Some places offer low-priced products and they don’t try to hide behind brand names. Do you want to spend just a couple of dollars on a toy? It will be made as cheaply as possible with cheap materials, but that may be just what you needed at the time, and don’t mind paying just a bit for better quality.

Other places, however, offer brand-name merchandise for quite a bit less than every other retailer. How can a website offer you television for $200 less than everyone else? Why would a high-quality camera be $100 less in one place than another? Sure, it could be a sale or a special promotion. 

Still, it makes customers feel suspicious. In fact, according to a Black Friday survey, 24% of consumers won’t shop on Black Friday because they believe retailers manipulate shoppers on this day. 

On the other hand, stores lose money on those sales to bring customers to the store. Shops that sell below cost lose money all of the time – unless you’re paying for something else.

Additional Merchandise

Let’s say you bought a camera for $400. Everywhere else online it was at least $500 – a deal almost too good to be true. So you click the Buy button and wait for your camera. But you don’t get a camera, at least not right away. Instead, you get a phone call from the company.

It turns out that the camera you just bought doesn’t come with a case or battery. Would you like to add those to your order? Suddenly your $400 camera became a $600 camera. The company loses money on the camera but earns quite a bit by selling you a $10 case for almost $100.

Shipping Costs

It’s not just additional merchandise that can run up costs. Shipping can cost a pretty penny, too. Especially if you pay extra for shipping and then the shipping is “delayed” negating the entire service you just paid for.

One man bought a television online and paid for overnight shipping. When he called to follow up with the company, he was told that the company simply doesn’t ship televisions overnight. They certainly didn’t offer to return his money. In fact, they hung up on him.

Tough Customer Service

If you’re going to work in a business where you roughly persuade and possibly even deal with customers dirty, you can’t have gentle souls working in your customer service department. Fortunately, an overworked, angry customer service agent is all you really need to run a business like this, and having a shortage of representatives means you can bet customers don’t stay on the phone very long.

In many cases, irate customers called up to complain or follow up with concerns about their purchase. Sometimes, consumers complain about eBay customer service because they were rude or hang up on them. That’s certainly not a “customer-first” atmosphere.

Delay the Product

Finally, if you really want to make money by selling items well under retail prices, you can simply not send the product that the customer bought. It’s simple, really. You buy one camera. Then you sell your camera to five different people online. You make five times the profit!

Of course, there will likely be some complaints from customers about not actually receiving the camera they purchased, but that’s simple to handle. Tell them their product is delayed since it’s coming from overseas. If the customers get tough, you just have to get tougher. Hang up on them!