I had posted my Trading Assistant profile on eBay, and a local car dealership found it. The parts manager called me and explained he had a large quantity of car parts to sell. We met for lunch to discuss it, and it turned out great.
It turns out, that a fairly common practice at these car dealerships, is they buy parts, and after a few years they become "dated". So, they write them off the books and literally toss them in the dumpster.
Well this internet saavy parts manager would take his marked down parts and sell them on eBay. But it had become too much work while he was also trying to manage a multi-million dollar parts business. So, we came to an arrangement.
The deal - I would come to the dealership, photograph and log all the items. I'd go home and create the listings, and launch them in a store/and under a username I had created just for them. They paid all fees and they did all the shipping. I got a flat 20% of the closing value for my work. Again if you look around this is quite a departure from what most Trading Assistants do or what they charge, but it worked great. I didn't have to pack or ship the items, or store them. They felt comfortable because if it didn't sell I didn't make anything.
Was there an opportunity for me to do work and not get paid? Absolutely! But it built an incentive for me, and a relationship. A year later it turned into a multi-dealership car listing business with this same dealer group...but more on that later. So was it worth it? You bet!
I did learn a valuable lesson I'd like to share with you. As many of you know...just about anything can sell on eBay. And this dealership taught me just how true this was. One day I was in the parts managers' office, and on his desk was a standard sales brochure for a new Ford Mustang.
I was flipping through it while waiting for the manager to do something. When he saw me looking at it, he mentioned how the brochures were hard to come by, and he'd just received a box of 1000 or something like that. He laughed and said "we should sell them on eBay".
Well if you knew me, you'd know what I did. I jumped on his computer. You know what found? Car brochures for sale. Old ones, new ones. Every make and model. We weren't the first ones to think of it, but we put a twist on it. I told him, there were quite a few online already and they were selling for a few bucks. Not really worth the work to mail it out, after fees and my split.
Then the light came on. I went to the manufacturer website. They had the auto brochures for download in a .pdf format. Check one out HERE. What could be easier? We sold tons of auto-brochures on eBay, that were electronically delivered via email. No packing/shipping, nothing. An email - that's it! Then we started selling the accessories brochure in .pdf format and along with that we included a price list of what those accessories would cost them, and the special
"internet" price we were offering them. This resulted in the sale of the brochure and then the accessories. I still got a cut of the accessories and I never had to even take a single picture or ship anything. A few clicks of the mouse. That's the power of eBay! Then I went crazy. I found brochures for every make and model of car out there, domestic and foreign. Everything from Hyundai to Maseratti, Toyota to Ferrari. Many are even available in several languages including Spanish, Chinese adn Korean and more. There were very few people doing at the time so we listed them as store items and it cost us only pennies to do so.I love that story, because it truly exposes what's possible on eBay. Something for darn near nothing! That's my kinda' job. :o)
::Side note... I'm not sure if I was infringing on some copyright or anything like that. The dealers do give them away, but that's how it went down.
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