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1973 Marvin Gaye…ok, I am an old guy. “Old School” as my daughter describes me.

How am I going to tie Marvin Gaye into  a blog post about ebay? Simple, have you been thinking of staring an ebay business, maybe for supplemental income? Lets get it on….really, nothing happens without action and effort.  What is holding you back?

If you have an entrepreneurial spirit hiding somewhere inside you, eBay is a great place for a flight test to see if you really have been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, or if you’re best suited to continue to work for someone else. The beauty of testing your wings on eBay is that you can do it part time and see if you have a knack for building up your business. And eBay business, if done correctly, does require a good amount of hard work, but building an eBay business from the ground floor up is a possibility open to just about anyone. If your eBay endeavors really start to pay off, you may just find yourself riding on your own momentum to create quite a substantial E-commerce empire. There have been countless ebay sellers who have started at the kitchen table and ended up with corporate offices making millions of dollars. It is not too late.

No matter what you sell, customer service must always come first. This customer first attitude is the underlying idea behind everything you’ll do to be successful on eBay. The feedback that the customers leave for you, will really define your future success. One bad feedback, especially if you’re new to eBay, can be devastating to your chances of getting people to bid on your auctions and buy your items. There is a great deal of fraud committed on eBay, so the customers that use eBay are extremely wary and find it very hard to trust sellers with low feedback scores. This means that your first strategy to building income through eBay is to get positive feedback, and lots of it.

One of the best methods to get a great deal of positive feedback early on is to sell items that are inexpensive, available to you in large quantities, and are easy to describe accurately. Profit doesn’t even have to be a priority at this stage. Certainly you don’t want to lose money, but your initial sales are solely to get you a decent amount of positive feedback. You can actually accomplish this more efficiently with a single listing using eBay’s Dutch Auction listing option, which allows you to list multiple quantities of the same item under the same listing. This service is discounted compared to listing all of the items individually, but you still can receive positive feedback for each and every one you sell this way. You will want o be a little aggressive in requesting feedback at this stage as well, just remember to always be polite with your requests.

Once you have received a satisfactory amount of positive feedback (this number can vary, but reaching 25 or so is a nice goal), then you will want to start listing more expensive items that have the greater profit margin. You might wonder why receiving a bunch of positive feedback for selling dollar refrigerator magnets will help you once you start to sell expensive jewelry or vintage radios, and the answer is because most eBay buyers don’t go through the effort of finding out what your positive feedback was for, just that you have a high percentage of it. Some will check and those buyers might be discouraged from bidding, but even if you miss out on a few of these you will still be way ahead of the game thanks to the positive feedback from those magnets!

Once you’ve established a solid feedback rating and moved on to selling what you intended to sell to begin with, it’s just an issue of maintaining high standards when it comes to item descriptions and customer service. There are small things you can do to streamline profits and increase sales, such as researching all the add on services offered by eBay like galleries, buy it now, the benefit of starting auctions at a specific time, or setting up an eBay store. But, your success on eBay is almost entirely based on your customers level of satisfaction with your products and your service, so don’t ever let anything else distract you from maintaining high standards in those areas.

EBay is a great example of how supply-and-demand works because sales are based almost exclusively on price. The brick-and-mortar retailer can use advertising, customer loyalty promotions, and other inducements to buy – inducements not available to the online seller. The store-based retailer has expenses the eBay seller doesn’t face: advertising, rent, store maintenance, staff’s salaries, etc. The eBay retailer can sell merchandise at a lower price than the store retailer can – and should.

Nonetheless, it’s been shown that 30% of potential buyers who find what they want on eBay end up buying from a store. Why? This trend has been attributed to slow delivery and inflated shipping costs.

Currently, we are going through a period in which the inflated price of fuel is driving up shipping costs even higher, making the situation yet more difficult for sellers. What can a seller do to deal with this situation? The best approach is to adopt aggressive strategies:

• Find, purchase, and sell merchandise that the other guys have yet to find. Americans love gadgets, especially new electronic technology. What will be the next iPhone, Xbox 300, Grand Theft Auto? Explore markets to find out, especially foreign markets that are beating out American manufacturers in pricing and creativity.
• Jump on the newest wave, then stock up on merchandise. As they say, “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap”
• Pay close attention to your feedback rating. Keep customers happy. When a potential buyer sees a high approval rating, he may be more willing to overlook high shipping charges.
• Absorb the cost of posting a lower shipping charge or no charge at all. Do this only if you can make up the difference through what the customer pays for the item. This would pretty much dictate that this strategy be used only with high ticket goods.
• Don’t offer warranties beyond the manufacturer’s warranties. Avoid the hassle of handling returns and taking on more shipping charges.

When times are tough and sales are slow you really need to focus on creativity. What separates you from the other ebay sellers? Are you offering incentives to buyers such as:

• Discounts on futures purchases…..Include a coupon in every box you ship offering 10-15% off future orders
• Free Items with purchase….Take every opportunity to purchase deeply discounted closeouts that you can offer as a premium with every purchase. Make sure the free gift compliments your merchandise.
• Discounted shipping for multiple purchases…Advise your prospective bidders that you will combine winning auctions to save money on shipping
• Publish a newsletter and promote it in your auctions and About Me page. For example, if you are selling apparel you could write a monthly newsletter about fashion, clothing care and apparel trends. Of course, you would always link your newsletter to your current ebay auctions for repeat sales and traffic!