Selling Items at 99p including postage - how?

#21

Buy all the other seller’s stock, as you probably can’t buy for that…

#22

And that is without the items’ cost prices …

#23

What’s the number of feedback of the person selling it at a loss for 99p? If they are new then I doubt they will be around for long.

#24

So, when we add new listings, try to avoid the big gap price between the products in one group.

#25

Ive tried adjusting min/max price numerous times. Listing stays deactivated purely because Amazon reckon it is now too high a price. Ive had it at same price of £6.99 for several years. New seller comes in at 99p and my listing is deactivated.

#26

Keep your listing inactive and wait for the other seller to sell out ?
Do a test buy of the other sellers 0.99p listing - see what turns up at your door.
See how many the other seller has listed on amzn - by doing the add to shopping basket / then changing the qty in basket to 999 - this will show you how many the other seller has listed (but not all sellers show the full qty).

Your competitor could be from china - and I believe the chinese government are still subsidising online sellers postage costs

#27

The loss per item might be non-trivial, but what price is a review or a feedback or both worth?
It’s not uncommon to see items going for a loss, to build reputation and standing.

#28

I believe the answer is Royal Mail’s postage system done on average weight per bag. Our rep pitched us this but as most of our items are a similar size and weight it didn’t work for us but if you can sell items in volume at cost price or even a small loss it works out…

Basically you fill a bag with the post… let’s say 100 items. You then take the weight of each item and add them together and divide by number of items to get an average weight. So if your selling an item for 99p, say a headphone adaptor, and it weighs 25g and you sell 90 of them. Then you take a really heavy item like a set of books that weighs 700g and you sell 10 of them you’d have 2,250g of adaptors and 7000g of books. So you’d have a total of 9250 grams or 92.5g per item. So the whole bag goes down as under 100g in terms of what you pay as its based on the average. I’m not sure what they do about sizes… It’s just about getting volumes into the system and balancing the weight out so for items that are heavy and earn decent money you don’t pay high postage on…

#29

99p including postage, that’s crazy

Large Letter under 250g with Royal Mail costs £1.04 + VAT + 3% surcharge = £1.28 (just the postage)

Then you got item costs, Amazon fees, pro seller account fee, packaging, labour, overheads, profit etc etc…

#30

If you can’t buy the shade for 99p to be able to sell anywhere, then as others have suggested, your best action is to buy them up from the Amazon seller at 99p and flog them elsewhere for more than £4.50 (about break even after parcel post and Amazon commission).

#31

Have you tried deleting the listing and creating a new one?

#33

I too am sick of Amazon’s total bullshit . We’ve had books deactivated because amazon thought the pricing was a mistake ( despite constantly updating and editing them ) The latest thing we had was a Book we are selling can no longer be considered ‘New’ , only 'collectable ’ or ‘used’ . This is ridiculous considering we imported the book from it being printed and its been in our warehouse since . I have currently deactivated my account due to Amazon resisting items we’ve sold out off , not sure I will bother reactivating it , especially when you can have multiple ebay accounts , each can list 1,000 items and the fees are a lot less than Amazon . Its no wonder Jeff Bezos is soon to be the worlds first Trillionaire , Its the marketplace sellers that are adding to his wealth !

#34

Yea to be fair we do this more so if we have items at FBA thats sat over 6 month we drop the price to clear them.

#35

Order one and see what it is like, if its the same, just buy up their stock and sell for profit on your other listings!

#36

Light and small maybe?

#37

No its not small and light. As I said its too large to go as large letter so has to go as small parcel (I post mine in a Size 6 bubble envelope) so it would not qualify for Small and Light even if it was in Amazon FBA - but its not anyway, its fulfilled by seller.
And they not a new seller - over 4000 feedback with a rating of 90%.
It’s not worth me buying the sellers stock as my cost price is slightly less than the 82p it would cost me to buy the sellers stock.
I will just have to forget it and wait until other seller realises their pricing mistake as according to my calculations they are losing almost £2 every time they sell one.

#38

A couple of years ago I bought numerous items from Chinese sellers, all @ 10p per package, delivered. I think they had been highlighted on the forum.

It was partly as an experiment to see if they would supply. They did, albeit a month or so after the orders were placed.

It was mostly small items like packs of 10 dust caps and plastic combs but how they were able to sell, post and pack for 10p including p&p is anyone’s guess…

#39

I remember reading somewhere (I think on the “Stop Amazon/eBay VAT Fraud” website) that postage from China is subsidised a lot.

It’s like $1USD per kilo to post… Regardless of number of items and size… So if your selling 50g items, that’s like 5p postage.

You cannot buy postage that cheap in the UK… And Royal Mail puts prices up as they have to deliver the items, so only way is to put up postage prices in the UK.

Edit: Found the site - here’s the link. http://www.vatfraud.org/blog/stop-subsidising-chinese-post-via-united-nations-universal-postal-union-upu-terminal-dues/

#40

If it’s only slightly less, I’d buy. See what they use to post etc.

#41

Yes I have bought one for 99p just to see what arrives and if it is indeed the correct item. If nothing else it may prompt the seller to realise their mistake when they come to pack and post.