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Entrepreneurs – Want To Start A Serious Ebay Business?

Written by: Lee Lister

Article Overview: OK, you are really serious about setting up your new business; you don’t want some hobby but the real thing. You’ve thought about buying and sell on eBay, but are unsure if you can make a living off of it. Well millions do – but you have to approach it like every other business. Here’s a start up plan for you.

Entrepreneurs – Want To Start A Serious Ebay Business?

OK, you are really serious about setting up your new business; you don’t want some hobby but the real thing. You’ve thought about buying and sell on eBay, but are unsure if you can make a living off of it. Well millions do – but you have to approach it like every other business. Here’s a start up plan for you.

First of all - all the information you need to set up and manage an eBay account and store are on eBay itself - so don't buy some cheap ebook just to get the same information. Now here is a simple plan for you.

1) Have a good look at eBay and see what kind of things sell well. Make a list of 20 - 30 items that you are interested in. Don't pick any high cost or heavy/hard to ship items unless you are really interested in that business area.

2) Cross of any items where there appear to be dominated by 2-3 Power Sellers - printer ink would be an example. These are markets that will be too difficult to penetrate for someone with little feedback.

3) Work out what it will cost to sell an item in the price ranges you are looking for. Include payment processing costs, listing costs and selling costs. Ditto for shipping, packing and mailing costs. This is your cost of doing business.

4) Pick the top 10 cheapest to fulfill – that is list, process payments, correspond with the customer, wrap and mail the item, then support the sale afterwards. Research the cheapest purchasing cost you can buy these products at. Look at your local flea markets, garage sales, sales, auctions on and off line and local retailers or producers.

5) Now pick your top 5 items that appear to make a reasonable profit of 50% or more.

6) Test sell a few of each of the 5 items to see what happens. If not satisfactory after about 3 weeks then move onto another 5 items.

7) Rinse and repeat, remembering to change your sale items every so often.

Good Luck.

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Article Tags: auctions, business area, ditto, doing business, ebay, ebay account, ebook, flea markets, garage sales, good luck, mail, mailing costs, new business, payment processing, power sellers, printer ink, producers, simple plan



Related Forum Posts
Re: Selling on eBay - [quote="BuzzAroundBooks":ctamvpom]Does anyone know if you can remove an item that you've listed for auction on eBay and then conduct a private sale? Is there a way to do this without violating the rules on eBay?[/quote:ctamvpom] If you are going to have a private sale with someone that saw the listing on Ebay and you complete the sale off the Ebay site, it violates their rules as far as I understand them. You can re-enter the info on Ebay and let someone bid right away to complete the sale and then Ebay gets their share. Chris
Ebay actually drives prices up... - I have an acquaintance who collects rare books. He went off on a rant about Ebay in his blog a couple of weeks ago. It used to be he could buy books for quite reasonable sums, but ever since Ebay debuted, people are putting their stuff up their with inflated reserve bids, and the uninformed public are buying those books at ridiculous prices...so now even book collectors that don't deal on Ebay are also inflating their prices, because if people are too stupid to know what is proper market value... For myself, I fell victim once... not so much to a scam but to my own lack of knowledge of what I was buying... Way back in the 70s Forrest J. Ackerman published 8 issues of a magazine called Spaceman, and I wanted them all. I also thought they were very rare and was willing to pay any price to get them. So I bid $100 for a beat up old issue of Spacemen 1, and got it, and of course next week another issue was up there for $20. So I was not a happy camper. Lessons are - know the market value of what you want to buy and realize that there are other places besides Ebay where you can get it.
Re: Picking an external hard drive to backup my files - I bought one from Ebay and it worked great for about a year - I forget the brand. But, about 2 months ago, it froze up and all the info is stuck there. Luckily most of the info was still on my desktop computer - but I had a quote of $250 to get the info off the hard drive. I love the flexibility of moving info from one computer to the other with an external hard drive, but seems I would need to find a way to back up the hard drive somewhere else as an insurance policy. When mine froze up - I found a good number of questions on forums from people who had the same problem. So, it doesn't seem that buying Ebay was the issue. I've bought plenty of electronic things on Ebay and they have all worked. I think the issue with my external hard drive could've been because I was using it all day every day to store and retreive files and it was also turned on all the time - until I did that, I didn't have any problems at all. Shri
Re: How can I promote my site? - To promote website online you need to hire professional SEO expert because you have to perform the below activities for your website promotion:- Start On page optimization which includes the following task:- 1. Meta tag optimization 2. Header Tag Optimization 3. Alt tag Optimization 4. Content Optimization 5. Anchor Text Optimization 6. URL Optimization 7. Navigation Optimization After On page optimization, Start off Page Optimization which includes the following task:- 1. Link building 2. Directory submission 3. Classified Ads submission 4. Article submission 5. Press Release submission 6. Social Bookmarking 7. Business Listing 8. Local Listing 9. Blog Optimization 10. PPT Creation & Optimization
Re: How Important is Feedback in eBay? - 1. Have you made eBay purchases? Almost once a week. 2. Was the seller's feedback important? VERY! I always looks for seller's with good rep. 3. Do you sell on eBay? No. 4. Do you worry about your feedback score? If I were to sell anything on Ebay, I would. The feedback is very important. A lot of sellers are crooks and Ebay buyers are aware of it.


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