DSF

I totally understand where you're coming from with this. If they are selling them on ebay can you not get friends and family together to buy a few then give them negative feedback saying the items were poorly printed, damaged or never arrived. For the price they are selling them at I'm pretty sure they'll not be offering tracking in their free postage, so it's just your word against theirs, and the buyer always wins on ebay.

Oh dear, naughty tactics, fraud and deception spring to mind here, never mind the charge of inciting someone to commit a crime!!

I have seen a number of the cheap and chearful sellers on both eBay and Amazon come and go. You may be right in the fact that they may be poorly printed, and I wonder if they can keep it up for too long, after all they cannot be making much profit and they will have to pay someone to do them etc.

I ahve been to Coralgraphs place and it is not that big, soeither they have move a load of stock out or are using somewhere else to print and send the orders out, which will add to their overheads.

It just seems very naive to risk your main business by annoying your returning customers. We spend £10,000s with suppliers, I wonder if he'll make that profit back in naff mugs should people decide to buy from his competitors instead?

Sad to say you might be deluding yourselves if you think they can't keep it up.
Even at their volume vat inclusive wholesale prices the mug costs them 77p, the polystyrene mailing box 40p and maybe 15p for a transfer. That is £1.32 (including vat) before you factor in what they are actually paying as importers.
In reality, their direct costs are probably little more than £1, the premises and staff are already being paid for.
They are likely using a logistics company to benefit from Royal Mail volume discounts, so postage will be less than you or I would pay.
Chances are they are earning nearly £2.50 a mug contribution to their fixed costs. Not massive, but enough as an extra income, for some.

Anyone ordered one of their mugs to see which mugs they're using and what postal service? With the eBay and Amazon percentage costings, surely they cannot be making a lot per mug?

Factor into that VAT, breakages, etc.

I know we certainly couldn't be doing them at £5.88 a mug.

Ebay charges low due to store type, paypal charges low due to volume postage low due to volume, etc etc. The profit is there.

webtrekker;121094 wrote:I totally understand where you're coming from with this. If they are selling them on ebay can you not get friends and family together to buy a few then give them negative feedback saying the items were poorly printed, damaged or never arrived. For the price they are selling them at I'm pretty sure they'll not be offering tracking in their free postage, so it's just your word against theirs, and the buyer always wins on ebay.

The above just about sums you up.

Even if the fees take the profit below £2, Coralgraph are wholesalers. £2 on a £5.88 sale is probably higher than any other margin on their site.

pw66;121100 wrote:Sad to say you might be deluding yourselves if you think they can't keep it up.
Even at their volume vat inclusive wholesale prices the mug costs them 77p, the polystyrene mailing box 40p and maybe 15p for a transfer. That is £1.32 (including vat) before you factor in what they are actually paying as importers.
In reality, their direct costs are probably little more than £1, the premises and staff are already being paid for.
They are likely using a logistics company to benefit from Royal Mail volume discounts, so postage will be less than you or I would pay.
Chances are they are earning nearly £2.50 a mug contribution to their fixed costs. Not massive, but enough as an extra income, for some.

I agree with most of your post, but am not too sure about the staff part.

You'd have to think that to make the enterprise worthwhile would tie up at least one person full time - if not they were already employing too many staff.

An extra member of staff is going to cost 15K plus?

7.5K mugs to break even?

It's certainly possible, but are they likely to be able to sell that many via eBay & Amazon?

I appreciate that they may be printing other orders in addition to those marketplace sales, but this takes some of the cream from the operation...

froggy;121111 wrote:The above just about sums you up.

Pardon? In what way does this 'sum me up?'