‘The World’s

Greatest

Wholesaler?’

Special New Subscriber Bonus Report!

With Oliver Goehler

‘Auction Kommando’

A Private ‘Subscriber Only’ Report From Oliver Goehler,

‘Auction Kommando’

This report is copyright 2010 Information Mavericks Ltd. No part of this manual may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission of the

publisher.

Legal Notice: Whilst all attempts have been made to provide effective and reliable information with

regard to the subject matter, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for

errors, inaccuracies or omissions. It is also sold with the understanding that the publisher is not

engaged in rendering legal, accounting or any other professional service, and that this publication is

provided for educational purposes only.

Dear Reader, Okay, let’s get started! I believe that the upcoming ‘source’ I share with you could be the best Wholesaler in the World right now! We’ll see why throughout this report today. Okay, let me firstly ask you a question which is probably quite straightforward to answer and it’s simply this: Have you heard of Alibaba.com? (Don’t worry. That ISN’T the ‘Wholesaler’ I’m referring to today.) Now, I’m sure most people listening to this will have heard of Alibaba.com. It’s simply a big trade site. Now, you’ll be glad to know I’m not going to sit here and write about Alibaba.com, because pretty much everyone knows about its existence, I think. Alibaba is simply a middleman’s service where manufacturers can post out their products. You can go in there and search for practically anything you can think of, and then get in contact through the site with manufacturers. Now, there are a couple of issues with alibaba.com, not great issues if you are careful. And I still think it’s the best resource for sourcing the cheapest possible products on the face of the planet. But there are a couple of potential issues. Firstly, there are a lot of, not relatively, but in quantity, people that will rip you off. So, as an example, if you go out and try to buy branded stuff, then invariably it’s fake or other people will just run off with your money. Now, an easy solution for that is simply not to try and buy branded stuff like Apple Wi-Fi, Sony Playstations, Xboxes, that kind of thing - and just obviously be careful as well. Now, the second ‘catch’ that comes with it is that, in some cases, you have to buy in fairly large quantities. You might have to buy 100 units or something or 200 units or 500 or even 1,000 of something, if you’re going through a manufacturer. It’s not always the case because you can use trading companies and wholesalers through there, but it can be the case. So, below I’ve just included a quick sample picture from the ‘Beauty and Personal Care’ section of Alibaba.com.

Beauty And Personal Care From Alibaba.com You can go on there and you can search for any new product. You can just browse categories as well. So you can see in this picture, we’ve got everything here from artificial hair to body art to makeup tools to weight loss products. There are literally thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of products available on this site and at some of the best possible prices, as well. But there are a couple of issues as I’ve mentioned. Now, what we’d normally do if we are operating as ‘Kommandos’, if you like, to make money using alibaba.com, what we’d normally do is go on eBay.co.uk or online and find a market where people are already selling successfully.

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE: I will refer to selling on eBay throughout this

report. But that also means you can sell online, through websites, through Amazon.co.uk, or ‘offline’ through retail, through shows, or whoever else you may want to sell these products! It’s entirely up to you. But for the sake of EASE here, I will refer to selling them on eBay – the same principles apply though WHEREVER YOU decide to sell these products!

Then we go out after we’ve established that market, what the market is and what kind of products are selling well, we then go out and locate a product to sell into that market and use something like alibaba.com as a potential starting point for sourcing products. As an example, let’s just say, we go on eBay or online and there’s a great market for walkie-talkies on there. I’m sure there is. Now, we say to ourselves, “You know, this is a good market. People are selling successfully. There are not many sellers doing this, either. Now this is ideal.” If we can find a supplier for walkie-talkies, we can do something similar. But obviously, we need to find a supplier first.

So, invariably with a product like that, a kind of electronic device, invariably Chinese suppliers or manufacturers will have the best prices. So, Alibaba.com is ideal for us as a starting point to source products to get into that market. Frequently, as we know, China’s got a lower manufacturing cost so they usually supply the cheapest possible products in most but not all categories. So, I just ran a quick search on alibaba.com for walkie-talkie and sure enough a few different suppliers are coming up with literally hundreds of different products.

‘Walkie Talkie’ results from Alibaba.com

And we can see a powerful walkie-talkie, H280 walkie-talkie. It’s got a minimum order of 100 sets. The powerful walkie-talkie has got a minimum order there with 1 set. We can see there are plenty available here. And we can see the suppliers and then, we can look at the suppliers and see what else they’ve got available as well. They will almost certainly have other models of walkie-talkie so we could get different types in and start a whole business just selling walkie-talkies on eBay. Once we’ve done eBay we can sell through other online channels, websites, and so on. But some of them here have like 100 sets or 50 sets, minimum. And if we’re testing out a product or if we’re just wanting products to re-sell, you may want to just buy 5…just to take it slow and have a diverse product line as well. So, you buy 5 of this, 5 of something else, 5 of something else, and so on. So, what am I getting at here? Where am I going with this? Well, there is a new kind of innovation, if you like, that Alibaba just recently introduced. And it’s called Alibaba Express. You can go online. You go to Aliexpress.com – it’s a-l-i-express.com. And you can check it all out for yourself.

Aliexpress.com

Now, Alibaba traditionally has just been the middle man, if you like, in the sense that they will introduce or let you find suppliers. It’s a bit like Google, really, for products and suppliers. And they’ll hook you up then with various suppliers or you can do your own research from there. Now, AliExpress.com is a bit different because they’re actually now getting into the wholesale business. So, you can buy actual products through their Ali Express facility, and you can do so in very small quantities, as well. So, I’m not sure exactly what deal they’ve done but they’re not actually manufacturing it themselves. They’re still in a sense a middleman. But before now, you’d actually go on Alibaba and contact manufacturers and then do deals with them directly through e-mail, or phone or whatever. Now this way, through Ali Express, you just go on there and BUY PRODUCTS DIRECTLY. It’s like eBay almost but for manufacturers and wholesalers. You go on there and you can just buy directly through that site! You don’t have to do the ‘hard work’ of contacting manufacturers yourself, of getting in contact with them and sending payments and all that kind of thing, and , of course, as well as I’ve mentioned, the benefits as well is the very low minimum orders – 1 to 5 units or so for literally scores of thousands of different products (all through this new site, Aliexpress.com).

If you have not done so already, just have a look at this website Aliexpress.com. And you see at the top, it says, ‘Grand Opening’ at the top. And take a quick a tour now. So, you can go through and it shows you how exactly it is working. And on the first page as well, it’s got top categories – cellphones, computers, networking, and so on. And also, it has the top 5 wholesale items - sliding mobile phone is on that currently. Also, it’s got a bit more about escrow and buyer protection.

Okay. So, what I want to do now is just do a sample idea, if you like, just to see how it might work in practice. So what I’ve done is just take a sample product from eBay. There’s no particular reason for choosing this product at all, almost random. And you can see from the pictures, a glow-in-the-dark watch. It’s a fairly hot market. And you can see from these listings here, there are some branded ones and some ‘non-branded.

Glow in the dark watches on eBay.co.uk

So, there’s a hot market. People are making this pay by the looks of it. Now, you see, what you might do from here is you might firstly go and try to find a UK wholesaler or even a US wholesaler. But the better approach will be to go to Alibaba.com and try to find the manufacturer - because they’ll have a lower price obviously than a wholesaler. Now, the catch, if you like with that, is you might have to order a 100 or 1,000 or so for them to deal with you. You might not want to order that many. You might even have to order more than that. But with Ali Express now, we’ve got the potential to order much smaller quantities which enables you to get a foot on the ladder, if you like, much more easily. So, let’s take a look at the next shot of glow-in-the-dark watches up on Ali Express….

So, all I’ve done is type in ‘glow watch’ into the Search Bar on Ali Express. And as you can see from the page here, it has come up with 31 wholesale results in all regions for glow watches. And you can see prices by the looks of it; $1.21 for the top item and then the next item is $1.09. So, you’re looking at 70p, 80p. And you can see as well, it’s got time left remaining, “Time Remaining: 10 days” on these 2 on the page here. Now, I don’t know exactly how long these listings last. I’d imagine 30 days. I’m not sure why they’re using time limits but there we go. And you can see these items here that have a 100 pieces in their lot. So, that’s $121 in the case of the top lot. So, in this case, because it’s a cheap item, they’re packaging 100 but it is still only £77 to £80 or so. So, that’s not a great deal to start. Now if you went straight to a Chinese manufacturer, because it’s such a low-priced product, you might have to order 1,000 items. Now, chances are you don’t want to risk getting 1,000 in because what happens if they don’t sell as well as you hoped? But with this new Aliexpress.com, it’s a lot more manageable the risk because I’m sure you can see that by just buying 100 of these...well, it is only going to cost you £70 to £80 or so, which is not a great deal in the grand scheme of eBay trading. So, it’s a great low risk opportunity to try these products out and, of course, to source these kinds of products as well. And it’s not just about testing. It’s also about sourcing and finding good suppliers as well. So, the key point is we can get items cheaply but without the huge quantity - and we can get direct access to wholesalers, manufacturers in China. So all in, it’s a great resource by the looks of it. Now, the interesting thing about it actually in terms of its design lay-out is they appear to have just copied eBay directly. I’m not sure if there’s going to be any kind of legal challenge to this by eBay - but it’s remarkable how much they copied from eBay! Obviously, they’ve taken a proven formula and I’m sure they’ve done all the legal side of it and worked out that they can get away with it. But if you look at it, you’ll see how familiar it is to eBayers. And

for you if you’ve used eBay, it’s so ideal because you’ll see how familiar it is. Maybe that’s why they’ve done it. So, let’s just return to our watch example. I’ve got the glow-in-the-dark wristwatch again. You see, I’ve opened up one of our listings here and then just look at that page. Now, okay, the color is different than eBay but you can see how similar the layout is to eBay…

If you look at it they have the ‘Buy Now’ button, instead of the ‘Buy It Now’ button which eBay use. On the right it’s got ‘Supplier Details’; it’s got feedback, some positive feedback. It’s got ‘contact supplier’. The layout and the picture and everything, the way they price themselves, is all very, very much like eBay. And also, to point out as well they’ve even copied and used exactly the same term of ‘Best Match’ – eBay’s search algorithm. It’s the way that items (mostly now by default) appear in search results. So, if you type in ‘glow watch’ in eBay’s best match system, it brings up the most relevant items to your search. It’s their proprietary thing and appears that Ali Express has just swiped out that slogan. I’m not sure if the programming is the same but it seems to be laid out the same way as well. So the bottom line is it is pretty much like eBay, so you shouldn’t have too many issues hopefully, working out your way around the site. Now, one of the great things about the site actually is - if you look closely on this page - you can see the positive feedback the seller has got. And that’s the key point – it has feedback ratings. Now, one of the big issues for buyers of product to sell on eBay has been the reliability of the particular supplier you’re dealing with. Obviously, there’s a case of lack of information on our part because you don’t know whether that supplier is reliable. They’re in a different country often. So, you have to take a lot of interest and you have to get samples in. Now, this is a huge thing as well.

What Aliexpress.com has done is that they have introduced their own feedback system. And it works much better, I think, on this kind of level because transactions are much more regular. So if you’re dealing with a large manufacturer, you might only have a few key customers, that kind of thing. It might not be that they get regular feedback from loads of people. But because there’s much more frequent transactions on Aliexpress.com, and I suppose volume of buyers on here, this feedback system can work quite well. And another good point here as well, I want to point out, is you can see that there is a button in there in the previous picture that says, “View My Store.” So from there, we can see, we can view the store of the seller. Now, what’s the point on that? Well, if the supplier here is selling glow-in-the-dark watches, they’re going to have other models. They might have other products as well or other hot products that you can check out – combing shipping potentially as well. So, once you found your one good supplier, bingo! As a real-life example, I’ve got one particular supplier in China which supplies me with a product I’ve had for years. But they also stock; I should imagine off the top of my head, about another 30 or 40 products along a similar kind of line. Now, as it happens, I only order 3 – I’m trying to count – I think 3 products from this particular supplier. But I’ve got the option, if I want to, of getting another 20, 30 products from this particular supplier and that would be more than ample to last for a very long time. So, the point I’m making is once you’ve found a good supplier, you’ll have enough different products to last you forever, practically. So, there’s the advantage of having the “View My Store” button so you can check the other items they’ve got, potentially look into those and buying those in as well. Now, another feature of this site, and you can see from the pictures as well, is they’ve got something called ‘escrow buyer protection’. Now, just a quick explanation if you don’t know what an escrow is - it’s basically a holding facility. So, once you’ve sent the money for, let’s say, these watches, let’s say you sent £100, the escrow party will hold that money and be an impartial middle man. It is only when the products are shipped to you or maybe delivered and you’re happy with it that the escrow company, the guys in the middle, release the payment to the supplier. So, you can see the security of having an escrow service. Yeah, it’s basically a middle man, an impartial middle man, who holds the money whilst the transaction takes place and is consummated. So, it’s ideal and some further protection as well. You’ll also notice from the picture, coming back again to the glow-in-the-dark watches, you can set the quantity. You can have pretty much any quantity you want. You can have lots but you can choose as many lots as you want. Well, it has very low minimum orders, meaning anyone listening to this now should be able to get in and start ordering and trying these things out. And finally as well, another feature of the service is you get full secure tracking on the orders so you know when it’s shipped, where it is, and so on. So, take a look at this next picture

here. Now, this is one where it says, “Welcome to our store,” and it’s the store for the seller we looked at previously and it’s got, as you can see, some of the products. I’m not going through all of them. But they’re based in China and they’ve got 100% feedback scores so we can check them out as well. So, we can say, “Look who’s had the product from before. Has it been delivered? Were they happy with that seller?” Ideal way of checking out the supplier before we buy and now, we’re looking at their other products. So, they’ve got here some bands and another kind of watch and so on. So, this could be potential products as well. As I’ve said, once we have found that supplier and once we get a good supplier, then we can look to buy other products from them. I’m sure they will have other suitable products as well. So we can check the store out and we can check the feedback as well. Just looking at this seller’s feedback, they’ve got really good feedback from people all over the world. You can see, it even gives you the little flag to illustrate where the buyers come from and that they were satisfied with the purchase.

Sample feedback

So that’s obviously a very reassuring thing and again; it takes away the edge of having to worry about, “Is this supplier any good or not?” It’s a great thing, I think, this service and the way they’ve done it. Okay. So, let’s move on now and think about how you’re going to actually start doing this for yourself. Now, what is the thing to do once you’ve listened to this? You know about the existence of this site now. You’ve seen how potentially powerful it is for sourcing products and finding legitimate supplies. What do you do next? Well, the first thing you should really do is start with the market itself. It all starts on eBay.co.uk. It doesn’t start on Ali Express or alibaba.com or really anywhere else. It starts on eBay.co.uk and it starts with you finding those popular products which are already

selling well; seeing what’s working best on eBay at the current time – glow-in-the-dark watches is just one quick example, walkie-talkies is another one. But literally, thousands of products are out there on eBay that are selling extremely well now and will continue to sell. And in the future, other products may come in and start selling well for whatever reason – a change in fashion trends, a change in the economic circumstances, whatever. But we’re always coming back to looking at the market first, seeing what’s selling, what’s popular, and what are people buying now. I’m not making any really judgments about that

but just taking it at face value, I suppose. We’re going to see if we can get a similar product that’s preferably better in some way, cheaper in some way, offers a greater benefit in some way – well, preferably a combination of all those three things. And then, were going get that product in and describe it powerfully and list and market it well, as well. Now, with whatever you do or whatever market you’re going into whether it’s glow in the dark watches or whether it’s more conventional wrist watches, whether it’s – I don’t know – drill bits, whether it’s microphones, whether it’s phones that look like the iPhone, whether it’s cheap plastic bottles, whatever it is that you think you want to go into in which you can see on eBay selling well… …the key thing to do is test it first because as I’ve mentioned in the introduction, even with the best of intentions, you can’t always tell what’s going to work and what isn’t going to work. It just depends on so many different factors. And that, of course, is the benefit of using something like as Ali Express because you can order small. You can test out concepts very quickly, very cheaply. Or of course, you can use the testing method that I’ve mentioned in the introduction, my own personal testing method. But you can order small amounts on here. Well, what you might want to do is jump in and order a small one because if you get things really cheap on there, then what’s the worst that can happen - really? Unless you’ve really done something wrong you should be selling them for what you’ve paid for them. Even if you really screwed up, you can just put them on an auction format and list them really cheaply and get rid of them. Things have to be really quite, quite wrong for you to not be able to get your money back. So, with that in mind, you might want to just test a small lot out on the site Ali Express and go straight in rather using my quick-fire testing method. That’s up to you. Whatever you do, really, you want to be testing several concepts and products and listing them aggressively to find that initial winner or find that second, third, fifth, tenth winner wherever you are now with your eBay career. So, you want to be testing out different concepts, different ideas, and not really doing what I’ve said earlier, the fallacy of the one-product one-listing which is unfortunately all too common. You don’t want to just get in one product and list it once, in one category and then, just kind of forget about it if it doesn’t work. Think about how you’re going to promote it, how you’re going to list it, in what category are you going to list it, are you going use a “Buy Now” or are you going to use an auction form with a “Buy Now” attached - or are you going to just use an auction and let it run with no reserve? You want to be testing different ways of doing it and you want to be using a powerful description. Remember, that whatever you’re selling really needs a good description or, if not, a good description, at least a really great picture. I use, as an example, the glow-in-the-dark watch. Okay, that might not need a stellar description written by a top copywriter because it’s such a visual thing. People are buying it really for what it looks like. So, with a product like that then make sure obviously you’ve got a really great, crisp picture of the product and, of course, a nice little description as well. But with selling other products – maybe like a walkie-talkie – yes, you need a picture but also, I think, you need a really good description as well outlining how it works, how it’s better than anything else, the

dimensions and the capacities and features and benefits of it. You can’t do that very well with a glow-in-the-dark watch because it’s just there, just existing and it doesn’t really have that many benefits to it. But in instances where there’s a lot to describe, if you like, then you should really go all out and create a lengthy, and rich, and full of benefits, description. And obviously, as we say, aggressively promote in those categories using different approaches – “Buy It Now”, auctions, and so on. Just some warnings here about using the site and just, in general, as well, using potential suppliers in China. And this applies as well to this Ali Express. Now, generally speaking, I avoid personally buying in branded stock from China. What do I mean by branded stock? It’s simply a product with a brand on it. So, Apple is an example of a brand or GHD or Nike. Any branded stock, I avoid buying from China because invariably it turns up and it’s fake. Or it doesn’t turn up at all unfortunately in some cases. And that would apply as well to the Express. I personally wouldn’t buy ‘branded’ stock on there for these reasons. (If it does turn up though, people might not even realise that it’s actually, unfortunately, a fake. And they might go even for months or years selling that without realizing it was even a fake.) So, don’t go on there and think, “I’m going to buy three Apple iPhones or two Playstation 3’s and an Xbox,” because they may be dodgy. Often enough, they’ll probably be fakes in some way or there’ll be something not quite right with them. Now, as you’ve seen, we looked up glow-in-the-dark watches and those aren’t branded, they’re just kind of generic glow-in-the-dark watch, no brand on it. In my opinion the non-branded side of things - that’s the better approach, I think. You’re pretty much assured of not getting a fake because there are no unbranded fakes. There’s no brand on it so it can’t really be a fake of anything. And those people that supply a number of new products are usually much more legit than the people that purport to offer the real brands. So, generally speaking, stay away from the branded stuff. Go straight to stuff without the brands - the generic stuff and non-branded products Second warning: even though this is a small buyer’s site, don’t go out and rush in and buy 100 of something straightaway. Test multiple products and concepts. And that’s the huge advantage of this site. You can test those things easily which you can’t as easily do perhaps if we’ve got something like alibaba.com, the main trade site. Make sure you use a secure payment method. Now, they’ve got the escrow service on here but use something like a credit card or PayPal if you can. Why? Because if something does go pear-shaped for whatever reason, you know, maybe the ship goes down or something over the Pacific! And what do you do? Well, at least you’ve got something. If you pay with your credit card or PayPal, you can reverse it. So, make sure you use a secure payment method. And don’t try and transact off the site. So, don’t kind of let someone say to you, “Can you

send me this as a money transfer at Western Union or something like that?” without being them subjected to feedback because that’s asking for trouble. So, bear that in mind as well. But don’t get put-off by these warnings. It looks, anyway, to be a great source of products. So, be ready to investigate and don’t get bogged down in the warnings but just take note of them, anyway. So, what to do now? Which products are you going to go for? Well, I’m not going to choose the exact products. Yes, we have given a couple of examples throughout this today. But I’m not going to go and give you a list of 5 products now because it’s really pointless doing that on this kind of small scale. And it’s much more fun as well for you to go out and just do the research for the sake of an hour or so looking around. You can find your own thing and have your own product rather than me just introducing something that a dozen or two dozen other people are going to try in exactly the same way. So, go on eBay and see what’s hot. As I’ve said, find those markets and then go on this Ali Express. There are thousands of products on there to choose from and actually hundreds or maybe even thousands of suppliers who are eager to supply you with these quality products, these saleable products. Get into those hot markets and get on here and test several out. Don’t do the one product, one listing mistake. Once those products have come in (and they’re usually quite quickly here), then list them powerfully with a good description, a good title, and using different formats. Take a good picture if you can. Or if you can’t, then simply use the supplier’s pictures if they’ve got them. They should be fine with you using their pictures because obviously, that ultimately is going to increase their sales as well because you’re buying from them. So, you can see how it’s all mutually beneficial to everyone, really. To Ali Express, they’ll get a commission no doubt. For the supplier because they’ll get access to customers that otherwise they might not have access to. And to you because you get products and the source for the product that you otherwise might not have been able to tap into. So, as you can see, I’m quite enthused with this new Ali Express service. And I urge you to get on there, have a look for yourself because this could really be a great way of kicking off your eBay career! And one final thing about this: if you’re already well-established or if you get well-established after using this site, you can use it as well just as a pure testing mechanism. If you’re kind of really going for it, like I mentioned before, I got 10 products to test, you could get maybe 20 products to test from here. Test them all out on a small scale. Once you’ve determined, however many of them will work, then go to the big manufacturers, get huge orders going, to get even lower prices again. So, that’s another option as well if you’re now already well-established using this as a great source of buying a small amount of product and testing very, very many concepts, very quickly and to expand your product line. But regardless of that, if you’re just starting now, it’s a great way I think to get started and just to get involved in the whole online trading and selling and buying business without a

great deal of risk; without scouring all over the place for different suppliers. It’s quick and it’s easy.

IMPORTANT NOTE AS MENTIONED EARLIER!

I’ve talked about using eBay throughout this report, but as I mentioned earlier you don’t need to sell on there! There are tons of other ways to use this wholesaler – selling offline, on Amazon or through your own, independent website. The choice is yours!

So stop reading this now. Get into some hot markets online OR offline. And then get on this Ali Express – take the tour, investigate some of the sellers, see what they’re selling, get that first product or products in, take it from there. I’d love to hear of your success stories using this new service. Thank you!

Best Of Luck, Oliver Goehler ‘Auction Kommando’