Lumo TV › Start reselling

How to start a TV reselling business

Reselling is one of the few small businesses you can start this week with almost no capital. It is also one where most people quit inside three months. Here is how the economics actually work, written by a supplier, so read the last section knowing exactly who is talking.

What reselling actually is

You buy credits from a provider at wholesale. One credit runs one device for one month. You sell subscriptions to your own customers at whatever price you like, and keep the difference.

You are not reselling someone else's brand. You set the price, you own the customer relationship, and in most cases the customer never learns who your supplier is. What you are really buying is infrastructure (servers, an app, and an activation panel) that would cost a fortune to build yourself.

The numbers that decide whether it works

Wholesale credits typically run $5–12 depending on volume. Retail is usually $15–25 a month. So the gross margin per customer is roughly $8–15 a month.

That sounds thin until you notice the important part: it repeats. Fifty customers at $10 margin is $500 a month, every month, for work you did once. A hundred is $1,000. This is a retention business, not a sales business.

Which means the number that actually decides your income is churn. If customers leave after two months you are on a treadmill forever. If they stay a year, every sale is worth six times more. Everything below follows from that one fact.

How to choose a supplier

Judge on the things that cause churn, not on channel count. Every provider claims a big number and the number is never the reason anyone cancels.

Ask for a trial before you pay anything. Watch it at 8pm on a weekend, when servers are busiest, on the sport you personally care about. A service that is perfect at 11am on a Tuesday tells you nothing.

Check there is a real programme guide and catch-up. These are the two features people cite when they stay, and their absence is what makes a service feel cheap.

Test how fast support answers you, because when your customer has a problem at kick-off, your reputation depends on your supplier's response time, not yours.

Avoid anyone who demands a large upfront commitment before you have sold anything, or whose credits expire on a clock.

Where customers actually come from

This is where most new resellers go wrong, so it is worth being blunt.

Mass-posting adverts into Facebook groups does not work. Most of those groups are run by competing sellers who delete competitor posts on sight, and the volume gets your account flagged for spam. We tested it properly: 27 posts across 27 groups in a day produced 18 website visits, one enquiry, and a restricted advertising account. That is not a cautionary tale we read somewhere. It is our own measured result.

What does work is unglamorous. People who already trust you: the person who fixes everyone's wifi has a customer list waiting. Answering questions rather than broadcasting. In the same groups, a helpful reply to someone asking for a recommendation reaches one person with real intent and does not get deleted. Referrals, which is why a free trial matters so much: it costs you almost nothing and it turns a sceptic into someone who tells their friends.

Expect your first ten customers to come from people you already know. That is normal, and it is the fastest hundred dollars a month you will ever make.

The mistakes that kill new resellers

Competing on price alone. There is always someone cheaper, and the customers you win that way leave the moment someone undercuts you by two dollars.

Selling without a trial. A device that does not work on the first evening produces a refund demand and a bad word-of-mouth story. Let people watch first.

Promising what you have not verified. If you have not personally checked a channel is there, do not say it is.

Depending on one supplier with no backup. Services go down. Know what you will do that evening before it happens.

What we offer, since you should know who wrote this

This article is published by Lumo TV, and we run a reseller programme, so treat this section as the advert it is.

Credits from $7 at volume, no expiry on them, you set your own retail price, and a free trial you can hand to any prospect. We run the app, the servers and the activation; you keep the customer, and we never contact them.

The full pricing ladder is on the reseller page. If the numbers above have convinced you this is worth doing, they will work with a different supplier too. The economics are the economics. We would just rather it was us.

Common questions

How much money do I need to start?

Very little. A starter batch of ten credits is around $120, and you can sell those before buying more. The real investment is time spent supporting your first customers well enough that they refer others.

Do I need to be technical?

You need to be comfortable installing an app on a Fire TV Stick and explaining it patiently over the phone. That is genuinely the level. Our install guide covers the fiddly part.

How many customers can one person handle?

Around 100–150 before support becomes a real job. Most of that load is the first week of each customer, which is why a good install guide and a trial pay for themselves.

What do I do when a customer has a problem?

You message your supplier. That is the main thing you are buying, so test their response time before you commit, ideally at a weekend evening rather than a Monday morning.

Can I do this alongside a full-time job?

Yes, and most people do at first. It is evening and weekend work, and it scales gradually rather than demanding you quit anything.

Read next