Selling On Ebay

I'm sure there's very few people left who have never heard of Ebay. For good reason as well, they are a global phenomenen. They are of course the biggest online auction site on the internet, and are a great way to find bargains. In general, any products, whether second-hand or new, are cheaper on Ebay than traditional retailers. They are also enormously beneficial for both individual traders or part-time sellers, and larger established businesses who have products to sell.

There are small costs involved in listing items on Ebay, but for newcomers to the internet in particular, they are a great way to start your online business. You don't have to worry about setting up a site and working hard and spending money on advertising to get traffic to your site. With Ebay being one of the most visited sites on the net, the traffic is already there. The only thing you have to worry about is doing some research, finding a supplier, or creating your own product to sell, and then creating a good listing or sales copy for your product(s).

To make money selling on Ebay you obviously need to have a product whose average final sale price, minus any deductions from Ebay, is greater than what you paid for it. Look at what other people are selling, see what the average final sales price is, and then go about finding a wholesaler or supplier. You don't necessarily need to find a traditional wholesaler either. For example, I've made decent profits myself on a casual basis just by buying quality products from sites like hotukdeals.com, and retail shops who have huge sales or closing down sales, and then listing them on Ebay and selling at a much higher price than I paid for them.

Information products such as ebooks, as discussed in other pages of this site, are a very lucrative business because clearly you don't have to worry about buying and stocking goods from a wholesaler. In most cases you will have one product, either that you have created yourself or that you have full resale rights to, which can be sold over and over again because the buyer can simply download it from a link.

Another way of making money from selling on Ebay is through dropshipping. This is basically where you find a dropshipper, list their product(s) on Ebay, then when the product is sold the buyer pays you, and you pay the supplier a set price, who then delivers the product to the buyer, whose details you supply at the end of the auction. If you have sold the product for more than this set price then you get to keep the surplus profit.

This sounds like an ideal business set-up, particularly as you have no stock to look after. However, this isn't something I've personally tried and I don't intend to either. This is simply because I have heard too many negative things about dropshipping. These range from suppliers running out of stock, not delivering to the correct address, products not turning up, all of which negatively impacts upon your Ebay sellers' rating, and therefore your future profitability.

If I was to seriously get into selling on Ebay, I would either go about creating an ebook, and selling it continuously, or conducting extensive research on what products are selling well, and finding wholesalers that offer prices low enough to generate sizeable profits. There are loads of wholesale directories on the internet, but you have to pay for these, and a lot of these lists are often out-of-date, or generally worthless.

The Rich Jerk, which is an excellent ebook generally, offers some excellent advice on buying from wholesalers, and lists some good wholesale suppliers.