 Are Amazon and eBay dead for individual sellers? Hey, have you noticed that the sales on eBay and Amazon are going down for you? Have you noticed that you're not as profitable as you used to be? A lot of people are saying Amazon and eBay are dead, dead, dead, okay? In this video, I'm gonna cover that, but what I'm also gonna do is I'm gonna give you a couple ways that you can be profitable online and why I sold on Amazon if I'm still selling on Amazon and what I did and what I changed. And also what I would do right now. And as a matter of fact, we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher, been selling online for a long time. Since 2009, sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, which is really your channel, I share with you the things that I've done, the tricks and tips and secrets that I've learned along the way so that you can be profitable online too. So let me tell you my story first and I will tell you that in the beginning, the first place I ever sold anything in 2009 was on eBay. eBay was the place and it was really the fall of 2009 right before the Christmas season. And I actually, I made some money. Now, I wanna tell you what my progression was and what happened with eBay and what's happened with Amazon. But before I do that, let's discuss both of those platforms, the pros and the cons and what's going on right now in 2020. Let's check out the obvious first and we're gonna start with eBay. Ask yourself this question. Have you bought on eBay? Now, I'm gonna assume that you're a grownup, you're an adult and if not, maybe you're younger and you haven't done this. But if you did, 10 years ago, what were your buying habits like on eBay and what are your buying habits like now? I will tell you 10 years ago, I bought a lot of stuff on eBay. I really did. I bought tons of different things on eBay and I can tell you now, I can't remember the last time I bought on eBay. It's probably been years, maybe two, three, four years since I bought anything on eBay and there's reasons for that and I wanna dig into that. But the first thing you gotta look at is what are your actions and what are your friends' actions? No matter what platform you're talking about, that matters because if your buying patterns have changed, probably other people's have too. Now, I can tell you when I started out, the majority of my income came from eBay. I made a lot of money off eBay and I would say probably 95% of my sales were off eBay or related sales going to my eBay store and I forgot what they called that now. I don't have one anymore. But that's where my money came from. Now, I'll also tell you what's changed a lot about eBay and that's the fees, the fees. Oh my God, the fees are ridiculous now on eBay. It cost you so much to sell on eBay that it's really hard to make a profit because you are actually fighting with all these other sellers to have the lowest price because there's all kinds of sorts on there. You sort it by the lowest price. That's what most people do and if you don't have the lowest price, you're not gonna sell anything but if you do have the lowest price, you may not make any money. Things have changed too, what people's buying habits and what their expectations are. Buying and selling on eBay is not convenient and one of eBay's strong points is not getting that item to the consumer quickly. Amazon kind of took over on that. So when people go to eBay, they're like, oh, I'm gonna have to wait three days or five days or a week or whatever and that's not really eBay's fault. The fault kind of relies on the seller and eBay is not really selling products. It's all these individual sellers that are selling on eBay. Whereas if you go to a platform like Amazon, they are actually selling some of these items and most certainly they have FBA which is fulfillment by Amazon and they are shipping out a lot of these items for sellers too so they have that ability to get it to the consumer really quick. Now another problem with eBay is they didn't evolve. When they did come out, they had a great idea and it fit the market perfectly and it did really well but the problem is since they came out, they have not really changed anything. It's still the same business model. The only difference is there's more competition because people are trying to sell at the cheapest price and the fees have gone up. So that's not an advantage to the seller at all. So if I had to pick today, which I do, I would not sell on eBay. Every now and then we'll have a few products there just to see what it does but ultimately we don't get many sales off eBay anymore. It's just not there and they've changed the format too. I could, back in 2009, you could have like we sell survival food, I could have a case of chicken and put that same case of chicken on there 10 times. Now you're not allowed to have duplicate listings and since you can't have duplicate listings, you have less chances of that coming up for a customer in the searches. So there's just so many things that have gone against the seller in eBay that I think it's a sight that if they don't make some changes pretty soon, they're not gonna be around much longer. You can't make any money there. I don't get any sales off it. Not something I would recommend. However, if it was 2009, I would tell you to do it but it's not, it's 2020 and you gotta go with what works in this time. Now, let's check out Amazon. Is Amazon a good place for an individual seller? Let's see the pros and cons of selling on Amazon. Now I guess some of the pros is it's one of the biggest selling sites in the world at this point. So Amazon is gonna drive traffic to whatever product you put there. I get that, that's a good thing. But one of the problems with Amazon that I foresee is that they hold your money, okay? They hold your money. When you sell something on other platforms, you get credited in a day or two or whatever for that particular item but on Amazon they hold your money. They hold it for 14 days. You only do a settlement twice a month and since you only do a settlement twice a month they get use of your money and you say, well, it's only $50, only $100, it's $300. No, but that's times maybe millions of sales. So they maybe have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting there where they can actually use that money and invest and get interest on that money and not pay you. Amazon also is complicated. I mean, selling on Amazon is selling the listing, the delivery of the item. There's so many different aspects to it that Amazon controls now that, you know, it makes it difficult to sell on the platform. And since we're speaking about control you almost have no relationship with your consumer. You can't email them. You can't talk to them. You don't get their personal information. You can't put them on an email list. So if you're selling somebody on Amazon you're gonna probably make money on that one product, that's it. You're not gonna be allowed to do upsells or downsells or cross sales or market to these people afterwards. It's just that one opportunity to sell to them. Now there are cross sells and upsells to a purchase on Amazon, but Amazon decides what that is. And you'll notice that after they buy something there may be a banner on the bottom and it'll have other products that other people have bought. And a lot of those products being offered are Amazon products. It also enjoys the same problem that eBay does is there's that race to the lowest price. Whoever's got the lowest price is gonna come up in the searches and of course you can once again sort by lowest price. So you can't sell your products and make a huge profit like you could if you were doing it on your own. In addition to that, they're gonna make money on you whether you make money or not because along with the 39.99 monthly fee you gotta pay for a professional seller's account which you pretty much have to have there's other fees that are involved. Let's say you're selling a camping tent and it's $130. You would incur $35 and 80 cents in Amazon fees alone on that sale. That doesn't even include the shipping fees. You're gonna have to pay if you include shipping. So the fees take up so much of your sale profit that it's hard to make a profit. Also with their liberal return policy people can return pretty much anything. They can damage it. They can use it to where you can't sell it again and you're just gonna be out that money. You're also gonna have redundant shipping. Now what do I mean by that? Let's say you decide to use Amazon's FBA fulfillment by Amazon where they actually ship out the product. Well, don't forget you've gotta ship the product to Amazon before they can ship it out. So you're paying fees there for that shipping and paying fees to get it to the customer. Now although you got the sale I wanna remind you again you have little or no contact with the customer so you can't build a relationship if the customer's unhappy for whatever reason you don't even really get a chance to fix that situation and talk to them. Amazon handles all that. So as you can see these two platforms that used to be preferred platforms because of all the traffic the advantages of selling on these sites now has really, really gotten whittled down to the point where, you know I guess the two ways that I was gonna tell you that you could make money on one of these platforms and still do pretty well is if you have a unique item. And when I say unique item it's an item that maybe you actually make yourself. Nobody else has that. Or it's a product that you have a patent on you manufacture and nobody else can manufacture it. If you own that market, yeah you could sell on eBay and you could sell on Amazon and you could probably do well. The other way that you could make money is that you just do it on very slim margins. You become one of the cheapest people there. You cut all your costs you possibly can and you hope to make it up on volume. If you've got an item that sells over and over again that's something that's consumed or people are gonna need over and over again maybe it's a food item something along those lines. Then of course if you have a small margin you can afford to do that because you're doing such great volume. But outside of that I'm gonna tell you the best way to sell online right now is through your own website through your own sales pages and doing it that way. I also told you in the beginning I want to tell you a story about us selling on Amazon and we did do that. We did sell on Amazon and we sold on eBay. eBay was our main one in the beginning but I'll tell you now we don't. We don't sell there anymore. We have a few products listed on Amazon. We don't do well there. Our main business is through our website and through our retailers. That's for our physical products because we sell survival food and we have all these retailers out there on the internet. If you Google survival cave food you will find there's a lot of people that sell it. A lot of big websites sell it and that's where we make the majority of our money. So that's one way you can do it guys. You can have a product that is pretty much your own product and get retailers or other people to sell your product. Also we sell digital products. Now digital products are sold entirely differently and these platforms you can't even sell digital products anymore. In the beginning eBay became kind of a scam site because people were selling PDF downloads for $100 and it was two pieces of paper or something like that and there was so much turmoil over that that they just cut out any of those type of digital products and you couldn't sell them there anymore. Now we do have digital products but they're primarily courses, they're videos that teach people how to do different things. As a matter of fact, I've got some links below if you wanna check those out you're welcome to do so. And I've got a free course below. It's a $97 course. You can just opt in for that and go through that course. You can learn a lot of stuff about selling online and making money online. So check out that below there too. Don't forget also we're at the point of what subscribing? If you haven't done that, shame on you. You need to subscribe. You need to hit that button down there. Hit that big old, it's right here, right here. 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