Printer Toner Cartridges

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Faster

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Mar 10, 2010
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One of my clients (I do IT consulting) wants to bring me on board to help him sell printer cartridges. Apparently he buys pallets of the stuff directly from the factory. He sells them to Ingram Micro, Tiger Direct, etc. The way he put it, he is the first in the food chain.

After googling around it seems the printer cartridge business is pretty saturated. Everyone has a store hawking these things. There are pages and pages and pages of optimized websites. I doubt I'd make it to the third page let alone the first on google.

He is offering me a percentage of the company and percentage of the sales. I just need to come up with the right way to hit an already saturated market.

I was thinking of getting the top 250 best selling cartridges and going that route. I could maybe secure ink contracts with large companies. We supply cartridges at $x for a year. Maybe some kind of ctr for affiliate markets?

Not really quite sure how to take full advantage of this opportunity. Maybe some suggestions?

What questions should I ask him before moving forward?
 


People are always shaking that shit up when the pages start looking funny so they can get an extra 500 sheets out of it, but they still wait till the bitter end before ordering.

Use some of your margin to offer free delivery - if you can manage same day courier or next day air and still keep your prices near the competition, you'd have a major selling point.
 
Fat margins because of the patent protection by the HP, Epson, and Canon monopoly. I was fooling around in that niche before my current gig and the margins are good.

Even the long, long tail is worth shooting for, I was doing insane EPC on Shareasale (well EPC at helluva lot better than Ebay, like by a factor of 20.

I would go for it.
 
jryan21 said:
People are always shaking that shit up when the pages start looking funny so they can get an extra 500 sheets out of it, but they still wait till the bitter end before ordering.

Use some of your margin to offer free delivery - if you can manage same day courier or next day air and still keep your prices near the competition, you'd have a major selling point.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I got to look at his prices and see if they are truly super cheap. If we can offer next day shipping through the post office, it might make sense.
 
Benji49 said:
Fat margins because of the patent protection by the HP, Epson, and Canon monopoly. I was fooling around in that niche before my current gig and the margins are good.

Even the long, long tail is worth shooting for, I was doing insane EPC on Shareasale (well EPC at helluva lot better than Ebay, like by a factor of 20.

I would go for it.
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These are not guine HP cartridges, they are knock offs with reverse engineered chips or something. I need to get more info on who makes them and the patents against them.

I'll look into sharesale and see what I can offer. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
As the IT manager of a medium sized company, I get 10 calls a day from these bottom feeders trying to sell me their crap.

Even if you could get people to buy them, quality is a major issue in this business. It seems once you make an order, they backfill any additional orders with garbage 'refurb' cartridges filled in some guy's garage.

It seems all the cheesy used car salesmen hurt by the economy are now pushing cartridges.

Saturated would be an understatement.
 
LotsOfZeros said:
As the IT manager of a medium sized company, I get 10 calls a day from these bottom feeders trying to sell me their crap.

Even if you could get people to buy them, quality is a major issue in this business. It seems once you make an order, they backfill any additional orders with garbage 'refurb' cartridges filled in some guy's garage.

It seems all the cheesy used car salesmen hurt by the economy are now pushing cartridges.

Saturated would be an understatement.
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Thanks for the view point. I've talked about the crap cartridges out there with him and he told me he has had about 5 failures in the last two years.

Making sure they high quality and no failures will be important. Probably a testimonial page or some kind of super high quality assurance or refund policy would be in order.

From what I am told, these are straight from an american factory, not hand filled or chinese crap. From the research I've done it looks like HP, Canon, etc are suing all those chinese manufactures.
 
Well I used to help out in my dad's business some time ago and we once got some cartridges that failed. The worst part is that we had ordered them in bulk, so we sued the dealers. We then realised that they came from china. Basically fast delivery is just one part, make sure that you have another plan as well. And the Market ain't saturated, if you know what your doing.


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EmpyreRam said:
SEO for printer cartridge is very saturated .... Try to wholesale the product or export it
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Export? You mean export and sell in other countries that are dominated by crappy toner cartridges? Not sure where to look or begin on how to do that.
 
Maybe you could ask for a list of satisfied customers and ask them what they think.
 
EmpyreRam said:
SEO for printer cartridge is very saturated .... Try to wholesale the product or export it
Click to expand...


Long tail, long tail, long tail.

Download data feeds from ShS or CJ and build a store, then optimize by deep linking.

I guess you do need two things additionally: 1. A reasonably aged domain AND...

2. High boredom threshold. I can't think of anything more boring than writing about printer cartridges. Even colon cleansing copy is thrilling in comparison.
 
Faster said:
He is offering me a percentage of the company and percentage of the sales. I just need to come up with the right way to hit an already saturated market.
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You better have those promised percentages in writing AND signed by him BEFORE you give him any information on how he can better his business or your doing it all for nothing.
 
Selling printer cartridges in a saturated market requires a strategic approach to stand out. Instead of competing solely on price, focus on value-driven solutions like B2B contracts, subscription-based ink supply, or targeting niche industries with high-volume printing needs. Establishing exclusive deals with offices, schools, and printing businesses can ensure consistent sales. Additionally, leveraging SEO, PPC advertising, and affiliate marketing can help gain online visibility despite the competition.
 
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