Can You Get Retail Price for Items Sold on eBay?
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If you travel down to your corner retail store to buy that green widget you have been eyeing, most likely you will be paying full retail price for it. The same is not necessarily true if you jump online and check out what the prices are on eBay. That begs the question: Is it possible to sell items on eBay for the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price?
The short answer to this seemingly simple question is: Maybe, but highly unlikely. The likelihood of you being able to sell your products for full retail price on eBay is very slim, unless a certain set of circumstances are aligned just right for you (and the eBay pricing gods are smiling down upon you.)
Following is a list of possible scenarios that allow you to get retail prices for the products you sell:
- You have a unique product that nobody else is selling.
- Demand for your product is super high (in which case maybe you can get more than retail.)
- You offer a “free” product bundled with the product you are selling at retail price so that customers are willing to pay retail price for the main product.
Really, about the only way you will ever be able to charge, and receive, retail prices for your products on eBay is to be the only one selling them, or be fortunate enough to have your competition selling at retail. On eBay, the chances of your competition selling the same item at retail are slim to none.
Please keep in mind that eBay is the world’s largest garage sale. And as such, people are looking to get a deal on eBay. For this very reason, you need to be smart about your product sourcing and find items to sell that don’t have a large amount of competition on eBay. This is the way to make sure that you can receive a decent profit on your items.
Be unique and sell what people want. This is the path to take if you wish to be able to charge retail for the item you are selling on eBay. This is also the best way to ensure that your profit margins are high enough to make it worth your while to sell this item. Don’t waste your time selling items that will not generate the return to make it worth your time!
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We have found that the avergae buyer on eBay is very price sensitive, and many time unrealistic.
99.9% of our listing are fixed price and immediate payment (to avoid non paying bidders, and also generates hgher profits for us.) If we are getting close to game time and change the listing to best offer - the offer are ridiculous! It’s not uncommon for someone to offer $5 for a $200 pair of tickets! After shipping and fees, we lose more than of we just let the tickets go unsold.
Even when we don’t pur best offer in the listing - we get lowball offers.
If buyer make a respectful and reasonable offer - we usually accept it. If they’re offer is insulting or unreasonable, we just block them.
We are fortunate to have other sites we can market our product on as well that generate higher selling prices.
Jessica
Jessica,
You bring up a great point about requiring immediate payment on your Buy It Now items. This is a great way to make sure that you do not have any non-paying bidders and would definitely work if you are selling tickets.
The downside of requiring immediate payment is that you do not have the opportunity to offer combined shipping. This may not be a problem if you are selling something where someone will not purchase more than one item from you, or if you do not offer combined shipping.
We have never employed this strategy as we have always sold items in which we combine shipping, in the hopes that people will buy more than one from us. This has worked well for us, in that we could offer combined shipping.
However, we have also had to deal with people that take their time paying. We have a 3-day payment policy, but eBay won’t let you do anything until after 7 days have passed.
We have been lucky in that only a very small percentage of our buyers end up not paying. It is a pain having to chase down people for payments, though. We do suggest using the immediate payment option if that will work for the items that you are selling.