Selling DVDs and Blu rays
Hi, Last night I put about 100 dvds and Blu-rays onto amazon for sale. I was really pleased to see I’d sold a dvd by morning and I’ve made 33p! Can this be right???
Order date: 31/01/2018
Price: £0.98
Shipping: £1.26
Amazon fees: -£1.91
Your earnings: £0.33
Would I be better off selling at Boot sales or Ebay? I would consider myself a basic seller. Do you think I should up my prices to try and get a bigger profit and just sit and wait for buyers?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
31 replies
Seller_u4N7CLUxByftJ
With the fees amazon charge its pretty much pointless to sell low value items unless you’re one of the big sellers and can shift thousands a day. Ebay has lower fees but i find ebay sellers tend to price items lower than on here so it evens out really.
My advice is to find more valuable things to sell and don’t sell anything under £5ish. I learned its basically a waste of time when mega sellers can sell the same item for lower than what you can and don’t mind loosing profit just to undercut you. Find a good price product which you know you can make a profit on, have a look what others are selling for, price it in the average and offer better service, such as free postage/ free 1st class postage etc.
Seller_A2Ell2R6C7mVB
As Allsorts has said, also go to your inventory and add a few quid to each of your listings to save you getting a loss sale.
You can then check out the offers on each of your items and amend the prices to suit.
Seller_2BrPSydGy6oyq
>Would I be better off selling at Boot sales or Ebay?<
Yes
Seller_CIf29DRF1Z1lW
THANK YOU for your help! I’ve been such a brave and beautiful fool! I’ll trawl through my list of 100 and add a few quid. This time next year Rodney…I’ll be a millionaire!
Seller_LKjg1QRrO36Yq
You need to raise prices a lot just to break even…at the moment, you aren’t making a profit at all.
Unless you can pack and post a DVD for less than 33p you are you are making a substantial loss!
Seller_lt0vdQSvuVUco
Your figures are right. Little point in selling DVDs for under at least £3 plus P&P. Given how much Amazon charges for fees on DVD, I’m amazed another site has not cropped up. It wouldn’t be hard for sellers to undercut Amazon prices massively with a more reasonable fee structure. Bound to happen in the fullness of time.
Seller_lt0vdQSvuVUco
I agree with the bundles idea. On Ebay, I usually sell them in bundles of 10 for about £9. That way, I make about £4.50 per bundle after fees and postage. For me to make that same £4.50 selling each DVD for about £3.50 each on Amazon, I think I’d have to sell about 20 of them. Plus, the buyer about have to pay £31.50 for the same 10 discs here. I mean, come on. How can they justify a fee of about £2 on a £2.50 sale? Of course, Amazon don’t justify it, and never could.
This is why sellers would be mindful to spread their stock around other marketplaces and support their growth. Because, when dominance on sales of an item type is total, this is what happens.
Amazon have killed the used DVD market for a reason. They want to push their Prime streaming service, and cheap DVDs are anathema to it. Of course, the ones losing out are the customers Amazon pretend to have their best interests at heart.
Seller_9XWqPGRXeAg4Q
Not worth the bother. The only winner is Amazon. Take them to CEX and trade them in.
Seller_j4FKLU8LN0sZg
Many new apps for mobiles popping up now whereby people can just offload old dvd,s and cd,s.As others have said,unless you have a RARE deleted dvd,limited edition blu rays or cd,s it isn’t worth the bother,unless you bundle them up.
Seller_6DgzNTtfWk1Jd
Now a lesson in profit and commonsense, to make a reasonable profit on any item you need to be able to list that item for £7.71, this is the magic number, after fee’s postage etc. you still end up in profit, anything less than this is futile and you are going to lose money.
As for DVD’s how many do you see today priced at a penny? You don’t because the postage is so poor that people no longer want to deal with them, other than the mega sellers who are selling almost everything at a penny and losing money hands over fist constantly whilst denying that there is an issue with this method of sales. I’ve seen this all before whereby eventually it all ends in tears.
I won’t doubt that I’ve just opened myself up to a barrage of thumbs down, the reason being is simple, no one wants to admit that I am right and they are losing money with every sale, do me a favour don’t waste your time negging me as I really don’t worry about it, no doubt the usual suspects will be waiting in the wings with their fingers on the button.
The bottom line is this, if you want to make a profit then price your items so that you do make a profit, all last year for the whole of 2017 I read on here week after week how many people were having a bad time and sales were poor, if this is the case how come I don’t use FBA. Buy Box or Prime or indeed any other tools on Amazon, yet by the end of 2017 I was 26.8% up on my previous years sales from 2016, WHY?
Well I’ll tell you, I don’t sell penny books, my lowest price is 50p gradually rising according to value and condition of the book, I don’t list soiled books, only clean one’s we have a first class customer services team who work with the customer and to demonstrate that our up turn in turnover isn’t a fluke this January up until today we are once again 38.8% up on last year for the same period, and still we don’t have a penny book in site, perhaps it is because we run our business as a business that makes a profit that we are successful, and yes we will still get loads of thumbs down on here and for what, telling the truth and for given an honest appraisal on how we operate.
My advise is simple operate your business on a profitable margin, if at the end of a month you haven’t made a real profit then do something about it, whilst we may not be in the top 100 sellers on Amazon, we are still one of the best, and this is because we run the business as a real business and pay our way, this isn’t a hobby for me it is a business so it is in my interest to do things right.
