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There is a lot of talk about home based businesses on eBay, but there is limited discussion about the integration of eBay and an existing online business. Why put efforts into eBay when your site is already providing you with an income? Is it worth building an eBay business?
For many, the answer to the above questions would be NO! There is no point in building an eBay business. But I say different. Running an eBay store AND an e commerce website is the best way to go. Read on to find out why…
eBay is One of the Most Trafficked Sites
Imagine owning a brick and mortar bookstore and making a sale to 1 out of every 5 customers that came through your door? How does that sound? Converting 20% of your sales isn’t too bad, but what if you only had 5 customers in a day? What if you could market your products to over 1,000,000 people per day? Well, 20% of 1,000,000 is 200,000 sales!! Now, that is unrealistic, but that is the why selling on eBay is a great way to develop income online. eBay is the most trafficked site on the internet. It is estimated that $14 for every $100 spent online, is spent on eBay! The potential is unlimited selling on eBay.
When Selling on eBay The Financial Risk is Limited
Another great thing about selling products on eBay is the minimal financial risk involved. If you are anything like me, then you do not have the money to open your own store. Nor can I afford for the business to fail. Could you? If you were to open a brick and mortar store, you would need to secure a store front, inventory, shelving, and customers. We already discussed how eBay attracts MILLIONS of potential customers, but it offers an inexpensive way for you learn everything you need to know to build an effective stream of income online. And I say stream here, because you by integrating an eBay business, you now have two streams of income.
Converting eBay Customers into Website Customers
Through your communication with your eBay customers, you can promote your web based business and have a chance to to covert them to repeat customers off of eBay. You have to remember, your eBay customers found you because of an auction on eBay. Who is to say they would have found you on the Internet? If you convert them to customers off of eBay you will save money on the eBay fees, but a customer is a customer right!
The eBay and Online Store Connection
As you can see, there is potential to make money on eBay, even if you have an established online business. The investment to sell on eBay is much less than selling from an actual store front. The cost to operate an eBay business compared to the potential for building new customers and sales off of eBay is heavily in favor of the later.
How to Successfully Sell on eBay – Ten Steps to Selling on eBay
My First Sale EVER on eBay - My 1st Story Reader
You have decided to sell on eBay and start you own home based business, but you are unsure what to do next. Here are ten steps to get you on your way to operating your own eBay work from home business. For help answering the question: What to Sell on eBay?
Step 1 – Identify Your Market
I wrote about how to identify a target customer and what you want to sell in previous posts. When you decide to sell on eBay, you will want to take your time to investigate items related to what interests you. Just watch the items and how they sell on eBay. Any market research data that you can collect will be useful to you at a later time. Keep your eyes open for those hot items – those are items that are selling for a good price.
Step 2 – Competitive Research
Competitive research means to watch the competition. Before spending any time or money to list items on eBay, see what other sellers in your niche or category are selling and take notes on their strategies. Some questions to guide you through this process:
What do their auctions look like?
What is their seller rating?
How many items are they selling at one time?
Are they selling single items or are they selling packages?
Do you notice any flaws in their auctions that you could exploit?
What are the items selling for?
What type of auction(s) are they using?
I am not saying you should outright steal ideas from your competition, but it is an age old business strategy to find out what your competition is doing and do it better. I like to call it piggybacking.
Step 3 – Find Your Product
This is step goes hand and hand with step 1. You will need to find a product to sell in your niche and by now you should have a pretty good idea of what you want to sell. As you identified your market, you probably gained some insight into what you are going to sell. If you are not sure what to sell eBay, check out this post to help you to decide what to sell on eBay. You will need to to find a supplier for your product. Like anything in business, you should look around to find the best price. Do not be happy with the first quote you get.
Step 4 – Start Small and Grow
By starting small, you will minimize the financial risk. As you gain sales and a reputation as a seller, you can grow your business and start spending more to suite you growing home business. Remember, you are in control and you should take the time to experiment to find out what works and what does not work. The the nice thing about
using eBay is that it is inexpensive to try out a new marketing strategy.
Step 5 – Testing, research and repeat
Keep trying new auction strategies until you find one that works. Once you find one that works, you should use it until it works no more. Do not feel ashamed about using the same auction over and over again. If it works, stick with it and make as much money as you can from that auction. There is no same in making money!
You should continue your competitive research and try new auction styles base on that research and repeat the process of finding a new niche or a new auction strategy.
Step 6- Automating Your eBay Business
After a while, sending out emails manually can be a real hassle. You should be marketing your eBay business through email. The more sales you make, you will find you are answering the same questions over and over. You should create yourself a set of email templates to address all of these frequently asked questions. That way, all you have to do is copy and paste them into an email.
There is software and web based services that assist in the automation of the eBay. Many of the services are free, but best services are paid. eBay’s Selling Manager Pro is easy to use and I have never had a problem using it. It allows you to schedule auctions, keep and track inventory, send automated emails as well as other features to make managing your eBay business as easy as can be. I personally only have experience with Vendio.com and there services were nice, but interfered with eBay’s Selling Manager Pro. I could have used Vendio instead of Selling Manager Pro.
Step 7 – Write Out a Business Plan
Keep in mind, you are in charge of this business. This does not have to be some formal report to be handed into your boss. You do not have to prepare a presentation with audio or anything, unless you really wanted to go through all that trouble. You should put together some sort of outline of the eBay niche opportunities you have discovered and your strategy to exploit these possibilities. You might include a time line of what you want to get done. Setting deadlines is a great idea to keep yourself working. The business plan is a way to hold yourself accountable.
Step 8 – Expanding Your eBay Business
Once you started to make some money on eBay, you should consider expanding your eBay business. Expanding in this situation has a few meanings. One way to expand your eBay business would be to take on inventory. That is to keep on hand more than a few items in your home office. You may have to your garage to store the inventory.
Another way to expand would be sell in other niches under a different eBay user name. Many of the top eBay sellers have multiple eBay accounts that they sell under. This will help you establish yourself as an authority in each niche you sell. It is harder to develop the authority persona when selling to different niches.
A third way to expand your eBay business is to open up your own web store. This is by far the biggest step you could take in expanding your eBay business. Not only are you moving away from eBay and you will lose many of the tools that eBay offers to automate your business. This method could be very lucrative.
Step 9 – Declare Yourself a Business
As I have said in previous post, I am not a tax expert and all I am giving you here is some friendly advice. You will want to register yourself as a business. It is not as expensive or as difficult as it sounds. A lawyer is your best bet for taking care of this task for you.
Step 10 – Don’t Quit
Even when it looks like it’s all going wrong, don’t stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you’ll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.
What You Need to Know BEFORE You Get Started on eBay.
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Are you thinking about selling on eBay?
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Have you already decided to sell on eBay, but are not sure what to sell?
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Do you want to supplement your current income by selling on eBay?
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Do you want to quit your current job and work from home?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, keep reading to find out a few things you really need to know about selling on eBay successfully.
What to Sell on eBay?
Ask yourself the following questions. What do I know best? What is my specialty? Do I have any special skills? You will be better served as a seller on eBay if you can become a trusted source for particular products. Just the other day, I found an eBay seller that specialized in model boats. Not the cheap, plastic models that get glued together. Each model was in excess of $150 and required time and special tools to complete the assembly.
The biggest advantage of focusing your eBay business into a niche is to develop a customer base that turns in to repeat business. People that buy from you will be more apt to buy from you again. Especially if the your service and product were of high quality. You do not want to focus on selling random rubbish all the time. You can sell
consignment items, but again, you would want to focus in a particular category or niche.
When deciding on what to sell on eBay, the main point to consider is to sell what you know best. For example, it would be very difficult to write a description of a product that you have NEVER SEEN! Imagine, trying to write a description of a baseball trading card without ever seeing it. You could not even discuss the condition or who was even on the card! Who would buy that?
If you are having a difficult time deciding on what to sell on eBay you should thing about where you go online; what websites do you visit? Why do you visit these websites? What kind of advertising is on these websites? This should help you decide where you intersts lie and ultimately help you decide what to sell on eBay.
When the above strategy does not help you, try asking friend and family. They will probably answer with, “Oh, you should sell…” and you will be like, “Duh, why didn’t I think of that!”
Don’t worry if you think the thing you’re selling is too obscure – it isn’t. There’s a market for almost everything on eBay, even things that wouldn’t sell once in a year if you stocked them in a shop. You’ll probably do even better if you fill a niche than if you sell something common.
Shipping on eBay
Currently, eBay gives sellers listing items with free shipping preferential treatment in search results. So, if you can find items that you can obtain at a good enough price that you can offer free shipping. If your niche does not allow for free shipping of the item
because of the size or the price you get the item for, that is okay. There are plenty of sellers charging for shipping on eBay.
You should always be able to track the order and give your customer access to the tracking information. eBay has recently integrated the tracking information into the buyer’s account. In my experience as a seller with the newly integrated tracking, it does not work. The correct tracking number is there, but it needs to be copied and pasted
into usps.com website. Though, this is an improvement over being only able to access the tracking number through paypal.
Tax and Legal Matters
First off, let me be clear, I am not an lawyer and the advice I give here is not legally binding. I am just making you aware, you will be responsible for reporting your income in accordance with the income laws of your city, state and country of residence.
You are going to have to pay tax. It will not be done for you. If you are selling on eBay
full time, you will want to register as a business and probably talk to a tax professional. You will need to be track how much you are making and how much you are spending on eBay fees, shipping fees, shipping supplies along with any other costs you have to run your business.
eBay Is Like the Stock Market
Much like the stock market has it ups and downs, selling on eBay will have its ups and downs. The best sellers on eBay are the ones that learn to deal with flow of the market. If you learn how to market your eBay business and give your customers great service, you will be able to make it through the downs times.
Anyone can sell on eBay, if they believe in themselves – and if you do decide it’s not for you, then the start-up costs are so low that you won’t really have lost anything.
How to Use eBay Research for Beginners
If you are new to selling on eBay and want to make money on eBay, there are a few things you should learn before listing any items for sale. You will want to analyze eBay market research. That research starts on eBay and these tips will start you on your way.
Be specific
The search for the competition should start on eBay because that is where the compet0rs are located. eBay generates enough traffic on its own, you do not need to worry about driving the traffic to your sales page. If you are searching maternity clothes, you should keep in mind are you selling used or new clothing. This will impact the type of result you will get.
Spelling Mistakes
Hey we are all human and we all make mistakes and you should capitalize on these mistakes. No matter what you are searching for, think of a few common misspellings. There is a good chance that these auctions will go for less because few people will find them. You can buy it on eBay cheap and resell it on eBay for profit! For example search addis instead of adidis. There are over 40 results with Adidis spelled wrong. If you want to learn more about how to make money off of people’s mistakes on eBay, check out this listing of mine on eBay!
Use a Thesaurus
If you are selling on eBay or you want to start selling on eBay, there is no need for you to own a thesaurus. Why? Because you have internet access and could use thesaurus.com to help you think of different words someone might search for when looking to buy what you are selling. For example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. This goes back to being specific, if you can you should consider using the brand and model.
Use eBay Categories to Your Advantage
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If you do not know, eBay requires all sellers to list their items in at least one category. You can narrow your search results by searching in specific category. Even after you completed your search you will notice a list of categories to the left of the search results. For instance, if you are looking for a particular CD, you should search the CD category. This will save you valuable time looking through a ton of auctions that you do not even care about. You maybe asking yourself, why would I want to search for something I want to sell on eBay? You want to check on the competition! Any time you are trying to sell anything, you need to spy on your competitors. Check on their prices, shipping costs and how much activity on the auction(s).
Take Your Time and Browse Around
This tips goes along with using the eBay category search tip. Once you have found the item you are looking to sell, you should check out the entire category and try and find items that would compliment the item you are trying to sell. If you find items that go well with your item, you could create a package deal to increase the value of your auction, thus getting more bang for you eBay buck and more sales. Also, you will get ideas on what other items are selling in that category and you could add these items to the list of items you are already selling. Thus, growing your business!
Advanced Search Techniques
Here we start getting into some more advanced techniques, but they are not that difficult to understand. Just know these few strategies will help you complete very narrow searches and will ensure you are defining you niche.
Wildcard searches
You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.
In this order
If you put words in quotes (“”) then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.
Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.
Either/or
If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.
So once you’ve found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don’t worry – eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we’ll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you’ll be prepared if the worst happens.
I hope this post has helped you! If it has, leave a comment. If you think I missed something, leave a comment. If you think I suck, leave a comment. If you want to enhance you eBay market research, you should check out the folks over at hammertap.com. I have used their services and it has improve the money I have made from eBay.
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