Ecomm Challenge Day 5 — Confidence. Can I make just 1 sale?

LostSociety
Ecomm Challenge
Published in
3 min readAug 30, 2017
Photo by Jeremy Paige

In the introduction of this publication I stated that I had never sold anything online and that is true. I have bought many things, but as far as I can remember I cannot think of anything I have actually sold including on Ebay. For my own confidence, I thought it was important to sell at least one item before I go to the effort of building a site and uploading products to it.

I decided to go with the Lifefactory Water Bottle. I have seen lots of people with them recently, they seemed reasonably priced and the company has an ethical stance on production and product. They also have coffee cups, babies bottles, as well as food storage products. Lots of scope to expand into different product ranges. The first thing I did was drop them an email to see whether they would consider a drop shipping arrangement. I noticed they had a direct shop on Amazon and were using Amazon Fulfilment Services.

Next I selected one of their bottles which had good reviews, and was on Amazon prime - Lifefactory 16oz. Beverage Bottle Graphite (475ml) (Affiliate Link). I then wrote my own product description and features based on the Amazon listing and the Lifefactory site.

I then did some sums to see whether I could sell this product at a very small profit based on the Amazon prime listing:

I then created a 24 hour listing on Ebay and including free postage & packaging as an additional incentive:

I went through the same process for Facebook:

And also depop, which I think could be an interesting route to market at a later stage:

Guess what?

At the time of writing no sales. This is now starting to make me question all of my assumptions. I have posted the Facebook marketplace ad in a number of groups (maybe they are the wrong ones), relisted the Ebay item, which didn’t sell after 24 hours and started following a number of Yoga and Fitness related profiles on depop to no avail.

My Ebay listing still has until 4pm today to run (30th Aug 2017), but it looks unlikely it is going to sell as it has only had 3 views since I had to re-list it.

What do I do now? Do I continue this challenge?

At this point I would really appreciate your input. If you would like to help me in my challenge please leave a comment, or message me below.

I’ve also now set up a Messenger bot, so if you’d like to get regular updates about the E-Commerce Challenge subscribe here

If you want to read earlier articles in this publication, you can subscribe to The Ecomm Challenge here.

Contact

If you want to chat with me you can reach me on messenger.

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LostSociety
Ecomm Challenge

A media consultant at a global company, but toying with more practical marketing ideas. http://about.me/talintyre