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Your ‘Real-Life’ eBay

Money-Making Project

Example!

How To Go From £0 To £1,045.96 Per

Week In Sales…In Only 31 Days Using

eBay.co.uk!

With Oliver Goehler

‘Auction Kommando’

Bonus Special Report!

This book is copyright 2010 Information Mavericks Ltd. No part of this manual may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission of the

publisher.

Legal Notice: Whilst all attempts have been made to provide effective and reliable information with

regard to the subject matter, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for

errors, inaccuracies or omissions. The advice and strategies herein may not be suitable for every

situation and always involve risk to some degree. It is also sold with the understanding that the

publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or any other professional service, and that

this publication is provided for educational and informational purposes only.

INTRODUCTION Hi, and welcome to this SPECIAL REAL-LFE PROJECT! What we’re going to go through here is an actual real-life kind of live example of making money on eBay.co.uk – starting from scratch! The good news…you’re going to see the EXACT STEPS I took to go from £0 to £1,045.96 per week

in sales…in only 31 days! What is this then? Well, what you’re going to read here is actually the text from a recording of a 2-DVD set I did a while ago. And that DVD set showed the ‘real’ life example of what you see here…the only difference is that we’ve transcribed it all into book form for you. (If you think some of the text ‘rambles’ a little – bear in mind that it was me ‘talking’ and then this got transcribed into written form!) So…we’re going to see from start to finish - from establishing where there is a market to then actually marketing the product i.e., writing a description listing effectively. And then, seeing how it pans out, whether it comes to profitable fruition or not. Looking at the various aspects of selling and profiting from my ‘system’ towards profiting on eBay. What’s my approach then? It’s basically selling the same product over and over again on ebay.co.uk. Locate a product, list it – sell it for months or years to come, on auto-pilot! It doesn’t have to be difficult! So, you’re getting control of a given product in a large market. It must be large because, otherwise, you’re going to go back and have to find another market to bring up any kind of worthwhile income. So, we want a large market and an existing demand for something. And then, we want to introduce our own product which is similar (has similar benefits) to what’s already selling in that given market where we’ve established already that there is demand. We don’t’ want to really break new ground.

Just go with what’s already working! Obviously, there’s certain markets where this is more applicable - clothing, electronics, that kind of thing where the markets are large. Basically, then, we take control of that product and just sell it

over and over again into a given market like electronics, clothing which is huge (there are many more markets than those – just some examples here). Bear in mind straight away that we can eliminate certain categories already (which aren’t large enough or don’t have the potential to list over and over again), and just concentrate our efforts in those areas where that statement holds true. In other words, the big markets where we can sell these products over and over again. So, immediately, things like very small niche markets can pretty much be eliminated. So, the first thing to do is when we get on the website, ebay..co.uk and look at the various products that are on offer, and the various categories. We want to immediately eliminate some categories when we’re browsing through (the ‘too small’ ones). So, as an example, maybe something like the ‘children’s category aged between one and three toys’; that might be too small to create any worthwhile income. Of course, that depends on your goal and that statement is kind of a bit general, because if you just want to create something very small, then, that might be fine if you want to sell like five items a week or so.

But generally speaking, most people want to go sell a little bit more. And so, that automatically eliminates certain markets. The easiest way to start and find market is simply going to the homepage on eBay.co.uk and look at the categories and their sizes. How do you establish whether they’re too small? Generally speaking, we’ll give you an example of this, but generally speaking, those categories are ones with less than a certain number of items in the category. If a category has only got, say, 100 or 200 items at a given time, then it’s generally too small to bother with. If it’s a few hundred or so over 10 days, then you have to ask yourself by how many people really are going to be buying products in that market; there's probably not much demand for products there. So we can eliminate that from our enquiries right away. And a similar thing to do is just to move on and look at another market where there are a lot of items for sale. We want ‘busy’ markets with lots of products changing hands. Ideally, busy but not ridiculously busy so our item gets lost amongst the competition. So a half-way house. The second thing to do and the safest way of approaching the market is to look who is already selling

what in a given category. And to qualify that – look at who is selling items which are unique and non-branded. The items I go for generally are NOT brands- they are unique and ‘non-branded’ items. We want to go into markets where other sellers are successfully selling these ‘non-brands’. So, for example, in clothes, you could look at that category and say, “And these guys are selling x amount of product – and the items they sell are non-branded – they’re not real ‘brands’ in any way.” That’s ideal because they aren’t selling a brand (which we may not be able to stock anyway) and they are selling a healthy amount of that product per week. So, you want to look at what other people are selling. This is the absolute safest and surefire way of establishing how much you can sell in a given market. So, in the clothing category, there might be a seller that’s selling 100 of XYZ of unique products per week, an average sale of £10 apiece, that’s a £1000 a week business. And then, if you look them, that might be in line with your goals and I can’t say because I don't know your individual situation – but that could be what you want to achieve. But let’s say that sounds very good to you. Then, you could say to yourself, right - “All I need to do now is find a product rather which will fit into this market which is similar to what’s already selling in a market where you already know that there’s going to be sufficient demand to meet your income goals!”. Does this all make sense? Hopefully, it does. That’s really the crux of it. It’s simple, really. And the purpose of this special project here today is to follow on with the trials and tribulations of actually doing this in real-life. Back to a clothing example – let’s assume we see a seller selling 100 of various unique clothing per week and it’s all kind of, I don’t know, retro kind of clothing. If you can come in and all you got to do is just find the product along the same lines – and that’s really it. Just find it once and then sell over and over again. That’s the whole concept here - getting that one product and selling it over and over again. In an ideal world we won’t sell exactly the same thing as someone else – something similar, but better. Better price. Better features. Better packaging. Better benefits. Ideally, a combination of all those things! So, just kind of rounding up this segment. As I said, you have just got to make sure, firstly, we’ve got a market where’s a demand for something, where there’s a market which is sufficiently large to meet our goals whatever they are. You have to decide that first and then work from there for you to work out which kind of market you want to go into.

And then, we have to obviously source the product for that market and then, the steps after that which we’re going to look at are effectively marketing that product within the category. So, we’re going to be up against obviously competition. We’re going to see what they’re doing and try to beat them of course. Now throughout this real-life project, we’re looking at effectively listing that product all the way through to the sale and relisting it and etc, etc. I’ve got some ideas as well for then expanding out from there which I’ll share with you too. But the difference here with this report and the other stuff you might see is that it’s just all real world. You can see everything that’s going to happen with this new project. So, next phase, we’re going to look, we’re going to find our market and that’s the next episode and then, we’re going to get the products.

STAGE ONE Okay, so, we’re on the next stage of this project now. I think the next phase from here is for us to actually go out there and to look at different markets as they stand on eBay right now. For example, let’s say you were going to sell MP3 players – let’s take a look now at the breakdown of item types in that category. So, I search for ‘MP3 players’, then look on the left hand side of the screen and see what kind of sub-categories are popular (you can see on the left of the image below) – so we can see 4GB has the most items (3,788) and that 2GB is also popular. 3GB and even 1GB are probably best avoided as they’re much smaller in terms of items listed. Now, that could mean they are under-served sub-categories, but chances are that it’s merely that items aren’t as popular in those sub-categories. So right away we know 4GB and 2GB are the areas to possibly concentrate on.

Now, the MP3 market may not be an ideal market - because it’s very price-orientated and so we might not be able to source well enough from a different country eBay seller (more about this later) to be competitive over here. In which case, we ought to change our approach into going from not getting the product from a different country seller but direct from the manufacturer. Or we simply change markets and look for something that’s more unique and which is hard to compare against some of the products (MP3s are obviously very easy to compare with others – they are all very much alike which doesn’t give us much room for manoeuvre with pricing).

Remember that whatever market you’re looking at, choose to view ‘Buy-It-Nows’ only. This tends to throw up the items being sold by traders rather than individuals. (Individuals tend to use auctions to sell their old gear, whereas businesses use BINs). You can select ‘Buy-It-Nows’ using the Tab, as shown in the image below, in whatever market you want:

So now let’s look at some actual real-life market examples that may be good to enter. Remember we want one which is ‘hot’, where other traders are profiting, where they generally list on a ‘Buy-It-Now’ basis and where we can source products for this market as well. We do NOT generally want to sell branded stock (stuff with a ‘name’ on it). Why? Because everyone else is doing that! Which waters down the profit. Plus, there’s no pricing power – you have to price at the same price as everyone else! Not my kind of business. So, we want unique and non-branded products which we alone control! So the way I’m going to do this – ‘live’ if you like – is to go to ebay.com (which is the international American site homepage) and this is where our search begins. So, we’ve got to find a new viable product that we could promote. We’re going to look to buy wholesale from the eBay American site

(at least to start with) from another eBay seller then go from there. This is our ‘product source’ – a seller in another country who wants to expand their sales. We’re going to buy wholesale from them! Looking down the homepage is the best place to start because it gives you a bird’s eye view of the different categories up for grabs. And so, looking down this list we can eliminate certain things, certain categories already. Let’s look at some of the categories from eBay’s main category page…

Forget antiques because they’re always going to be really one-offs. This is going to go out the window so we can forget about that. Generally speaking, it’s not going to be an area to concentrate in. Another category – Books - probably not. Generally, they're one-offs so probably nothing doing there as we can’t sell those items over and over again! Business and Industrial possibly, you never know. Cameras and Photos - that's a good one because we’ve got the kind of product that we want, i.e., it’s got quite a high price or good margins and it’s cheap, easy to handle, cheap to ship and we can sell it

over and over again.

Cell phones, no. Clothing, shoes, and accessories certainly something to look at. Coins, probably not. Again, for the same reason there as we said with antiques. Collectables no. Again, same with antiques. Computers and Networking possibly. Consumers love electronics, certainly something to look into. Crafts, again, something to look into. Dolls and Bears you never know. DVDs probably not because of compatibility issues (if we’re buying wholesale from the USA). Unless we create our own, of course. Entertainment memorabilia, no because it’s a one-off again. Gift certificates probably not. Anything at all there. Health and Beauty, certainly. Home and Garden possibly. Jewelry and watches, certainly again. Music and musical instruments, probably not, although certain ‘niches’ in here may be OK. Real Estate probably not because we won’t be able to sell the same house over and over again! But the one we’re going to concentrate on today is Health and Beauty. The products in here can have the ability to be sold over and over again. Buy one lot, keep selling that same product for profits. When it runs out, just order more. Also, they have a lot of emotional appeal - what I call a ‘high market pain factor.’ What I mean by that is that the people buying these products in that particular market generally have got a problem which they want solving. If you compare that to something like selling maybe an antique, someone doesn’t really have a problem that they want solved and they just went out to buy an antique. When someone has a problem that they want to solve it, it’s easier to sell to that person a product, i.e. solution to that problem. Take warts – if you have warts, you want to get rid of them! So you’ll certainly pay for an effective solution! So it’s easier to exchange money for possible solutions to a problem - than when you just have products like an antique or something like that. Not always, but often.

So, if we look here, things like Body Enhancer is a perfect example. Oral Care, people who have a problem with their teeth who want to solve that problem. They’re prepared to spend money. Over-the-Counter Medicine, these kind of products here again, I’m not suggesting that you kind of go into the pharmaceutical business but again, if can offer solutions to problems - certain beauty products are a good choice. Face products for example - like with anti-wrinkle or something like that, dietary supplements are another good idea. People want, for example, to look younger - witness the massive billion pound beauty industry. People really, really want to kind of solve that problem of getting older. Again, blemish control - acne is a problem. Obviously it’s got a high degree, a high kind of market pain factor. So we’ll really want to do something about this problem and that usually involves spending money. So let’s look on eBay.com and see what’s selling over there, with a view to bringing it over here to the UK and selling it here. The best way to start is I think, if you look at the very top of a category when you’re browsing through, you’ll find the what I call ‘featured listings’ which are those listings which come up at the top of the results and people pay a premium to get their listings at the top. These are often THE hottest products on the whole of eBay – great for our ‘market research’! Just one problem: eBay changed the rules on ‘Featured Listings’ recently so only certain types of sellers can run them. So you don’t get a complete picture. But you’ll still some ‘Featured Listings’ from top sellers. Fortunately, there’s an alternative… The best thing to do nowadays is to actually just search by ‘Buy It Now’ only in whatever category you’re interested in – search for those items which come near the top of the search results in a given category. Invariably, because of the way eBay’s new ‘Best Match’ works, these are the best-sellers in the category (those buy-it-now listings near the top or on the first few pages of results). I’ll show you an example – this one from the Baby Category (Baby Slings to be more specific):

These are the ‘Buy-It-Now’ listings on the first page of results in this category. Take a look at the item that says ‘New LittleRubi baby sling pouch…’ (second from bottom). If you take a look at that listing, they’ve sold 49 of those just from that one listing. So it’s a hot item. How did I find it? Simply by looking in any category (in this case baby-baby slings) and checking which ‘Buy-It-Now’ items come up on the first, second and third pages. The higher up, the better. Those are the hot items in any category, generally speaking – the ones appearing highest in a given category. And what you’ll often find is the unique products are the ones which are on the featured listings. The reason for that is because they're non-brands, and they’re out there because people, obviously, don’t really know them from Adam, I suppose, for want of a better term. And because of that, people stick them up there on a ‘Featured’ basis so people get to see them, and then buy them. So, the featured listings and highly-ranked ‘Buy-It-Nows’ are the place to start looking for hot items. They are great idea starters for you! Let’s switch back to the ‘Health & Beauty’ category though and look at a specific market…and

try and find our own product for this category… So I’m going into the market Health & Beauty- Skin Care – Acne & Blemish Control.

So straight away we can see two Featured listings at the top which are ‘Buy-It-Nows’ – these are ideal to investigate further…

Looking into how much these people are selling, I would say it's a really hot category which we should seriously think about. It’s got the market pain factor going for it first, and it’s got featured listings. Obviously, what you want to do is always check on ebay.co.uk to see whether there’s the same demand there. If we look on .co.uk and there’s hardly any kind of market there for this kind of thing, then obviously bin it.

But generally if it sells on eBay.com it sells on eBay.co.uk. So, I think the first thing to do and we’ve seen the market here, obviously, the first thing to do is skip on to .co.uk and just kind of match up the demand there as well. So we will do that now. We’re on the ebay.co.uk marketplace now and we’re just looking at the difference in featured listings from here compared to ebay.com (the American site).

There are less items and less featured listings, but the products are still selling very well over here on the UK site. So, clearly there is a market here as well. Now, here’s a really easy way of finding how ‘hot’ an item is. Open the item and get the seller’s user name. Then take the seller’s name, put it into advanced search and we can see from that their completed listings. We could see exactly how many sold on each listing. So, this will give us the idea of how much they’re actually making and the depth of the market and how much we can expect to sell. And if this matches up with our kind of income goals, whatever they are, then fair enough, we can go ahead. The next image is for finding out how many items a seller has sold. You can go to the eBay home-page, click ‘Advanced Search’ at the top and you’ll get to this page.

If it turns out that this guy or this guy or whoever here, they’re not making more than £50 a week, then that may or maybe not for you - and then you’d walk away looking at different and obviously bigger market. But all the indications here are that there are plenty of featured listings which is a great sign. We can take it a step further as well and look at each individual seller and how much they’re selling off their listings and we can get a good picture then, of how much we can expect to sell as well. So we’re going to concentrate on this market – the acne market. We are starting really from this basis of people are actually making money here. If someone else is

doing it, then there is a way of doing it. If you start with a market where there is no one else making money, then you’re just making things unnecessarily difficult. We want things where it’s just easy as possible. By the looks of it, as there’s so many sellers indicating that this is an easy market, or an easier market to make money in. All we’ve got to do is come up with our own products. We've got to come up with something of our own and we’re going to use ebay.com to find that ‘initial idea’. It's really pretty much straightforward stuff which is going for an easy market as evidenced by the number of sellers that you see (and how well their items are selling!). We’re just going for this easy market and then, trying to introduce our own products into this and we’re sourcing our product by using in this case ebay.com. So, we’ll go back over there now, and try to get a suitable product! I'm back on ebay.com. Now, we’re product sourcing. We’ve done the first step of this which is establishing the market we’re going to go into which is indeed the most important thing. We know that’s the one or some people making money doing this kind of thing in this market (acne/blemish control). So what we need to do now is source our products for this market, for the UK e-Bay marketplace. So, there are tons of products here as we’ve seen already with the featured listings and these are all featured listings (on eBay.com).

And these are probably the best place to start because these are the products that have been actively promoted - really proven and which are probably going to be kind of non-branded and unique. I’ve searched under the term ‘acne’ to see what appears.

Straight away at the top you can see two ‘Featured Items’ – these are ideal candidates. So all that it really is a matter of now is emailing the sellers of each of the ‘hot’ items we can see on eBay.com (whether they are ‘Featured’ or just normal listings), and seeing whether they’re up for our proposal (almost a joint venture proposal where we can tie in together and sell our product in the UK). We want to BUY WHOLESALE from these foreign sellers (or just locate the wholesaler they are using already, maybe in the USA, or Australia). The other thing to do is use the ‘Advanced Search’ (as mentioned before) so you can see exactly how many they’re selling. So, the more they’re selling obviously the better. The hotter the product is. Then, you can take that and market it better on the UK eBay. The more they’re selling the better and you can check that from advanced search (as explained earlier). So we want to email really as many as we can because we’re not going to get everyone to agree to

wholesale to us. There’s no way that everyone’s going to reply to us even. But we only need one product at the end of the day to start and keep this up. We need one thing that we could test out and see how it goes. Finally, on product selection what I’d say is this is a good example here, actually. There were a lot of kind of lotions on .co.uk and cloths. So, a cloth might not be probably the best way of going in. Lotion may not be either. We want something different but still in a proven market. So, it’s not a contradiction because as I said earlier, we want to come in with something unique and our own kind of thing that’s similar to what’s already selling. But it needs to be similar but

different. In other words, it needs to kind of solve the same kind of problem but be slightly different in its approach, if that makes sense. If people are selling lotions and not cloths – sell cloths. If people are already selling cloths and not lotions – you sell lotions. If people are selling BOTH…we want to come in with something like a total treatment program which is different than the cloth and the lotions, but which would still solve the same problem. Okay? So, this might be a good way, a good thing to start with here. A lot of these are brands in the acne category – we don’t want those. Those are items that tons of other people are selling. We want something unique. OK, I’m back now and I’ve just fired out some emails. My really fast email to these American sellers went like this (you can use something similar): “Hi, I’m from the UK. I wondered if you offer this product at wholesale. I’m from the UK and am

interested in promoting your product over here. No risk to you. And I’d pay up-front. If you’re at

all interested, let me know including possible prices.” And in my case here, they came back to me, asking what kind of quantity. So straight away we’ve got something. Already, we’ve got a positive response from our email, so that’s a step closer to tying up a product that we can sell and just market for ourselves. We don’t need any kind of product development of

our own or need any experience with this particular market to do this. Anyone can do it,

starting right now. And we don’t even need to write the script or sales copy. We don’t have to go through the lengthy process of developing products. Most importantly, we’ve already got products which are tested and proven in an e-ay environment if you like. So let me show you the product that we’ve got an interest in and that we know now we can buy wholesale from an eBayer in the USA, to resell here in the UK.

Take a look at this product. It’s a bit different from what’s already on the site. It’s like a formula in capsule format rather than like all that lotions and cloths that are on .co.uk and if we look down. They’re up for selling there to us and so, we can resell on .co.uk. Let’s see what price we can get it for… The price of this item is actually only a few dollars. And I know that if we got it manufactured, it would be even less! So this is a good price. What if this seller didn’t want to deal with this? Then we push on to other products – other featured listings, other highly-ranked ‘Buy-It-Now’ items which are selling like gangbusters on eBay.com (the USA site), or eBay.com.au (the Australian site). Failing that, going through the normal listings and just looking at all the different products for sale, seeing what kind of unique things which aren’t on .co.uk and which you think would slot well into the current ebay.co.uk marketplace. So the next phase is really just simply list the product that we’ve now acquired. We buy the products and just see how it goes. So, that’s what we’ll do next.

LISTING OUR PRODUCT – REAL-LIFE

EXAMPLE!

Okay. We have found our market, got our product for it, now all we have to do is list on eBay.co.uk! So far, this has all been very quick. And it’s not been all that much like ‘brain surgery’ has it? Find a hot market that’s working for others. Locate a product from foreign seller. Negotiate price and get it shipped over here. We wanted a product that fits, not necessarily jelled with that market, but which was kind of something a bit fresh, a bit different than what was already selling, but against a backdrop of a market that people were making money if that makes sense.

So, come in with something slightly different to what people are already offering in a hot market which is pumping out profits for these other people. Okay, so that was Phase 1. So Phase 1, was identification of the market. Phase 2 was the actual product selection and sourcing. So, we’ve gone through those two phases now. We’re really at the last phase, I suppose, or there’s possibly one more after this which is the expansion. But Phase 3, is actually listing and marketing the product on ebay.co.uk. So, this is the marketing phase of the project, Phase 3. Now, we have this capsule solution from the USA. We don’t really want to be selling these on an auction because that’s really for one-off items. You CAN do that if you’ve got something fairly highly-priced. But remember we are selling the same thing over and over again so it’s probably best to use a ‘Buy-It-Now’. So, we can keep listing, keep making money out of it. So we’ll continue - we’re going to sell at fixed price, shall we say. Okay. So now, we’ve come up with the category. We want to go into the same categories as people, as the most successful sellers. We want to really copy them as I’ve kind of stressed throughout this. We’re not doing anything remotely complex or original, because we’re just really going after markets where people have already paved the way in. Let the other people be the pioneers, if you like. We’re just the vultures coming in afterwards. The profit vultures! And that’s really the best approach, I think, the lowest risk way and the easiest path to take. So, what we’re going to do is look because eBay is so transparent and that’s one of the virtues in a way, particularly when you're trying to look for something to go into. (Not so much so when you’re a seller who is already doing well!) But we want to go in those same categories as the most successful sellers. So we want to start with the most successful, and the most successful was the one that we looked to originally which was the skin

care category.

How do I know it’s the most successful? It’s where the most featured listings are and the most sellers are congregating and where the most of these kinds of products are being sold. And that’s what we’ve been saying all along - because people won’t be throwing away money by doing these kinds of things if they’re not making money! So, health and beauty and then, skin face care. This is where everyone is currently listing so it’s where we will go as well. Now, obviously, we might be able to make other categories work as well…and all we do is we just again look at the most successful sellers, look what other categories they’re in and simply copy what they’re doing. Because they will test, they put their hard-earned money to work already and this is the great thing about it. You can just simply kind of ‘vulture’ that for yourself. And if going for the best category doesn’t work, this category then, none of them are going to work. (Below – image of UK top category for this product type; Health-Beauty-Skin/Face Care-

Acne/Blemish Control)

So, we could start here and, if it goes well, then, we can move into other ones. Now, just looking down here in no kind of particular order, this one here, men’s skincare, might work for us as well. You never know. But the safest way to go in would be to look where the most successful sellers are selling. They may or they may not be in these categories like men’s skin care. What I do know is that the most people with featured listings and top-selling items currently are in this category above. This one is where we’re going to start. And if it goes well, then, we can look at the other categories or even think of some of our own. I'd stress really to go with the flow to start; we’d go where everyone else is and then, see how that works out. If it works out well, then, we can go from there, looking at expanding from that. We want to give it the best chance of success, so we’re going to go in this category (Acne-Blemish Control). So, this is broadly applicable, if you like, because wherever you’re going to go into, with whatever product, you want to be following the top sellers. You want to be going into those categories where the most successful sellers are listing the most heavily. Where are the most listings? And you want to go into that category as well. If that works, move from there. If it doesn’t, then, you should can the project and try something else. Try another product or market. And that’s it really. See how it goes and if it doesn’t work, obviously, we can think about re-adjusting in some way. If it does great, carry on and think about expansion. Note: I’m not going to go through actually listing the product here. This is basic material

available FREE from eBay.co.uk/help – you can find free details there on the actual process of

getting a listing ‘live’. Back to our project…

OK, I’ve now listed our acne product live on eBay.co.uk in the appropriate category. Quite a bit of a shaky start but I’m glad to say that the product is still selling well. Check the listing results below in this picture:

I’ve listed it at £14.95 which is a very good markup from our price from the USA seller. So, 150 quid off a 12 quid listing which isn’t bad at all. And bear in mind, these are finishing pretty much every day and the trick really has been ‘changing the picture’. What’s this? Simply listing the same item several times, but changing the headline on the listing and the picture. This way, I’ve listed several of the same item, kind of saturating the category. This is a good technique to use – list the

same item over and over, with different versions/pictures. You’ll get lots more traffic and sales

invariably. It means you can get so much more mileage out because otherwise as it was before, you just have one listing up there and it’s not really doing great things – this way we get more listings and get seen a lot more. Now, this can sound a bit kind of wacky, but I have an idea of kind of trying to take the product and listing it on other country eBay sites. Germany for example (eBay.de). There are loads of different eBay sites like Germany, France, Canada, Australia - and what if we can take this product and sell it over there? And so, this is what I’m going to try next. This is the first phase of expansion, I suppose. So, can we duplicate these kinds of results? As you can see here, pretty impressive abroad because if we can, then it really opens up the markets. So, the next phase is really to do that. So I’ll come back kind of with those results as well… Note: I now look to list the same item on other eBay sites.

We’re on actually what is here the German site, the eBay German site, ebay.de. (See Image Below).

And so, we’re going to just really have a browse.

Now, I actually have a German surname, Austrian-German. But I don’t know how to speak German - I’ve been to Berlin once for a few days! So we’re going to use a tool which I’ll tell you about in just a moment to help us out. So, we just wait for the search results to come up and we will see again - is anyone making money in the ‘acne’ category? Are there rather a lot of listings up for these kind of products and if there are, can we do something similar? We look at their categories and how many they’re selling, etc, etc, and really go from there. And the good news is that there ARE people making money again in this category, on eBay.de, the German site. So this has potential for us. Okay. We’re going to go to a site called freetranslation.com and this gives you free translations. So, this is the site here and obviously it’s free. You can get I think, professionally done one as well. It’s kind of a bit rough but it’ll do. So it should come up now.

We can choose what we want and just put in the text there and then hit ‘Translate’. And so, we can see you can get translations from there. This will then allow us to answer questions that people have with our listing! But for our listing/description we need something more detailed and more accurate; what we want to do is really go to a site called elance.com. We can look for translators on there who will work for not very much money. So, we’ll go on there, get the listing that’s working as we’ve seen for ebay.co.uk and then, we’ll put that translated listing onto ebay.de. It should be pretty simple to do that because I mean you don’t have to speak German. We’ll get someone else to do it and hopefully, it won’t cost very much to get a translation. We will then just simply list it and use the same advertising copy, same marketing, put it in similar categories. Put it in the similar categories to where the current sellers are selling successfully. It’s actually the same process. And I don’t see anyone kind of doing this kind of thing on ebay.co.uk. Not really anyway. Then we have got France (eBay.fr), Canada (eBay.ca), Australia (eBay.com.au) etc. as well. So, that’s the next thing to do. So, we’ll get that done and I’m not going to go through all the ebay.de listing but I’ll get it open and we’ll come back and see how it’s gone. On the German site, the listing went up and went with the same kind of, oh well, exactly the same copy. That was translated for me through the person we found on elance.com. It ended up costing about $50, about 30 quid all in. And that was translated very quickly as well - in a day or two and because it was really simple for a native obviously. She was a native and it was just slung up really on ebay.de with the same pictures, the same advertising copy (obviously in German) and the results have astonished me. I cannot believe how it has gone.

If we just look down all these sales here and actually it continues down, down so, it ended up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 to the 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, oh, no, I’ve lost count. Start again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. We go down. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, - 18 sold off one listing and I’ve run a few of these in the same style as I did with ebay.co.uk., run a few day after day. So we sold a hell of a lot as you can imagine. And I am running them on other sites as well, other country sites now. So ebay.co.uk, ebay.de, ebay.com.au which is the Australian site as well. And so, it's fabulous really how quickly we’ve done it and it’s all been achieved in a matter of a few weeks, really, and gone from absolute scratch. And hopefully, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you really can become a PowerSeller “within 24 hours” because that product was found and listed very quickly. And this is exactly from what I was saying, “Get the market first.” We went there. Got that market and we knew what people are making money in. Then, we got the products and we identify the market with a high market pain factor, MPF, high market pain factor where we have a greater chance of succeeding because people are easier to sell to. And then, we just simply list it powerfully. We came

in with a product that was slightly different from what was already selling. A fresh approach to

the old problem against the backdrop of a market which is was obviously making money for

different people. Now, we’ve expanded and we've gone on different country sites which is something I never really thought you could do - but just proven you can absolutely do. So, we're now, yeah, obviously now on these sites. Now, we have got the kind of next phase of expansion if we want. But I’ll probably leave it there for the time being because I think I’ve done enough to show this stuff and given a good learning experience as well. And hopefully this has given some inspiration about how simple it can be.

We started with NO product, NO experience of this market – yet now sales have climbed up to over £1,000 per week…from scratch! There’s nothing, as I’ve said throughout, complex or difficult about what we’ve been doing here - nothing at all. And we’ve gone through every step, really. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t do something along these lines as well, because this was done absolutely from scratch in a market I really knew nothing about. Okay. We’ve gone through obviously the various stages in the progression of this project but now we’re going to look at expanding. There’s kind of two different ways I think about expanding. Firstly is within the market. Secondly is outside the market. Within the market – what can we do? We can add more products to the market that’s already working. Outside the market is getting more products but in different markets. So, extending out and expanding that way. But we’re going to do inside the market expansion. So we need to find another product for this same market. And if you look at this product, it kind of complements the other one perfectly and it’s basically a gun that removes blackheads. Very pleasant, I know, but we’re only around to sell the product.

And the reason I’ve put this up is because I know this was a featured listing and that the person is selling an awful lot of them. So, let’s see again if we can get something similar. Here’s some of their powerful sales results for this item…

There’s an awful lot being sold so, this, as I say, is a perfect combo and it’s perfect for expansion because we come in within the same market. Can we find the product that will kind of match up with this so we can do this, add this product to our existing business? I don’t see why not. OK, we found the listing, a similar listing in the US. As you can see, bidders currently at $1.99. And this was simply found by looking through the similar category, skin care in health and beauty. And really now, it’s down to us to try and secure this product, see what we can get it for and then, simply do what we did with the last one and list it on .co.uk.

Fortunately, one of the sellers, we've emailed a few, one of the sellers has gone the proposition which is great. And so, this really is another product now for us. I emailed them and here’s what they came back with:

I’ve just stripped this out of the PayPal money request. It’s like an invoice that the seller sent. I don’t know the actual per unit price, it’s like $3 or $4, maybe $5. Just 3 quid or something. And as we saw, they were £15 so on eBay.co.uk, so this is a really good result. So, there’s no reason that I see why we can’t do that kind of volume as well (as the current UK seller). And if that’s the case, then, I think we'd probably even potentially do £2,000 a week, possibly more,

just in this one market and just with two products – our original and now this one too. And remember, because we’re selling the same products over and over again, it’s absolutely a cake walk to ship this, handle it, managing everything else. It’s really easy to do. It could be done in probably less than an hour a day. Even if you have them pre-packed, it probably would be about 20 minutes a day. So, I mean, this is a fabulous result and it’s all done totally from scratch. There’s no reason why you can’t follow my lead here. It’s just a matter of identifying a market and you coming in and looking at the viable markets. From there…looking at what’s selling, who’s selling what, look at featured listings and the highest-ranked ‘Buy-It-Nows’, look at who’s making what kind of money. Match that with whatever your goals are and from there go on to product sourcing. Remember, we talked about the different phases of this. Phase 1 is market selection. Phase 2 is product sourcing/selection. And to the next phase, we’ll be using the method of going over to a different country, getting a product from there just as we’ve done and proved twice here now. Getting that product, introducing it into the market and coming in, hopefully, with a new approach, a different kind of product and something that’s slightly different from what’s already selling… And then, expanding out maybe internationally - using as we’ve seen with elance.com and freetranslation.com. Then, expanding out with internal expansion, within that same market as we’re just doing with this product. From there, once we’ve expanded that within that market, more products, etc, changing pictures and so forth, then, we can expand now externally - getting into other markets with this exact same approach. So, we’ve really, as I say, gone from zero to £1,000 a week to now what looks like £2,000 a week. From there, I don’t see any reason why we can’t even get that to £5,000 a week as ridiculous as that may sound and you’ve seen for yourself how simple it has been to get to this level with just one product and one market.

But to be sure – not EVERY product you try will do this. Some work very well. Some don’t! The key is to TEST and keep those tests small until you find that ‘winner’. So, I hope this has given you a huge amount of inspiration and you’ve learned a lot as well. And I'd urge you really just to get on the site now as soon as you possibly can - don’t delay. Get on there, take action, trying to find that market, trying to find that product. There’s loads of them out there. Just quite seriously, there are loads of markets where people are making money. All you need to do is to introduce your own product, looking at all the techniques we’ve used and simply just do it. That’s it, basically, and thanks a lot for listening!

CONCLUDING COMMENTS WOW! As you’ve seen, I went from scratch in this market up to the level of £1,000+ per week within only 31 days of starting. You’ve seen EXACTLY how I’ve done it here. The most important thing was identifying the market first, rather than going in with preconceived ideas about what ‘might’ sell. Rather than do that, it was looking into something where we already knew that the products were selling. And from there, introducing our own product into a market where we knew there was existing demand for similar products. Many other people try to sell a product that they ‘like the look’ of almost. What we’ve done here is we’ve not sold the product as particularly glamorous or anything like that. But we have sold something where we knew that there was a demand and we know that people made money. And this backdrop or foundation is the most important thing when you’re trying to do something like this for yourself. Now it’s not a question of pioneering - of trying to break new ground. Nope. Rather it’s a matter of going to those select group of markets where you know there are profits being made. Good thing about eBay is because everything is so visible. That’s the thing about it. Everything is so visible you can see everyone's sales or see how much people are selling of X product per week; you can see what they’re selling them for; you can see how much they’re selling off each listing and so on. Because of that you can find out really easily these kind of places to go into, these markets to go into, and that’s the good thing about it. And the same applies whether you’re selling cameras or this kind of product or other anti-aging products or whatever else. If someone is paying for a featured listing or has a highly-ranked product in the ‘Best Match’ search results, then great! Can you enter too? Now, there’s two sides to that - whether to take a new approach and look at something that’s a bit

different for that particular market. And the second path is going for something that’s very, very

similar to whatever everyone is selling successfully. There’s something to be said for each approach as we discussed. Now, remember here we looked at sourcing through other eBayers. But that’s just the start. Eventually, we want to be dealing with manufacturers directly. And there are tons of other ways to source products as well. You can do things like the Yahoo stores approach, going to websites under Yahoo stores, just general websites themselves and try and find product that way. Ask if they will wholesale to you. Always keeping the market in mind. And if you go to shopping.yahoo.com, you’d find Yahoo stores and you’ll find loads of different products in there which would be suitable for this kind of thing that you can get from different countries like America.

You can use other eBay country sites like eBay.com.au (Australia) as well. So, in our example, let’s say that we did our second product - that blackhead remover. Let’s say we initially buy from a USA seller. It works. Great. Next though we want better prices – so we then go to a proper manufacturer in China, found through a site like alibaba.com. We use the initial seller as our ‘research’ if you like. Then get better prices later by ultimately doing deals with manufacturers and wholesalers who require bigger orders but offer lower prices too. What you have got to do NOW is go in and find a market where there are examples of hot products currently paying out for other eBayers. You don’t have to go in, by the way, to markets just where there’s featured listings but you do need to go into those which are currently ‘hot’ for other eBayers. So the example here was the health and beauty and all the subcategories there. There are loads of categories like this though. And really, it’s up to you to go on to the site (ebay.co.uk) and look through the various categories and see where there are these featured listings and other hot items. Follow the same step process I’ve done here. Check on .co.uk and see what’s on there. Check other eBay sites too. Fire off some emails to the .com sellers and see what comes back. You’re not going to get every single person to come back to you. You only need the one to start with though. If they email back, tie something up. You want something that’s similar to what’s already selling, the number of which you can see on the featured listings, and email me if you like and I’ll have a look at it. And then come in with maybe something different or something very similar - come in with that and promote it. Write a powerful and long description, as long as you can. Most people who write descriptions try to do really short ones - just doesn’t work. Make it as long as you can. That’s a five-star tip for making them more powerful. Just make it as long as you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s long-winded. The more you go on about the product, the more you tell about it, the more you sell. And what’s the worst that can happen with a product you get in to resell? The worst case is you end up shifting this stuff with no reserve auctions. You just stick on there, selling individually or whatever, and you’ll probably get most of your money back anyway. So, you’ve not got a great deal to lose, have you? The upside, obviously, is something where then you can run it and run it and run it and this one project generates fabulous sales for you. You’ve seen how well this has gone here. All you need is one product and one market to generate some decent volume. Remember too that because we are selling the same product, it’s very simple, very easy to handle. The money just goes straight into PayPal usually and that’s it. And then, you just keep relisting, relisting, relisting the product over again and you've seen now, everything works now where it sells. That’s why it’s worth the effort to try and get one of these things going. If you get one going, that’s great. Again, that would only be in one market still. If we can get another market like that, I don’t see any reason why we can’t with this kind of approach, then you can work that out for yourself. And you might not get to that level but so what? You can still generate a nice side income with a mediocre success. One final thing here: the final thing to say is that if you’ve got a product from another seller or wholesaler and it’s going well, then there’s no reason why you can’t create something of your own almost – get it manufactured yourself! So, if it’s just something that's fairly simple maybe – clothing, information, lotions etc, then there’s no reason why you can’t end up getting that manufactured for yourself. There are tons of manufacturers on places like Applegate.co.uk. Then you’re getting even lower prices!

But that’s something advanced. The first thing, as I say, is always get this market you are going to go into and do it now rather than delay and never end up doing it. Go and look for that market, fire off some emails and go from there. And remember, I’m always available on email. My email address is oliver@olivergoehler.co.uk. You can email me on that with any ideas you’ve got, potential projects, product ideas, anything like that. You can email me and I’ll give my straightforward feedback on that - whether I think it has got any potential, whether I think you should drop the idea, think about something else etc. Because remember there’s loads of different products out there – now you’ve got a plan to sell them and make money from them. Best of luck!

Sincerely, Oliver Goehler ‘Auction Kommando’