A local clear-out operation in town was selling 2.4ghz ‘handycams’ and receiver for $40. No recording, very novelty. I flipped them on eBay for $75. After taxes and shipping I cleared $25 a unit, sold hundreds. So if you find the right product at the right price, there will be people who will lap it up.
This was a side-gig, after a dozen sales I balanced my profits with stock (so should it all go to shit I wasn’t left with a garage full of junk), plus had an actual 9-5 so this was all just fun money.
Don’t think I would do it again though myself, but if you don’t mind a bit of hustle you can earn a few bucks.
Yeah, more or less. There are a lot of little ancillary costs–bags and stickers, shipping boxes, UPS costs to the AMZ sorting centers. And AMZ will generally stick you with a lot of little fees for things like “managing” returns, shipping you unsellable items, destroying unsellable items, etc. Maybe call it 24K pcs to clear $30K in profit.
Now consider that the current lowest FBA price is $6.28/ea. That slices the profit down to around $1/ea, give or take. And the current lowest seller-fulfilled price is $5.05. That guy probably doesn’t understand AMZ’s fee structure, or else he has a runaway repricer, or else he’s trying to dump his stock. With a $2 product and $3 shipping by USPS First Class Mail, there’s no room left for the minimum $1 AMZ fee.
After the 2000 tech bust, there was a cliche about getting by re-selling Costco office products online. The idea was to buy a gazillion pack of manila folders or printer paper and sell it in finite quantities on eBay. It’s not surprising that people still do this. I recently bought a UK only product on eBay by a seller who specializes in reselling UK products in the US. This is obviously older than the internet. I also buy some special French beans from a trading firm in NYC that imports in bulk and resells retail.
Same. I get Fazer chocolate bars from a company on Amazon that I’m pretty sure buys them retail in Finland or somewhere.
I used to go to the store often. Prices were obviously higher than going to a real Trader Joe’s, but not obnoxiously higher. And you didn’t need to drive 1.5 hours to get some dried fruit and some chocolate.
At some point when the store owner was being sued, he knocked down the ‘P’ in his name and the store became known as ‘Irate Joe’s’. I liked that quite a lot. I mean I liked the name, not that he was getting sued (that sucked).
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I called “peak Amazon” last year for this reason alone: I think they’ve lost control of their marketplace. (not that there aren’t a few other reasons…) 
I redid my house networks last year and looked for cabling and wall boxes on Amazon. I found a fairly simple item for $20, and $12, and $15, that should have been much less. Further hunting turned up the source company, and the part was $2. I ended up skipping Amazon for the whole order because, guess what, the source company had mastered the art of making their web site easy to use, with good order tracking, inventory information, good prices and they had domain expertise.
I’m finding less and less on Amazon these days and more and more at specialized retailers. I might be “ahead of the curve” but I think the world will catch up…
In the TJs where I work we have been limiting the purchase of ridiculous amounts of EBTB. Early on, people would special-order multiple cases, a practice we have halted. If someone repeatedly cleans out our stock on the sales floor (the shelf can hold 60-80 pieces) then a manager may speak to them. Individual stores have a great deal of latitude on dealing with most issues so one store may be more lenient than another.
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The so-called bagels at our nearby Safeway are really toroidal dinner rolls. My son found a recipe for bagels and they aren’t as much a PITA to make at home as I would’ve thought. (Anyway, I let him do it.)
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