Open Proposal for Members of the Audio Geek Club

[OldiesButGoodies]

Great meeting yesterday.  Those JBL62s sounded really for the $10 I paid.

Here's an idea (to consider along along with Ron's fencing-post outdoors speakers!):

We all sell stuff on ebay to keep our addiction going.  As BMWR75 mentioned in a separate post,  ebay is now charging ridiculous seller fees (13%).

We could sell on Amazon by ourselves at 99 cents + referal,  but what about this instead - what if we all chip in each month to maintain a 'professional' store on Amazon?  It $39.95/month but you can sell as much as many things as you want.  The store could be "Tom's Vintage Audio Shack' or something like that:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-product-page.html/ref=mm_sys_soa_pro_rtnav?ld=AZSYHSOA

We would use that store front to sell stuff and get money to buy more stuff on ebay or CG.  If there are 15 or so regular members willing to pay, we are talking a measly $2.60/month. If we can get more members to pony up,  it would be even less. We could develop a nice brand out on Amazon,  with all kinds of services and parts sales to pay for the Torpedoes. And with Amazon already being part of the search engine optimization scheme,  googling for stuff would quickly lead to our store*.

Just a thought....

(could also be a bone fide agenda topic for the next meeting - we also need to start developing the prototype fence post speaker  )

Cheers,

Pepe

* There may be big holes in my proposal here,  but all can be filled with spackling compound and made bearable

[MasterBlaster]

It seems the referral fee applies to merchants as well.

The only thing it saves on is the .99 fee which is only worthwhile if you sell more than 40 items per month.

[OCCD]

I am game! Another thought is to open up a vintage hifi auction site.  The shopgoodwill.com site is a good model.

[bmwr75]

I don't sell enough stuff to help support an Amazon store.  Plus - am not sure Amazon gets a lot of vintage Hi-Fi buyer traffic.  At least I've never thought to look there for vintage Hi-Fi.  But, hey what do I know.   

[OldiesButGoodies]

Ok Ok - let me rethink this a bit.  Amazon s not perfect either.  A stand-alone website may be an option (but that is what Tom has now on the main site, to a degree) if managed to improve the probabilities of being found in google.  Will investigate this option.

[MasterBlaster]

 I missed that you were proposing an amazon store. I was looking at the ebay merchant agreement. Doh!

[Colinbgood]

I'm in!

[OldiesButGoodies]

I wrote a nice letter to Amazon a week and a half ago explaining the idea and they have not gotten back to me.  Will follow up again to see if I can get what the story is.  The basic issue seems to be that Amazon drives what they allow people to sell on the web site on the item's  UPC (Univ Prod Code).  As you can imagine there is not UPC for my old 1973-vintage Kenwood KA-6008.   So the next steps would be for me to create this item in their catalog - create a product detail page for whatever I am selling from scratch.  This is not a high-value adding activity for selling things that you have an inventory of  one! (i.e., vintage stuff).  So that is my question to Amazon - is there any flex there?  No answer so far.  Ebay in the meantimes is making a ton of money off of people selling ld items with no UPC code. 
 

Pepe

[typethisin]

Just an idea. A lot of people use facebook. You can create a facebook account for the store, get people to like it, be fans, refer others, have links to the store, add content from the web, pics videos, etc. This wouuld increase the traffic to the site for free. I know many local businesses that do this. They even post advertisements for up coming events on the facebook account. Just an idea. I'm new but informed. Hope this helps if u have not done it already.

[MasterBlaster]

Baby steps. Tom is still mastering the online store.
One more technical challenge may cause his head to explode.