My Simplx Investigation

I know this is long, but I know that there alot of people that have or are starting eBay stores and I feel like there is some good info here for those that it will apply to...

So I looked into this company some more. Its one of those sounds to good to be true companies that will help you make a monthly income you can live off of by selling stuff online, like on eBay. Their whole spill is that you pay them $40 or so a month and they give you access to their database. Which is basically a database of a whole bunch of websites like Amazon-ish. (I'm using Amazon as an example just because everyone knows what it is.) Anyway, they give you access to this huge list of websites that sell tons of different products at discount prices.


You know how you can go on Amazon and get stuff cheaper than you can at Best Buy. They tell you to find a 'niche', some specific product or category of products that you want to sell. So you pick your 'niche', for example, iPhone accessories. I decide I want to sell accessories for iPhones on eBay. So I go the Simplx database and do a search for iPhone accessories, it pulls up Amazon and whatever other websites similar to Amazon that sell such accessories. So now that I know that I can get these accessories from this Simplx database, I'm supposed to go and list them for sale on my eBay store. When someone buys an accessory from me on eBay and their payment has gone through, I then go back to the Simplx database and pull up all the places that sell such accessories. I buy one from this company and then during checkout when it asks for the shipping address I put the buyer from eBay shipping address instead of mine.

So they bought it from me through eBay, they paid me, I buy it from Amazon and put their shipping address telling Amazon to ship it to them instead of me.



Now as far as how you actually make money with this company, they tell you there are two possible ways to make money with them.

1. You can mark up the price of the product. Say you can buy an otterbox from Amazon for $29.99 and $5.99 for shipping, thats a total of $35.98. So you can mark it up and sell it on eBay for $35.99 plus $6.00 shipping. If it sells then you get paid $41.99 giving you a profit of $6.01. If you sell 10 of these, you've made $60.10 for not really doing anything but listing it on ebay.

Not a bad deal huh?

But this is what the average person or a new eBay seller doesn't think of...

You have to pay eBay fees and if you use PayPal, you have to pay PayPal fees. Ebay has a listing fee and a final value fee when your item sells. Listing fees vary depending on what type of listing you choose. I used to pay $.05 for a store inventory listing fee, however, eBay has now raised that to $.20. So anyway, my listing fee on an otterbox selling for $35.99 would be $0.20 and when it sells I would be charged a final value fee of 12% I believe (those vary too depending on the category of product). If my calculations are correct, the final value fee for this otterbox would be $3.88 and the Paypal fee $1.56. So that is a total of $5.49 that it costs you to sell this otterbox. That takes your profit of $6.01 to an actual profit of $.52. Your still making a profit which is great but the amount of your profit, not so great. So if you sell 10 of these your real true profit would be $5.02; not quite the $60.10 that I thought I would make at first glance. So its not much but its still a profit; its $5.02 that I didn't have before.

2. The second way you make a profit with Simplx is that they give you a rebate on the things you buy through their database. They say that you can get up to a 13% rebate on some of the items you can buy through them. The trick is finding the things that you can make 13% on. Simplx says they give you access to thousands or millions of products, depending on how much you pay them monthly. So really do you want to search through thousands or millions of products to hopefully find one that will make you 13%? Most of them only make you between 1%-6%.

There are many other web sites out there that work the exact same way as this only they are free. For instance, I am actually a member of Blastoff and was long before I ever heard of Simplx. With Blastoff, say I want to buy something online from Target. I login to Blastoff and then go to the Blastoff “Mall” and click on Target. When I buy something from Target by getting there through the Blastoff Mall site, I earn a 2% rebate on my purchase price from Target. So I spend $30 (before tax), I earn $0.60. Not much, but if you do all your online shopping from this site it adds up. Another thing is that with Blastoff you can invite people to join the site. When they sign up through your Blastoff site they are put in your network and you also earn a percentage when they buy something through Blastoff! Click Here To Learn More About Blastoff



So my conclusion is that I don't doubt that you can earn money through the Simplx system. What I doubt is how much money you can actually make and how long it will take you to make that much money. From the numbers I have used as examples on here it would take A WHOLE LOT of sales to even pay my electric bill, much less be enough to be my sole monthly income. You would have to sell a ton of different products and the thing is that people have to go to your store to buy them... Now if you are buying from Amazon and marking the price up, why would someone buy from you instead of Amazon. More than likely the product is going to be found easier from Amazon than your store. Even if you sell it for the exact price you buy it from Amazon for, you still have to pay eBay & PayPal fees. The little bit of a rebate you get from Simplx would probably barely be enough to cover those fees if it would even cover those fees. So in that case your really not making any money. It would take a lot of time and research and figure out which products actually make you good money. Simplx claims to train you and work with you to help you find the products that make you good money. I have to wonder about this because when I talked to Chris from Simplx and I asked more about the "training"; the way he explained it was basically you call into a conference call once a week and its like a group training. Unless you pay them more money and then I think you can get a little bit of one on one. They give you a 7 day free trail period. Sorry but 7 days is not enough time to find the good money making products and list them on eBay AND get them sold. Your prices are just not going to be low enough, and if they are its costing you money to sell it.



eBay has just raised their fees way too much, its hard to make any money at all on eBay anymore. That is the reason I started using eBid.net, With eBay you have to pay listing fees whether your product sells or not. Not with eBid. With eBid.net you only pay fees if you your product sells and they actually have ways to list items without paying any fees at all!! Here Is My eBid.net Store