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Table of contents:
Preface
1. Introduction
2. How To Finance Your Business
3. What Type Of Business To Start
4. What Products To Sell
5. Where To Sell The Products
6. How To Sell The Products
7. How To Advertise The Products
Preface
In this eBook you will learn how some businesses make very big profits buying and selling high-ticket products like fine art and collectibles online and how you can also do the same. The best way to absorb this material and learn it more easily is by removing all distractions and solely focusing on it, and in doing so you can more easily discover how much you like this type of business and when you will want to start one of your own. And it will require that you to invest just a little of your time because you can read this eBook from start to finish in less than one hour.
Throughout the eBook I will present numerous examples of businesses that sell high-ticket products online. Although this type of business is extremely profitable, like any other business it requires some time, work, and dedication for it to flourish, and those who master it can in a few weeks or months start enjoying very big profits. The information in this eBook is also very beneficial to those who buy those products for personal use or as an investment and would like to make much better buying decisions that can save them thousands or millions of dollars.
Fine art and collectibles are unique items that tend to have unusually high markups, sometimes in the neighborhood of over 1,000%. For example, paintings that I order from my painters cost me about $50 to $100 each and frequently sell for over $400 and sometimes for over $1,000 and even $10,000. The reason for such high markups is of course the audience that I sell those paintings to, namely wealthy fine art collectors and investors who value certain unique paintings in the styles that I offer them. If you understand their mindset you can also sell to them and enjoy very big profits. Most collectibles do not regularly sell for such high amounts but some do and collectibles in general also have high markups. For example, Chinese porcelain vases that can be purchased for about $50 from certain Chinese sellers located in mainland China regularly sell for $250 to $1,000 and sometimes more. Only a few sellers across the world understand this type of business and today you are beginning the journey to understand it and then profit from it in the near future.
1. Introduction
Fine art and collectibles are two of the biggest markets in the world. In those markets interact people from various countries, races, genders, religions, and social status, making them two of the most diverse global markets. The main reason that humans from all walks of life participate in those markets is the human appreciation of unique and beautiful objects. Fine art and collectibles are not necessary for human survival like food and water, but they enrich the human spirit in the same way as music, dancing, and sports.
Fine art is a creative art, particularly a visual art whose products are appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content. The global fine art market has annual sales of over $60 billion. The most valuable items sold every year tend to be paintings by famous artists like Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet. Such paintings have sold for over $100 million each and are usually bought by museums and very wealthy individuals.
Paintings, art prints, sculptures, and statues are some of the different types of fine art items. The most high-ticket and profitable fine art items to sell are certainly paintings and their markets are very active worldwide all-year-round. Fine arts were, until the advent of the Internet, mostly sold in art galleries and through auction houses in physical locations. Since then, businesses have steadily and increasingly moved online.
Pablo Picasso’s painting Les femmes d’Alger sold for $179.4 million at an auction:
There is much more variety in the collectibles market. Items include militaria, coins, bars, stamps, toys, music, comics, porcelain and glass, sporting memorabilia, and autographs. The collectibles market is much bigger than the fine art market with global sales topping $200 billion a year, but the average selling prices of collectible items tend to be lower and it is generally much easier for beginners to enter that market to buy and sell. The most high-ticket and profitable collectibles to sell at the moment are Asian antiques such as porcelain ceramics and religious statues. Collectibles were traditionally sold in physical shops, flea markets, trade shows, and many other places but like fine art they began to be increasingly sold online, with eBay being one of the first platforms on which they were and are still massively sold.
This 600-year-old Chinese porcelain bowl sold for HK$229 million at an auction in Hong Kong:
The examples of the two images above are very extreme but they illustrate the big profit potential of this type of business. The Picasso painting and the Chinese porcelain bowl were sold through the biggest auction houses in the world and those businesses earned a percentage of the selling price, which is usually around 5% to 20%. But there are many more smaller businesses that are making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in profits selling lower ticket items, for example fine art paintings and Asian antiques that regularly sell for $1,000 to $50,000 each. Below are two examples of auction houses that sell on LiveAuctioneers.com and make very big profits every month.
This fine art paintings auction house usually makes over $50,000 a month in profits:
This Asian antiques auction house usually makes over $100,000 a month in profits:
It’s very important to sell products that are very profitable and that’s why I created the Winning Products Catalog, which is a list of types of winning high-ticket products that I have sold for many years and that have remained highly and consistently profitable. The products typically cost from $20 to $80 and sell for $200 to $1,000. Getting access to that catalog will enable you to begin making very big profits selling high-ticket products. To get the catalog all you need to do is invite your friends on Facebook to get this free eBook and within 24 hours we will automatically send the catalog to your email address. Simply click the “Share” button below, sign in to your Facebook account if necessary, then in the text field write “I highly recommend that you get this free eBook to learn how to make money online”, and finally click “Post to Facebook”.
2. How To Finance Your Business
The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of doing this type of business. Sellers no longer have to pay rent and other fixed costs for a physical location to sell their products and I have never done it. You can now sell from almost anywhere in the world with just a computer and an Internet connection. I started selling collectibles on eBay in the year 2010 and have progressed to selling on other online marketplaces like LiveAuctioneers and Invaluable and on my Shopify online store, and all that time I was mostly working from my laptop, with the exception of the first two years or so when I shipped the products myself. I discovered that it was cheaper, easier, and more scalable to dropship or to outsource the shipment of my products to third-party logistics companies, and in turn that gave me the flexibility to travel and work from many different locations around the world. That basically means that you only need a little money to start your own high-ticket products business and that you can have the freedom to work from anywhere in the world as long as you have a computer and Internet access.
So how much money do you need to start your business? Of course, the answer will depend on the type of business that you want to start and how much money you have to invest in it. But if you would like to know what the minimum amount of money you need to invest is, I would say that it is close to $300 to $500. With that budget you will be able to start dropshipping products on online marketplaces like eBay just like I did for many years. At the peak of my days selling on eBay I was making about $12,000 a month in profits just by dropshipping collectibles. With those earnings I was able to not just finance a very good lifestyle but also to invest more money in my business and increase my profits.
I recommend to sellers who have little or no experience selling high-ticket products and to those who have little money to invest in their business to start selling low-ticket collectibles like coins, bars, and banknotes that tend to sell for $15 to $70 each. The reason is that those products are inexpensive, in the range of $1 to $5 each, and have very high markups that tend to exceed 1,000%. Selling those products will enable you to grow your capital, which you can later use to buy and sell higher-ticket products. Even if you decide to dropship those collectibles and do not buy them upfront, your payment processor—for example, PayPal—may decide to put a hold on your funds and not release them until a later date and you might not have enough money to buy those products and dropship them to your customers. Therefore, before you start selling you must create a budget and make sure that you will have enough money to cover your business expenses.
Below is an image of a gold clad bar that sold at an online auction on LiveAuctioneers.com for $60 and below it is an image of the cost of the bar on AliExpress.com, which is $2.59 + $3.68 shipping to the United States= $6.27:
As you sell more and more of those items you will gain the experience and the money that will enable you to grow your business and sell more high-ticket and profitable items. Eventually you can reach a level where you will be selling items for hundreds, thousands, and perhaps even millions of dollars each. When selling high-ticket products the sky is the limit.
3. What Type Of Business To Start
Once you have decided that you will start a business to sell fine art, collectibles, or other products, you must decide what type of business you will start. The answer will depend on what products you are going to sell, where you are going to sell the products, and how you are going to sell the products. All of those details should be written in a business plan, which is a business document containing business goals, the methods on how those goals can be attained, and the time frame within which those goals need to be achieved.
As I wrote in chapter 2, “How To Finance Your Business”, I recommend to sellers who have little or no experience selling high-ticket products and to those who have little money to invest in their business to start selling low-ticket collectibles; online marketplaces like eBay where they do not have to spend money on advertising are the best places for them to sell; and dropshipping is the best way for them to sell. It is a very simple type of business that will be comfortably easy to start. Once you have enough experience and money you can start selling high-ticket products, which will be much more profitable.
Some types of businesses are required to obtain certain permits before they begin to operate. For example, auction houses in some jurisdictions are required to obtain an auctioneer license or register as an auction business. Also, the terms of sale need to be written by an industry professional to ensure that your business is protected as much as possible under the law. And when selling products on consignment you need to have a consignment agreement ready for the consignors of the products to sign.
In the next three chapters I will go into detail on the three questions that I posed at the beginning of this chapter that are critical in deciding what type of business to start: what products to sell, where to sell the products, and how to sell the products.
4. What Products To Sell
Deciding what products to sell is the most important decision you will make in your business. After all, it is the sale of your products what will make you a profit and without them there is no business. Your goal should be to find very profitable products that you can sell to a lot of people. And how do you find those products? By doing extensive product research.
Product research is a term that doesn’t sound encouraging to some people but it is actually something that requires only a little bit of practice to master. What you will basically be doing is looking for products that sell frequently and that have high markups. The markup is the amount added to the cost price of a product and can be calculated using the following formula: ((selling price – cost) / cost) x 100, hence a product with a price of $500 and a cost of $50 will have a markup of (($500 – $50) / $50) x 100 = 900%. That’s a typical markup for fine art and collectible products and very few other types of products have such high markups.
Fine art and collectibles tend to have high markups mainly due to their uniqueness and the fact that many potential sellers do not become sellers because they get intimidated by the apparent difficulty of the business, meaning less competition and more profits for those of us who dare to sell those products. Hence finding very profitable fine art and collectible products to sell will be relatively easy compared to products in other industries. You just have to dare to learn how these businesses work and you will be in a great position to earn huge profits.
Now let’s talk about how to do product research. The first thing you should do is look for products that are selling frequently and record their selling price. By selling frequently I mean selling enough times that for you the product is worth selling. Ideally you want low-ticket products to sell more frequently than high-ticket products because normally you would need to sell more of them to make the same amount of profit as high-ticket products. Selling 20 coins at a $20 profit is the same as selling one fine art painting at a $400 profit.
Where you look for products does not really matter. If they sell well in one place then they can sell well in just about any other place because those products have high demand and people do not tend to care where they buy them. To me, the best places to look for products are marketplaces like eBay and LiveAuctioneers because they tend to be very transparent about what products sell for and how often they sell and because they often keep a record of sales for a long time so you can find products that were sold as far back as a few years. Of course, you have to learn how to do product research in each marketplace as they have different rules. Online stores are more difficult to research because they tend to keep sales information private but you can research what ads they are frequently running in platforms like Facebook to get a hint of what products might be selling well.
In the image below you can see an eBay product listing page showing the selling price of 10 gold plated bars ($60 and free shipping) and the amount sold (21) and that they are shipped from China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. Those bars cost the seller about $2 each so the 10 bars should cost him about $20, which means that he makes a profit of about $40 on each sale, a 200% markup that is pretty decent and much higher than the markup of the average product.
The next image shows you how frequently he sold those products.
Finally, in the seller’s feedback profile image below you can see that he is based in Malaysia, which means that he is dropshipping or using a third-party shipper because according to the product listing page those products are shipped from China/Hong Kong/Taiwan.
The next step in product research is to compare a product’s selling price to what it would cost you to buy the product. To do that you must search for the product on platforms like AliExpress.com and find one with a low cost, including shipping, from a reliable supplier. For the product above you can search for “gold plated buffalo bar” on AliExpress.com and you should find that the product is offered by multiple suppliers. Then you use the formula selling price – cost to calculate the gross profit. If the calculated gross profit of a product is more than the minimum you expect then you have found a winning product for your business.
The very simple process discussed above is the same one you should use to find high-ticket products. By doing product research I discovered that Tibetan thangkas are a type of high-ticket product that sells frequently, has a high selling price, and costs relatively little. In the images below you will see examples of two different Tibetan thangkas that sell frequently on LiveAuctioneers for $250 and cost $14.79 on AliExpress, which is equal to an impressive gross profit of $235.21 and a remarkable markup of 1,590%.
LiveAuctioneers selling price:
AliExpress cost:
LiveAuctioneers selling price:
AliExpress cost:
As you gain experience during weeks and months of doing product research, you will develop an ability for finding winning products because you will know how frequently certain types of products sell, how much they sell for, and how much they cost. That knowledge will enable you to more quickly and easily increase your profits until you ultimately focus on selling the most profitable and bestselling high-ticket products.
5. Where To Sell The Products
Once you have selected one or more winning products you must decide where to sell the products. Your decision will depend on what products you will sell and where it is better for you to sell them given how much money you have to invest and your level of experience. Taking those factors into consideration you can choose the best selling platforms at any given time.
Some products sell better on some selling platforms than others and some products are banned in certain selling platforms. For example, on eBay you can sell pretty much any type of fine art and collectible, but it is challenging to sell branded items like luxury watches (Rolex, TAG Heuer, Hublot, etc.) and luxury handbags (Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Chanel, etc.) due to authentication issues, whereas on LiveAuctioneers you can sell those products without any restrictions. Some selling platforms are pretty broad in what you can sell on them but others specialize in certain types of products. LiveAuctioneers specializes in fine art, antiques, and collectibles; 51BidLive specializes in Asian works of art and antiques; and Artsy specializes in fine art. If you have your own online store you can sell anything you want as long as it is allowed by your eCommerce platform (e.g., Shopify), your payment processor (e.g., PayPal), and the law. The point is that you should have knowledge of the types of products that are allowed on a particular selling platform before you try to sell on it.
Banknotes selling for over $1,000 on an online marketplace:
Also, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, how much money you have to invest and your level of experience must be taken into consideration when deciding where to sell. Some selling platforms like eBay are very cheap to sell on while setting up an auction on LiveAuctioneers costs several hundred dollars. Also, selling on eBay requires no experience selling online while LiveAuctioneers is for those who have some experience. Creating your online store and making a good amount of money with it generally requires at least a few hundred dollars and some experience selling online. Having those two very important factors in mind will help you avoid selling on platforms that you are not prepared to sell on and will greatly increase your chances of success.
To find marketplaces on which to sell your products you can just search for them on Google by including the type of product you are trying to sell in the search term, for example: “where to sell paintings”, “paintings online marketplace”, and “sell paintings online”. Some popular marketplaces for selling fine art and/or other high-ticket products are eBay, eBid, LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Bidsquare, Barnebys, Proxibid, iCollector, 1stdibs, Artsy, and Artplease.
6. How To Sell The Products
Once you have one or more products to sell and you know where to sell them, the next important step is to decide how to sell the products. What that means is how to create product pages, how to accept payments, how to ship your products, and how to do all other things related to selling your products. This step is what separates the people making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year from the rest because very few people know how to correctly sell high-ticket products. Master this step and you will be on your way to making very big profits.
I have studied the ways that sellers try to sell their high-ticket products online and the most important thing that separates the ones making very big profits from the rest is how they create the product page, which is the page where visitors can see all the information made available for a product and includes the product title, description, and images. The product page is key to convincing prospective buyers to purchase your product. The best high-ticket sellers write a relevant product title that reveals what the product is, describe the product in as much detail as possible, and include very impressive product images that show as many angles of the product as possible. Of those, the product images have the most impact on the sale of a high-ticket product because buyers of those products tend to like things that look high-end as opposed to things that look cheap. Popular websites that sell high-ticket products like Rolex watches and Hermes handbags always have top-notch product images as do prominent auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. In fact, many successful sellers of high-ticket products hire professional photographers to take photos of their products. When you stand to make thousands or millions of dollars on a sale you must seriously consider investing in professional product photography.
Auction house’s product images
How you accept payments also has a significant impact on your sales. The more payment options you offer, the more sales you will generally make but nevertheless it may not make sense for you to make available certain payment options especially for high-ticket products. Credit cards and debit cards are the most risky payment options you can offer because of the risk of fraud and chargebacks. Having a credit or debit card payment reversed can mean the loss of thousands of dollars and the loss of the product or products that were already shipped. Those payment options are usually recommended for sales of $5,000 or less. Another way of receiving payments that can be risky is by cash, especially in high amounts. Some governments have reporting requirements when you receive cash payments above a certain amount that are usually related to know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) laws. Personal checks and money orders are also risky because they may be fraudulent or have insufficient funds and they might not clear in your bank account; therefore, you must wait for them to clear before shipping the products. The safest ways for high-ticket businesses to accept payment is by cashier’s check, certified check, bank transfer, and cryptocurrencies, and those payment methods are very common in high-ticket sales.
The next thing that impacts your sales is how you ship your products. Where you ship from and how long the shipment will take to reach your customer has an effect, albeit generally not a big one, on your sales. That information, along with the payment options, should be visible on the product page.
Customer service is very important when selling high-ticket products. You should answer all your customers’ questions and you might even have to talk to them over the phone to convince them to buy your products. Usually, potential customers want to know that you are responsive and rarely ask for detailed information.
Other things that have an impact on your sales are the online store design, upselling, and email marketing. Looking for more ways to increase your sales should result in bigger profits.
7. How To Advertise The Products
Once your products are ready to sell you must find the best ways to get visitors to your product pages. On some selling platforms, like online marketplaces, you do not have to invest money on advertising because they do the advertising for you and get people to visit your product pages, and that is why they charge you fees like listing fees and final value fees. For example, eBay charges a final value fee that is a percentage of a listing’s selling price. LiveAuctioneers charges a listing fee of hundreds of dollars per auction and a final value fee that is a percentage of a lot’s selling price, and you can also pay LiveAuctioneers for advertising if you want to reach a wider audience by promoting your auction on their homepage, emailing their subscribers about your auction, and more.
Therefore, if you do not have enough money to spend on advertising then you should sell on online marketplaces like eBay. If your business has enough money to spend on an advertising campaign and you or your team have the advertising knowhow required to succeed then spending money on ads can greatly increase your profits.
There are many options on where to advertise your high-ticket products online and they depend on where you sell them. As stated earlier, LiveAuctioneers, and other auction house marketplaces, allow you to advertise to their audience. If you have an online store you have many more advertising options and you can reach a much bigger audience than online marketplaces and that is why I prefer to sell on my online store. You can run ads on advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads; on online magazines like ARTnews; and on online marketplaces like Artnet.
Advertising can be the difference between making hundreds of thousands of dollars and making millions of dollars a year selling high-ticket products. There are many sellers who were able to successfully scale their profits into the millions of dollars by advertising on various platforms. Joining an online program on advertising offered by an experienced online marketer is a great way to quickly master advertising and to greatly increase your profits.
You can join Perpetual Income 365 today and start mastering affiliate marketing. The program will teach you advanced techniques on how to promote products online so that you can earn big commissions. Affiliate marketing is a popular and effective way to earn income online and you can use it to create an additional source of income for yourself or for your business. Perpetual Income 365 is a program that we highly recommend to anyone that wants to become an expert in affiliate marketing, which is a much faster way to make money online than selling products. Simply click the button below to get started now.