I just came back from Yiwu China, and a couple other HUGE marketplaces in China. While there, I was amazed at the prices of quality clothing and I am NOT talking about knock-offs, and often struck up conversations about buying in large amounts and getting a good discount. Vendors were often more than happy to start selling to me at discounted prices. I took home catalogs, got website information from small (and usually poorly made and designed websites) and kept our agreed prices.

I narrowed it down to several pieces of clothing and accessories, and got eBay market data from TP (Not sure if I can put a link here?) to show that things would sell and how quickly they sold, and all of that kind of data. So, I made a $600 purchase which included customs tax, and shipping, and listed everything up on eBay.

After all of the fee's (man I dislike eBays fees) and some slight trial and error, I managed to sell everything and my $600 initial investment became about $1500 in profit after all overhead. (I'm doing everything in my apartment, and man am I thankful for Thermal Label Printers!!!!)

So, now I've got about $2,000.

(I have a full time job making about $2,000 a month, and next to no bills.)

Should I reinvest this $2,000 into more inventory and keep on doing what I am doing?

or should I go through the catalogs and such and list products that research data shows that has a good chance of selling for a profit, and once my eBay customer buys the product, I purchase the product from China, and have it sent directly to my customer? This would allow me to list thousands of items.

Problem is:

With eBay, you don't lose money if you start your listing for 99 cents or less and the item gets no bids and doesn't sell. No fee's. However, if I get bids for something to the total of say $12.20, but the item costs $14.00 to get, I instantly lose money and have to pay about 12% to eBay/PayPal in fee's. This would obviously be bad, but because my profit margin is pretty high and because clothing on eBay is generally in high demand and the "sell through" rate is high, my profits from one item might make up for my loss of two items, and still allow me to see a small profit. I THINK I would like to operate like this until I earn about $40,000 in profit. With this $40,000 in profit, I could save a LOT more money by using Sea Freight (Container Shipping) which would cost me about $4,000 leaving me with $36,000 to spend on products that I have found to sell well, and more products in general. With this inventory, I would keep listing my products on eBay, Amazon, Bonanzle, eCrater, eBid, etc while ALSO purchasing Liquidated Goods so that I can sell Brand Name Clothing which increases traffic to even my non-name brand clothing that I am getting from China. Using all of these selling platform, I would launch a pretty basic but well designed eCommerce website (most of which I already have planned out) and try to pull as much traffic from those platforms as I can and pointing them to my eCommerce website with offers of a discounted price that would actually be less than the percentage of my profits going towards those platforms. (For example, I would send a 10% OFF YOUR NEXT PURCHASE coupon if you buy at MYECOMMERCEWEBSITE.COM which would save me money because I am normally spending about 12% on eBay)

Is this too risky? Should I just try this out with say $6,000 of my own money and keep up an inventory until I reach the level in which shipping by sea would benefit me?

Please give me some input.