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.
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