Thursday, 27 November 2008

How to caluculate whether your in profit with your ebay sellings?

Ideally I'm trying to come up with a quick and easy way to calculate whether my ebay sellings are earning me any profit. However, to do this accurately I'm going to have to include the amount I spend on packaging and stock.

From that I'll have to take in to count stock / packaging I haven't sold.

So that starts sounding complicated already.

Then theres ebay fees, where there is a monthly statement. The paypal where these fees as well as payments.

by
JM

4 comments:

  1. For completeness, I wanted to add this recent IM conversation.

    Blue> i tend to calculate price per item from a supplier order
    Blue> i.e 100 items + postage = £30 / 100 = 0.30p
    Blue> then add up ebay fees for particular auction + paypal fees + actual postal costs
    Blue> then minus items sold * 0.30p from the above.

    Blue> i tend to work mine out a bit lazely
    Blue> basically i look at monies withdrawn over a period
    Blue> minus any stock ive purchased from supplier direct from bank
    Blue> and thats my profit
    Blue> but i try now as much as poss to pay all supplier bills with paypal
    Dispy> good idea

    Dispy> I guess all I need to do really is read in fee information from ebay
    Dispy> and add my costs to my orders system
    Blue> you would need to analyise the fees
    Dispy> then it should be easy
    Blue> calcualte sale prices from the listings
    Blue> ebay api
    Dispy> I read all the info from paypal at the moment
    Dispy> and I have to add details about my listings by hand
    Blue> paypal part is easy
    Dispy> but I hardly ever have new listings
    Blue> fee = 20p + 3.4%
    Blue> in fact
    Blue> selling manager pro can do what you need.
    Blue> although thats a monthly fee
    Dispy> what about paypal fees ?
    Blue> i would calc that manually
    Blue> check your rate which im guessing is 3.4% of the received price + .20p

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  2. For completeness, after more chats with Blue...

    If we use PayPal for everything, looking at the balance this would give us a profit from our eBay activities.

    To make this more accurate, we had discussed paying for stock and packaging from paypal too.

    However unused stock would have to be carried over.

    I've since been thinking, if we provide a cost against each item or each type of item we sell, maybe break this down into postage etc. I know I could run this against my ordered database and produce
    an accurate cost of stock / packaing, then I just need to minus this from the paypal balanace per month

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  3. Sounds like you need an accountant, or at least a good book-keeping package. I could always ask my pet accountant to recommend a package if you like.

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  4. Ah its ok, got it all worked out now :)

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