Cheryl and Gary Casper have turned eBay sales into Retail Without the Risk:
That’s because the Caspers now sell goods they don’t even own. They look for vendors that have too much inventory (ideally, hard-to-find merchandise) and then sell the stuff on eBay. The sweet part: The vendors hold the inventory until after the sale. The Caspers only touch the stuff when it’s time to mail it out. The couple’s product assortment might sound dull — they specialize in floor mats for Ford (Research) automobiles — but their inventoryless business model is amazingly efficient and virtually risk-free.The Caspers have teamed up with a Houston-based auto surplus company that supplies them with a product list. Some days they put as many as 50 mats up for auction, at $16 to $125 a pop. Once or twice a week, they drive to the warehouse to buy the mats they’ve sold. The profit margins are as much as 75 percent, even after paying the dealer. ‘If I only wanted to make a few hundred dollars a day, I’d be done by noon,’ says Cheryl, a former Merrill Lynch sales associate. Some days, she says, she and her husband make $700 in pure profit.
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Peddling electronics on eBay, they found, is a sucker’s game because of the vast number of sellers crowding that market. They used eBay itself as a research tool, punching in offbeat product ideas to gauge sales potential and competition. (Star Wars light sabers and gumball machines were two quickly discarded notions.) They even attended Chamber of Commerce meetings to find people with products to sell. “That’s how your mind has to work,” Cheryl says.Eventually Gary called a friend in the auto surplus business. At first the Caspers considered hawking the man’s excess spark plugs and brakes, but the technical knowledge needed to sell such items was beyond them. Then the Caspers learned that their pal had auto mats — lots of them, stacked three stories high in a warehouse the size of two football fields. Auto mats are easy to understand and market.