fast trading marketplace serving global buyers since 2004. While I understand a few people may have reservations about China traders, let me squash the myth about China products. If you do your homework and source for the right products, you can still make sales and profits. For me, I started an ‘interest check’ forum topic on the online community I was targeting, offering to sell each card lamp at 6 Singapore Dollars (about 4.5 USD), response was OVERWHELMING. People were replying at lightning speed to my thread expressing their interest in the product, and asking me to let them know if I do import some of these card lamps. It is VERY important to do an interest check or some sort of market survey before attempting to bring in products. The last thing you want is to end up with a stash of goods that you can’t sell. There is an exception if you are ‘dropshipping’. This will be discussed in the other sections of the site.

The exact link to the product page is here: http://www.dhgate.com/funny-led-pocket-card-wallet-light/p-ff8080812418b4dc012423a020b643c1.html

Would This Product Make Me Money?

For me, the selling point of the product was that

1. Christmas is nearing, people are willing to spend on gifts for friends/family
2. It is VERY affordable!
3. The product was a novelty – people have not seen it in any shops YET.

The interest check revealed that I potentially could sell 50+ of these cards. However, the actual number actually hit more than 100 cards as there were people who were interested, but did not reply in the topic and were waiting for the actual products to be available for sale. Hence, you need to keep this in mind.

I then decided to make a bulk order of 100 card lamps from DHGate. WHAT? 100 cards? Didn’t my interest check reveal that only 50+ people were interested in buying my cards? Will I make I loss if I fail to sell ALL 100 cards? No! Using a special Excel spreadsheet I have devised, I realised that I only need to sell 32 cards to break even. Every card after the 32nd card would make me a profit.

The excel sheet I attached below would make this more clear (all prices in USD):

I made this special Excel sheet to calculate the profit I would make from the sales of this product. If you check out the link to the product, you will find out that it costs $143 to buy 100 cards (free shipping). The cost price of each card then works out to be $1.34. In order to break even, I would need to sell 100 of these cards at $1.34. But this is not what we want, right? We want to make a profit! Hence, I decided that a reasonable price to sell is $4.30. According to the spreadsheet’s calculations, I would need to sell 32 cards to break even (that is, to make $0 but also lose $0). This does not seem to be a tall order, considering the fact that I know about 50+ cards can be sold. The BONUS of selling ALL 100 cards is that I would make a total profit of $241. Note that this is just an estimation and I made a little bit less than $241 after factoring in all the envelope costs (for containing the card lamps), the postage costs and the discounts I gave to people who ordered 5 cards or more.

After determining that I could possibly sell between 50 and 100 cards (and thus assured that the break-even minimum of 32 cards is high possible, I placed an order with DHGate.

Then, with the help of Google Docs, I came up with a simple order form that can be found here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en_GB&formkey=dFBIcXBHVGlzYlU3MFlMak8wYTNNY1E6MA. Note that this order form is just a sample and that you can’t actually order any card lamps.

I officially announced the start of my ‘Mass Order’ and provided a link to the order form, stating clearly the payment terms and the arrival date of the goods (approximately 2 weeks). My order form was on fire! The one thing I love about Google Docs forms is that it collects orders for you automatically and outputs a nice Excel spreadsheet for you that lists clearly all the information filled in by the customer:

Note that the prices here are in Singapore Dollars, with each card lamp costing 6 SGD. The information here are censored, but each row contains the customer’s name, email address, number of lamps needed, address, phone number and postage option. The total cost of his/her order is also calculated nicely for me. With these information, I sent out mass emails to all my customers to remind them for payment. Once payment was received, I packed their card lamps in envelopes and mailed them out. I was able to track my sales and revenue through my Internet Banking account:

Within 2 weeks, I managed to settle all sales and close the mass order for this product with a nett profit of about USD200+. While this may not sound like much, I was definitely thrilled to experience my first taste of success selling stuff online. I have since ‘invested’ the profit into another product from another wholesaler, and am looking forward to seeing my spare income grow. Ultimately, the lessons I learnt is that to make good sales, interest/market research is important. Work out your projected potential profits in a spreadsheet. Make allowances for ‘worst case scenarios’. How many pieces of the product would you need to sell to break even? How accurate is my projected sales estimation? It is OK to at least break even, but nobody wants to make a loss.

I don’t know what their intentions were, but one or two people in the forum where I sold the cards challenged me by saying that a certain site called DealExtreme sells the cards cheaper. However, what I have to say is that while cheaper deals COULD be found, it is up to buyers to decide who to buy from, and I respect that. After this guy posted in my topic with a link to the cheaper cards offered by DealExtreme, several forum members who have had prior bad experience with DealExtreme voiced their opinions about their long shipping times from Hong Kong which allegedly take up to 2 months if you are unlucky. I have not personally bought anything from DealExtreme before, so I cannot be sure. However, I realised that the sales of my cards have not been affected (I sold  ALL 100 cards and had to cancel orders I was unable to fill!). Hence, don’t be afraid to try. This experience has certainly taught me that there is a market for products even if you don’t sell them at the cheapest possible price. You just need to find the right audience.

There you have it, my first sales experience! As time goes on, I will be adding more sections on selling stuff online, stuff that will extend to other avenues and facets of this business. Will probably add a mailing list soon. Do check back and thanks for reading!