I would like to share one of my “Make money online” ideas with you that I implemented about 3 years ago, it was pretty damn clever. It all started when I began to sell stuff on eBay. I just started selling random shit around my house, old Pokemon cards, Video games, etc. Well I started to talk a lot about my ventures on eBay and a co-worker of mine, who was an avid antique collector/buyer/seller approached me one day about selling some stuff for him for commission. I figured, hell why not? So as the days past and I kept listing more and more of his items I started to notice that he was turning a huge profit. We worked for a delivery company and every day on his delivery route he would stop (unknown to our boss of course) at various flea markets and antique store and buy more stuff. Buy low, sell high. So as I got more and more curious, I worked up the courage to ask him to teach me how he selects what items to buy and how to spot a deal. He agreed and I started to tag along with him to flea markets and auctions on the week ends. Well, we began to buy all kinds of stuff, china, furniture, coins, lighters, cast iron pots (which were super profitable) and just about anything else you can imagine. So, one day we were at a flea market and I spotted something out of the corner of my eye, buried under all sorts of random crap. It was a huge, store display SURGE (the drink) cooler. It was in two parts, mounted on rollers, about 6 foot tall, and shaped like an old school bottle of SURGE. I loved Surge when I was a kid and I just had to have the damn thing. So I ran up to the front of the flea market and asked how much it was, the old man at front with his cane in one hand and spit cup in the other somehow communicated to me that he wanted $30 for the cooler. Well I know better than to go with the first offer and was able to haggle him down to 20 bucks. It was mine!
When I got the cooler home and cleaned up, I showed it to all my friends who used to drink Surge (which is like every kid growing up in the late 90s) and they went crazy over it, “What a badass cooler man!”. Well as time went by and the coolness of the cooler wore off, it kinda became annoying and began to take up to much space. So obviously I hopped on eBay to see if anyone was selling SURGE related stuff. HOLY CRAP! Surge had a HUGE cult following on eBay and the internet. People were buying and selling old Surge memorabilia and even old out dated cans/bottles full of Surge for TONS of money. I believe I once saw a single out dated can of Surge go for well over 15 bucks (here is some being sold now: SURGE on eBay. My cooler could be worth a TON of money!
The Research
So I quickly began to search for anything and everything about surge on the Internet and eBay. Old SURGE signs and hats were very valuable. However, the most valuable discovery was a website called SaveSURGE.org. This site was going to be my way into the community that would let me profit enormously off of my SURGE cooler. So I signed up for the forums, and started making a few posts. In the meantime I had started to set up my auction for my huge surge cooler and discuss with the post office on which ways would be best to ship such a large item. After about a week I was ready. I listed my item starting at $.99 and let her loose, making sure to promote the awesome item at Savesurge.org. Holy shit! People went crazy! No one had seen anything like it before on eBay, the bids came rolling in! I believe when all the dust had settled, the auction ended at around $310 with $50 shipping. Someone had made a $360 investment on my $20 investment. Needless to say I was shocked.
The Epiphany
After the auction was over and the cooler had been shipped (which was crazy hard to do), I sat there wishing I had an unlimited supply of random SURGE stuff laying around my house, what a gold mine it could be. I mean the soda that I had drank almost every single day when I was a kid was now worth its weight in gold! Oh well. As the days passed I would every now and again visit good ol Savesurge.org and read their articles about one of my favorite drinks. Well, one day while reading I noticed that there was a huge buzz about Coca-Cola’s new drink called Vault. It was supposed to be SURGE’s twin! Upon further research I found out that the drink was going to be test marketed in only a few states. Oh hells ya, luck was on my side. Out of the 7 states chosen for test marketing, Alabama was one of those states. How could I be so lucky! It was obvious what I had to do next. I had to try and sell it!
Time to prepare!
The release of Coca-Cola’s new SURGE look alike was only about a week off, I had a lot of work to do! I clicked on over to the Savesurge forums, where I was now a staple part of the community and started to get a feel for what the demand for this stuff was going to be in “Vault locked” states. All 7 of the test states were in the East, leaving out the whole western US, the market was going to be huge for this stuff! Now that I knew what I wanted to do, I had to find a way to ship this stuff. How many would I sell in an auction? How much would I charge for them? Was this really going to work? The problem with Vault is that the full bottle is really heavy, and I wanted to sell more than one bottle at a time. Let me introduce Mr. Flat Rate Box from the US Postal service. This was the solution for my problem, I could put bricks in this box and ship them to anywhere in the U.S. and it would still only cost me $7.70 ($8.95 now days). The best part was that these boxes were absolutely free, so I went ahead and ordered 20 of them so I would have them ready for Vault Launch Day. The other cool thing about these boxes is that 8 standard sized bottles (Mt.Dew, Coke, whatever) could be squeezed in snugly.
I love eBay!
So now that I have shipping taken care of, I just have to get my auctions ready. I knew all the information I wanted to include, I just lacked pictures, now it was just a matter of time until I am in business! Well, the day arrived, and every store and gas station in town was loaded with tons of Vault, and the best part was that it was all on sale for $.89. I eased on down to my local grocer and bout myself 12 brand new Vault sodas. Next, I immediately arranged them in various ways and took all kinds of great pictured for eBay. I made one auction template and decided that I would simply just duplicate it over and over again if need be. Before I listed my Vault I did a quick search to see if anyone else had realized the potential in the idea and got a head start on me, NOPE I was going to be the first, the pioneer! But first I had to decide on a price…..
Well my shipping was going to cost me $7.70 and the Vaults were going to be 8*.89 = 7.12 so right there each auction was going to cost me $14.82 not to mention eBay/paypal fees which were like another 2-3 dollars because I wanted to use buy it now. So basically MY cost was going to be around $17.00, not to bad I guess. So what should I charge for them? What are soft drinks worth to someone who is craving a taste from their past? Taking the hype over at SaveSurge.org into account, I decided to price them for 39.99 with FREE shipping. $40 for 8 drinks. I stood to make 23 bucks a pop. Would people buy them? I put up 3 auctions and headed over to a friends house to hang out, hoping that when I got back one would have sold.
The DEMAND!
When I got back home after 3 hours or some at my friends house I was extremely surprised to see that all 3 auctions had been bought with Buy It Now, but not only were they bought, they were bought by three separate users within 30 minutes of me putting them up! I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT! I quickly threw 10 more auctions onto eBay and started to pack the 24 bottles I had already sold. I also put in for another order of 40 Flat Rate boxes to usps.com. OMG This was working!
The next day.
As I figured, people were going crazy trying to get their hands on Vault. I had probably sold another 7-8 auctions during the night! That’s a lot of Vault! Damn,I had to go to school so the Vault project was going to have to wait until I got home, but I went ahead and put up another 10 Auctions. That day at school I told my friends what I was doing and none of them believed me until I actually showed them it was working! The word spread fast! Teachers, people’s parents, and other students were amazed at my ingenuity. When I got home from work at 4, (I worked an hour each day after school) I only had an hour to get all this vault shipped, I had like 10 orders. Somehow, within an hour I managed to buy enough Vault to ship all the orders that had been placed the previous day. When I got on my computer I had sold a few more auctions worth of Vault, this was amazing and I was making a TON of money, $23 bucks a pop and over the next week I was selling an average of 5 a day. That’s a lot of damn money! I was buying my small town out of Vault, in fact I started buying it buy the case to get price breaks! I was cutting my bottom line! This was especially necessary because I was starting to get a ton of competition (SHIT!). These “assholes” on eBay were undercutting me for 1-2 bucks and stealing all my sales, GREAT! So obviously I would lower my prices to compete and they would bounce right back, ah free market economy! There went my monopoly! As the prices wars continued over the next couple of weeks, the prices finally settled around the mid 20’s range, so my 39.99 auctions were now selling for 24.99 =( bummer.
A Ray of HOPE!
Though I had developed some competition on eBay, I was still the dominant seller of Vault on eBay. I had a loyal following from Savesurge.org and they even featured some of my auctions on the front page. However, prices still continued to fall as did my profit margin. Amazingly, as if out of no where I get a phone call. It was from a customer of mine who had bought some Vault out in Washington. The person on the phone said that they like my ingenuity and that they owned a small Energy Drink Company called Gorilla Juice, to be honest with you I really didn’t believe him. He also had noticed the price drops of my product on eBay and he saw a way in which he could possibly help me get an edge, while at the same time help himself and his company. He said that he would send me all the free Gorilla juice that I wanted if I would replace one of my 8 Vaults in my boxes with one of his drinks. This was great! If I could use people’s curiosity of a new drink, such as Gorilla Juice to get more attention, then this could be the edge on my competition that I was looking for. The person on the phone said that when I got home from school the next day I would have 3 cases of Gorilla Juice and a free T-Shirt sitting on my door step. I did not believe him.
Gorilla Juice
The person on the phone was a man of his word! When I got home the next day there were three huge cases of G-Juice sitting on my door step. The drink was in a glass bottle and the box was absolutely HUGE, and very heavy. So I popped open a bottle and took my first sip of Gorilla Juice. Wow, it was really good! The taste was very unique and very refreshing, there is no way to describe it really, you just have to try it. After trying Gorilla Juice, I was more than happy to pop some into the boxes of Vault that I was sending out. So I revised my auctions to say stuff like *BONUS* and *EXTRA DRINK* to catch the searchers eye. I also added a ton of info and picture into my listing about Gorilla Juice. After doing this, I still wasn’t sure if it was going to help me with my competition problems. Amazingly….IT WORKED! Only 1 day after throwing in G-juice I noticed sales really start to pick up, and not only that but the price war was over and I HAD WON! Over the next couple of weeks I pretty much just got tired of fooling with Vault and decided to stop doing it, it was consuming a lot of time. The main things that I took away from this experience with eBay and Vault was all the cool things that I learned about marketing and incentives. This was probably a defining moment in my life that helped me catch the marketing bug.
Wow, that was one hell of a post! I will probably mention a few more things about my Vault experience in the future, so stay tuned! I also plan to add some pictures.
