Auction Power Guide

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.

There are many ways you can make money on ebay, from selling stuff you no longer need, all the way up to selling merchandise from a wholesaler. This is not the limit however, of the wonderful methods of generating cash off of the world of ebay. You can sell property, cars, boats, and even businesses. There have been transactions as low as a dollar, all the way up to business transfers that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ebay is clearly here to stay, now it is time for you to get your feet wet on this great money making opportunity.

Here we will focus on selling for a wholesaler, this is where you will promote other peoples products and sell them for a cut of the profit. Lets say for example you find a product you are interested in such as say, stereo speakers. You will then search for a wholesaler that will accept a contract with someone that deals in affiliates and ebay, with the proof that you are an ebay seller and can verify the account on ebay this should not be hard. Once you have landed this contract with the wholesaler, it is time to set up market strategies, and make sure they conform to what the wholesaler finds acceptable. Make a plan, check it twice and get to work selling.

Once you have the site available for the public to view, you need to weigh out some of the business expenses that will ensure you are not spending more than you are making. By having multiple payment options you can be sure you have all your sales basis covered. One of the biggest expenses you will encounter will be shipping and storage costs. It is not likely that you will have the space in your home to store a couple thousand pairs of home speakers, and this notion would require some sort of insurance that will be required in order for the wholesaler to relinquish the product to you. Any notion that you can rent space for cheap is improbable, and again will still require insurance as a measure of protection for you and the wholesaler. So what do you do? Well the answer is simple; you have the wholesaler keep the product, and ship when necessary to the customer when purchased.

This will keep the entire product in one place, alleviate the need to worry about shipping, and still ensure that you are able to make the sale. Once the product is sold to a customer, you simply place the order to the wholesaler, they will in turn send the product, charge you for the wholesale cost and the holding and shipping cost and the rest is yours to keep. This is not a difficult task and you do not even need to leave your seat. What you really need to do is research the product, and its competitors and finds a price that is reasonable, and will generate the best profit for what you are doing. What you are really doing is selling the goods like a salesman on a store floor. All the while not even leaving your home, you do not even really need to monitor this whole process, as the customer’s invoice will come in to you via e-mail.

anonymous
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-opportunities-articles/making-more-money-on-ebay-68423.html