How to make money with eBay

Morgan453

How to start business on eBay as a seller? 

turnitround

Open an Ebay business account.
Find an item you want to sell and list it.

Then find that every good idea has already been thought of and Ebay is saturated with the same items. 

Seriously you need to research everything. If you think you have sourced items which will sell well then look for the same items already listed and see if you can compete pricewise once you have paid the fees. If it's a good idea then it will already have been thought off. 

martindow

It might be worth looking at the Ebay board on here - soolin in particular is very knowledgeable

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/ebay-auctions-car-boot-jumble-sales

As has been said, there is something of a race to the bottom on Ebay with people seemingly working on very small margins and for many products you will be up against people who have bought in large quantities and negotiated prices that you will struggle to compete with.

Make sure you know all of the fees and costs of postage and packaging involved so you can be sure you would make a profit.  If you log in to Ebay you can select sold items so you can see actual prices achieved rather than some optimistic asking prices.

This all sounds rather negative, but there are people doing well on Ebay.  You need to research well to find products that will sell that you can buy in at a sufficiently low price to make it worthwhile.

Mistral001

I used to sell a little on Ebay, but now am mostly a buyer.  As has been said there seems to be a lot of sellers who make very small profits if any on Ebay.  But I think there are sellers who can still can get resonably profits going by the items I usually buy on ebay these days.  They usually fall into two categories:

1.  Items not sold in local shops in small quantities.

2.  Not sold at all in local shops.

I have noticed that the sellers will charge basically the same price as the retailers and often at even higher prices.  For example when I was retoring an old stool with fold down steps, I bought six new plastic end caps for the steel legs on Ebay for 99p each.  Obviously these are bought in bulk by the seller for a fraction of the price they were charging.  Same goes for almost any speciality items needed in small quantities.  Here is a list of things I have bought in small quantites in the last couple of years which fall into one of the two categories above or both of them:

One brass dome headed nut (£4 approx)

Water fleas for an aquarium to eat algae bloom (£5 approx)

Special soap and waterproofing liquid for rain coat - two small pouches (£8 approx)

50 welding rods (£7 approx.) usually sold locally in quatities of about 200 number.

Waxed thread for sewing leather (£3 approx)

Some of the sellers might be bricks and mortar retailers who also sell on ebay, but I suspect most are just part time businesses only selling online.  Most have only a few competitors online and sometimes no competitors. 

 

theoretica

How much storage space do you have?

Potbellypig

Plenty of variables in the answer to your question. What are you looking to sell? If it's generic stuff that you're trying to 'buy-low-sell-high' on then realistically the amount of time and effort vs ROI would generally be considered not worth it. 

If you've got some handmade, personalised or bespoke products then using eBay as a tool combined with your website, social media pages, Amazon, Etsy, in person sales and all the other tools out there is all good.

As with any of these tools, check out the fees generated by using eBay.

Morgan453

Thanks to all of you for guide. I create a seller account on eBay successfully. Just start uploading products on account.

soolin

Morgan453 said:

Thanks to all of you for guide. I create a seller account on eBay successfully. Just start uploading products on account.

Good luck with your sales. Just remember if you are buying or making items with the intention of re selling you will need a business account, if the items are just your own unwanted/used items then a private account is fine.

Make sure you have also set your buyer requirements tight, block those with 2 or more non payment strikes etc. Also watch for scammers, they do target new sellers. The one thing to remember is that you must only send to the address supplied by ebay - no other address will be covered if buyer claims non delivery. 

Come back if you have any more questions.