A few words about selling knitted and crochet toys on ebay

ebay has been a part of our lives for many years now but in a recent ebay survey of 450 small British online retailers 49%  said that suppliers would not allow them to sell their goods on ebay, or tried to impose retail prices on them.

We have mixed opinions about this. As a toy wholesaler we would be daft to ignore one of the fastest growing sectors of the retail market, and we do have customers who sell purely through ebay and/or Amazon. Both ebay and Amazon offer an efficient and low cost way of starting a shop and testing your concept. However they have also gained a reputation of having a lot of discounters

The way we see it is this. All retailers have charges to pay before they can start making any money. If you have a high street store you have to pay rent, rates, electricity and staff before you can even start to make a profit. If you have an internet shop you have to pay for websites, credit card facilities, SEO, google ads and advertising to get your shop noticed. In order to have repeat customers they both must offer a wide and ever changing range of products

If you sell on ebay you have to pay Pay Pal and ebay charges, but there are 2 major differences and they are both centered around the fact that a certain % of people selling on ebay are doing it as a hobby or side line and not the main source of income

1. You do not have to have a wide range of products you can just pick the ones with the highest margin! If a clothes retailers sold just belts and t shirts they wouldn't get many customers. They have to sell the full range of clothing some of which are higher margin than others and cannot cherry pick
2. You do not have to care about the margin you make as long as it covers the ebay and paypal charges. If its a hobby then it doesn't matter if you just make 50p on a £20 sale whereas it certainly does matter if its your main business!

Mark Lewis, MD of ebay says that he is trying to "break the grip" large manufacturers have over internet sales.

We are not a large manufacturer, we are a soft toy manufacturer and wholesaler trying to give our retail customers a good product at a fair price. The only time we will fall out with people selling on ebay os if they discount our wholesale knitted and crochet toys.

So why are we so adament about discounting? Put plainly if you discount our fair trade crochet toys you are undermining the way the fair trade economic model works

That may sound overly dramatic but heres how it goes. Our good retailers buy our toys because they can sell a reasonable volume of toys at a reasonable profit. If the toys are then widely discounted either the volume drops as their retail price is uncompetitive or they can't make a profit at the reduced price. So retailers stop buying from us, we stop buying from the workers co-operative and Samantha cannot offer work to as many people.

For many people in Bangladesh the Pebble toys offer a way out of poverty. We are not going to let discounters threaten this

So a message to good retailers, if you see someone on ebay or anywhere on the internet discounting Pebble toys please email sales@bestyears.co.uk  and we will take steps to stop them. We will certainly not supply them again

Discounters. Don't buy fair trade toys. Its unethical