Ebay Physical Delivery Pros And Cons

You might think with eBay's new policy of not allowing you to sell virtual infoproducts through auctions, that profiting from ebooks is going to be hard. It's not really changing the profitability of the ebook market as much as it is changing the delivery style of infoproducts.

In fact, now may be the best time to start ramping up a new physical delivery of all your infoproducts because the competition just got a whole lot scarcer. All the people who had already established themselves in the virtual infoproducts market woke up one morning to find their listings banned. Their only choice is to go elsewhere or to use the classified ads area to re-established a base again or to start converting their digital products into physical products. So, the field is wide open and those that expand into physical delivery on eBay will find their profits increasing in response.


You can still get many of the same positive features that you had with virtual products in physical delivery if you outsource your delivery management. This is called "dropshipping." There are a few companies out there that specialize in dropshipping products that you create by allowing you to order the manufacture on demand, one at a time, and then ask to have them shipped to your customer directly. So, if the thought of having an inventory in your house, or dealing with printing, paper, stamps, and mailing envelopes is too much for you, you still have options to keep selling infoproducts which remain virtual until an order is placed. Then, the order is sent to the dropshipper who is responsible for fulfilling the order and shipping it to the customer. Very little changes on your end, if you have been used to selling virtual infoproducts, other than you get to charge more for the same product because of additional costs of manufacturing, shipping, and handling.

Pros

Being able to charge more for the same product is your biggest positive when expanding into physical delivery. People generally pay much more for an item they buy that comes to them in physical format than from virtual products. You can recover some of the expenses that you have in changing your business model to include manufacturing of a product, but you will also be charging a whole lot more for the same item.

If you choose to dropship your items to your customer, you still have the advantage of not having to store inventory or manage it. Your dropshipper will do that. You won't have to worry about mailing supplies or getting stamps either. So, going with third party to deliver your products is the easiest way to transform a virtual infoproduct business into a hard copy infoproduct business.

You can even use the physical format to help you sell virtual infoproducts on your own website, by giving your customers that information after they've place their physical order and received it. It may drive sales directly to your site if you tell them that, in the future, they can buy the same information in digital format directly from you. You do have to be careful not to violate the term of eBay's agreement that says you cannot offer a digital infoproduct as a free bonus. You won't have to worry about competition from eBay because they've banned that area from their site. This will help to steer customers away from eBay and to your site, where hopefully they will buy and download virtual infoproducts directly from you. By getting your website and name branded with the digital infoproducts, you get a boost in your self-promotion.

Depending on your dropshipper, they may have limits as to who they can send your products too. Some don't mind international orders and others don't do them. Always check with them ahead of time to know whether you need to tell bidders that only specific countries can bid. Otherwise, many dropshippers have developed distribution channels that are efficient and cheap. You can benefit from their knowledge without having to figure out how they do it so well. You simply pay a set amount for manufacturing and item and usually a monthly fee for dropshipping.

Cons

One of the biggest complaints about doing dropshipping is that you need to work with reliable companies. By allowing others to dropship your items, you lose control of the delivery process - which, as mentioned earlier, is key to maintaining good feedback. So, many people who are outsourcing the manufacture of their virtual infoproducts into physical products are opting to forgo dropshipping for their own inventory and delivery system at home. While this will definitely keep them in better control, you still have much less control of a delivery cycle when handling physical items than when you are allowing people to download virtual products. You have potential problems with the US mail system, increases in gas prices, and potential damage during delivery to your product. It is quite a bit harder to keep all these factors from causing one or two problems down the road for you.

There are additional costs to delivering a physical product, obviously, which just begins with the added cost of manufacturing and delivery. You may also want to add insurance to your packages (in case they get lost) and include extra packing material to make them resistant to damage along the way. A loss of the physical product translates into a direct loss of money for you, as you will have to eat the cost unlike virtual products which only require a new copy to be posted online without a direct cost to you.

You will not be able to create multiple physical infoproducts in unlimited quantity and, if you don't use print on demand services, you will have to estimate a quantity to print that you hope you can eventually sell. If you print too many, you may be left with some extra books lying around taking up space. It will also eat into your profits. If you print too few, you will not be able fulfill all the orders that come in on time and that will cause negative feedback to be posted on your account at eBay. The more you print at one time, usually the better deal you get per book or CD, so you should have a good idea how to have enough physical infoproducts you need to keep in stock to keep your inventory flowing smoothly.

Tracking inventory and keeping track of mail orders is a whole new skill set that you will have to cultivate that you didn't need to have with virtual infoproducts. It can be shocking to realize that there are so many tiny things that can go wrong from being out of envelopes, packing, infoproducts, or having trouble timing the post office so you don't waste hours in line.