Ok, well I tried to buy a load of stamps on eBay from a seller which I had bought from before. The first time I bought from them was in November and I bought a 20 set lot of clear stamps but it “got lost in the mail” and never showed up and she “resent” them. I eventually did get them, but I had to call her house to get anything out of her. Personally I think she was just slow. Anyway, despite the fact that she didn’t answer any of my emails and had horrible communication, I gave a neutral feedback because I did receive them eventually. So I find another huge stamp lot on eBay by another seller which joined eBay in January and I try to bid but it says the seller has blocked me from their auctions. This is a bit odd considering I hadn’t even had business with the person - then I checked the email address, and while different from the “first seller” the initials were the first sellers initials! plus the location was the same. So, what this sneaky little bleep was doing was ditching her old account cause she was getting a lot of negative feedback at the end, and starting up with a new username and email address and blocking anyone who had previous business with her from bidding on the auctions under her new name! UGH! So this other lady in Canada keeps buying up all her auctions at prices way lower than I would pay and keeps reselling them as individual lots! SOOOOOO frustrating!

The good news of all this is that I realized there’s a hell of a lot of money to be making :D The big lots sell the stamps for $3.50 USD a set, and they sell individually for anywhere between $5 and $15 depending on the size - that’s a huge profit margin. Now I’m thinking the first seller would never let these things go below wholesale, so by buying wholesale I can get as many sets as I want for my collection at wholesale prices, but sell for a good profit to pay for my addiction :D That lead to looking into how to get a business license, then how to do your taxes as a sole proprietor, then going to the BC government website and reading the bulletins on handling and remitting PST, then on the available tax deductions and quarterly tax estimates… anyway, I ended up doing my taxes in the process to figure out if I’d need to pay tax in installments, which I won’t more than likely, so if the only byproduct of all this is a greater understanding of tax laws and exemptions and having my taxes in on time, I’m still ahead of the game, lol.

So anyway, I’m starting to get quite excited about this, but the start up costs are high. An import license from the federal government is free, but the business name registration costs $30 and to get my retail license in Vancouver is $156. But then I can buy wholesale. Now the cheapest thing would be to import direct from the US manufacture, but ten you have customs and have to know about tariffs and stuff… plus I have to use courier cause I can’t go to a border customs office to receive the shipments… things were starting to look like this wasn’t the best course of action. But then I found some Canadian wholesalers! Two are located in Alberta in Edmonton and Calgary, and one only has a $100 minimum order quantity and will ship regular post! Of course you can’t see any of the prices until you get an account with them, which is free but you need that $200 business registration and license… so to even know if I could make a profit I have to first risk $200.

I was thinking to myself that stamps aren’t gonna cut it, but I could also get the new Basic Grey paper collections which would really sell like hot cakes, plus other cutting edge products. I don’t have the space to really have enough stock to have a good selection for an online store, then Lionel was saying I could do like a weekly special kind of thing. If I just offer one type of product in a certain time period, but at a really great price, I could make a small profit and clear stock. I don’t really have any fees besides the license since it will be a home-based business, so it would be ok to sell lower than the MSRP and still get enough profit to continue on. I know the Scrapjazzers would really go for something like this, especially if it’s the products which are in demand. And believe me I know the market! I’m a true addict, through and through :D

So yeh, I’m really considering doing this. Now all I need is a cool name 8)