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Is this enough documentation or do I need to be keeping more?

March 5th, 2013 2 comments

At the beginning of the year I started up a small home business purchasing and re-selling consumer electronics products. Business license and registered with the state (Georgia) as DBA. I am a sole proprietor and the only one involved in the business.

January and February have been kind of rocky. I was learning the best and cheapest ways to ship, the quickest ways to test my products (stuff like memory cards coming from wholesale suppliers that could unknowingly be selling fake/misrepresented cards to companies, etc.) I sell on Ebay only, and I only accept Paypal as a payment method. So every sale, sale date, product description, Ebay fees, Paypal fee, date sold, etc. are all there. When I was a little more naive, I unknowingly flipped some products before I knew of a solid way to test them, so I got some returns and had to refund. Long story short, January and the beginning of February turned into an accounting nightmare in regards to logging everything. I utilize the "Outright" program on Ebay, which pulls all of my Paypal data. So it basically organizes everything, tells me the final profit, the total fees/business expenses for each month and year, the product description, date sold, sale price, Paypal fees, Ebay fees…all of that. The only thing it doesn’t log is the original purchase price and purchase date. I’m pretty much screwed for January and February in regards to proper documentation in regards to bookkeeping, but I do have the final profit amount for both months, all of the expenses and fees, payments received, etc. and I will just have to eat the taxes on the purchase amount vs. re-sold price. So taxing the whole instead of only the profit.

Is there a better way to keep track of this? I did make a spreadsheet in January. It has the item description, purchase date, purchase price, purchase tax paid, purchase shipping fee (I buy all of my inventory online and get it shipped to me from wholesale companies using my tax id), resale date, resale price, shipping fee, Georgia sales tax charged (if they were in my state – I only had one sale to Georgia during January and February and I have logged and paid taxes to the state on that), Ebay Listing/Insertion Fee, Ebay Final Value Fee, Ebay Final Value Fee on Shipping, Paypal Fee and then Finally Profit/Loss at the end.

Yeah, that’s a lot of fields to log for each transaction. Outright seems to do a really good job with keeping up with everything and letting me just print out all fees and sales with proper dates and descriptions. The only thing it doesn’t keep up with is the purchase price. I try to print out the invoice each time I buy something to re-sell and staple that to the printed paypal transaction paper for each transaction, when I have sold it. Is there a good way to keep this from being too tedious? We’re talking probably…$4,000 a month in sales in February. January was rather slow.

At tax time, Outright supposedly makes it easy to just see the total profit, total fees/deductions and such. But it doesn’t have an option to compare my purchase price per item to the re-sale price. So I could print that stuff out…but I’d end up paying taxes on everything for the whole year as a $0 purchase price value.

Any advice from sellers? Apart from "Get a CPA to do it all for you"…I wouldn’t make anything if I did that.

I keep all my items, prices, descriptions, final payouts, etc listed in an excel workbook. It does my calculations for me once I put the formulas in and I have a nice setup now after using it for a while. I don’t have to pay any fees to use it and I’m just very organized and attentive to it. If your business is so large that you can not handle the books on your own, I suggest hiring an employee. It shouldn’t take much training to keep good records. Just discipline.

The advantages of easily selling information products on eBay

July 19th, 2012 No comments

Everyday more and more people are making a living out of selling
information products on eBay. They set up an automated
information products business, because it does not require much
time nor money and it can bring great returns.

What is an information product? As its name indicates, is a
product full of information, which is normally sold as an ebook.
This information can be about anything (although you obviously
want to sell an ebook in which people will be interested), from
how to sell your used car to magic tricks; the scope is inmense.

Browse on eBay by searching for “ebook” and ticking “search in
both item title and description”. You will see what is being
sold at the moment: ebooks about UFO phenomena, how to get
traffic to your website, how to read music, body-building, even
the Bible.

You can choose to do a bit of research on a topic that people
would be interested in and put together an ebook, or you can
sell public domain information, like the Grimm brothers fairy
tales, Kafka’s works, or Poe’s poems.

Why information products? What is the added value on selling
information products? It has many advantages both for you and
for your customers. It avoids the three “S”: stocking, selling,
and shipping. You do not need to spend anything on production
nor in shipping costs. Pretty much all you need is a computer
and conexion to the Internet. You do not need to do much
selling, other than writing your listing: you put it on eBay and
the customers buy it without you having to say anything. It is
advisable to keep account of the information products you sell.

Why automated? Setting up an autoresponder system allows you to
have the sale completed without you having to “be” there. Once
the payment received confirmation email comes into your email
address, with the autoresponder system the customer immediatley
gets their email with the downloadable ebook.

This is obviously very convenient for the customer and for you.
They obtain instant gratification, it works like in a shop: they
pay, and they get what they want immediately. You can be
spending your time in any other thing in that time, as you know
that they will get their product thanks to the autoresponder. In
the listing, tell the customers to send you an email if they
have problems downloading the ebook. The only thing that you
need to do after the sale is check your email for possible
enquiries. Not much of your time.

Creating (or finding) and selling information products is a very
good investment. And I say investment because you spend your
time and effort once putting down all that information you have
researched, or the public domain content you have found. Then
you do not need to do any other thing than listing the item over
and over again, being that part of your catalogue of items to
sell.

The little amount of time and money required is making many
eBayers set up eBay shops and gain an income out if. It can be
developed part-time, at your convenience, it does not depend on
timetables and you are the boss. Why not start selling
information products on eBay today?

Marius Van Dyk
http://www.articlesbase.com/ebooks-articles/the-advantages-of-easily-selling-information-products-on-ebay-987.html