Wholesale products, Manufacturing and Merchandise Seller Blog » Blog Archive

September 3rd, 2008

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.

2 Responses to “Ebay Business…Lets get it on!”

Edwin Canales Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Hello,

I am a reseller on ebay for memory ram,that I can buy to resell on ebay. Looking for 512MB PC133 Low Density (Double Sided)Non-Ecc Non-Registered. Any help will be appreciated just trying to make ends meet so this is my part time job.

Thank You,Eddie.
John Paul Says:
November 6th, 2008 at 8:20 am
I’m an education specialist trained by eBay I am completely inundated with course bookings people who are looking to sell on ebay its amazing what you say is right eBay can be a massive way forward or it cam lead to destruction one of my clients is £32000 in debt thinking he will succeed he didn’t don’t blame ebay though did he do his research? no chance.

What I teach is not only how to create professional looking listings that will attract more buyers but also how to avoid some of the costly mistake that eBayers very often make.

So whilst ebay is a great way to earn extra or a full time living it has to be tread with caution to the wind.

Nice blog by the way

2 Responses to “Ebay Business…Lets get it on!”

Leave a Reply