A lot of the people I follow in the industry have blogs and alternate income streams outside Amazon/eBay. (Paid lists, software, coaching, paid groups, etc.) Definitely something I want to do but I need to get my business onto maintenance mode first and definitely not happening anytime soon.
My short term goal is consistently 100k/sales a month, and my long term (6-12 months) goal is 250-500k/month.
Vast majority Amazon, some on ebay but it's much harder to handle and sales are lower anyway so haven't been devoting a lot of time to it.
Many different products, really whatever sells fast enough with a large enough margin. I've sold things for less than $5 and things for over $1000: generally the cheaper the more it sells.
What margin I want depends on how fast it sells, competition, and some other things, don't have hard and fast rules as of now.
Many categories, from toys to electronics to tools to grocery to beauty. Amazon requires approval for grocery, health, and beauty, so there's typically less competition.
2. I very rarely create product pages or change them. For the most part, I'm listing against existing, popular listings. I have created on occasion (when the last raspberry pi came out, I bought 10 from England and made a listing and sold quickly before others got stock and the price went down. Something I wouldn't do now, not worth the money for the time, did it to learn. I might buy a couple hundred when the next one comes out and outsource fulfillment though.)
Finding items: I look for items that are already selling well, ideally multiple times a day (you can determine this from sales rank and keepa charts, easy to find out how to read them, use google and you'll find many blog posts). Sometimes I'll look at a store and see which items are good for amazon (enough margin, fast selling, etc) and sometimes I'll look at amazon and then try to find items at a store (when I have an item that does well, I'll often look for other items from the same brand or category.)
I use oaxray, a paid tool, costs $100/month to find products. It searches through a webpage and tells you which products are profitable for amazon, then I filter through those. Recently I've begun training employees to use it and make me lists of finds which I then go through.
1. Not everything is sourced from a store that people can go to. I've gotten a lot of inventory from other countries (think amazon.co.uk selling the same ASIN for half the price), which people won't do and also shipping would raise the price if bought individually.
2. Some stuff is bought on sale, which may be over by the time the item sells
3. Yes, people absolutely pay a premium for not having to go in store. Even stuff I can buy online people often pay more on Amazon. I do a lot of drop shipping from retailers directly to customers.
