Businessmen: How much should I resell a record for if I want maximum realistic profit?

You need to look at your expenses: your time, cost of shipping, cost of acquiring stock, advertising, etc. Typically, the time period used is a month.

Then you need to estimate the amount of sales you will make for the month. Then you divide the number of units of sale into your expenses to get the amount you need to charge to break even. Then you add to that in order to make a profit.

Of course, your sales will change based on the price you charge. The more you charge, the less you will sell, in general. You need to find the price point at which you maximize profits by selling the most while losing the fewest sales.

You can mess with this by paying yourself less or not even paying yourself anything at all. It all depends how you value your time.

Usually people build a spreadsheet to model all these factors. They also generate what-if scenarios to see how they would do at different price points and sales levels.

Typically people research the prices other people are selling records of a similar type for. If you think you can make money selling for less, then you are in a good position. If you can think you can get people to pay more because you offer better quality or service, then that’s a good sign, as well.

This makes me think I could make money developing business plans for people. I think people would have to pay me in advance, though.

[Disclaimer: I have an ebay store]

Supply vs. Demand will help you set the price. Since you want to sell on ebay, I can tell you your best bet will be to research what the going price for each record is.

You can do this by looking at the completed listings for each record.

You will need to make at least 50% profit to break even with your expenses. Obviously, you’ll always need to get as much profit as you can while still being reasonable enough to get customers to want to buy from you.