Ecommerce plan

[s2kinteg916]

I been pondering about building a ecommerce site for a long time now and i decided to start planning. The products im buying are under 10.00 each how much of a profit should i aim for ?

25%?
35%?

Also how much stock of each item should i have ? i plan on maybe spending a thousand or two on inventory stock and buying more after a couple sales..

[Chris]

How many different items do you plan to sell? Does anyone else currently sell these items? What are their prices? Are these items sold on ebay? How much do they go for on ebay?

[incka]

I think you are going for something too cheap. Go for at least $100 products.

[s2kinteg916]

They are actually on ebay and usually go for around 15-20.00 bucks. Other people do sell these items and their markup is around 40%. As far as amount of items i probally would have at least 100 plus..

[Chris]

How will you accept payments?

Does the $10 product cost include freight to you?

How will you ship products?

[s2kinteg916]

Accepting payments i havent got that far yet... this is a plan for my first ecommerce site which i hope to launch maybe end of this year. As far as shipping cost for the product to me it shouldnt be much. I dont really know much of the details because i havent got that far.

Shipping of the to customers items will be through priority mail or ups. These items are not that big... so flat rate should work out great...

[Chris]

You need to think about these things.

If it costs you a dollar to have each item shipped to you and a dollar to accept the payment for each item then your wholesale cost has effectively risen by 20%.

I had a shipment of toys sent to me today, mostly $12 items. The shipping cost was almost exactly 10% of the product cost (or $100).