eBay is an online auction site where anyone can post nearly anything for sale. Since its inception in 1995, eBay has been one of the most well-known shopping destinations on the Internet.
In addition to its basic auction format, eBay offers several options to buyers and sellers including a fixed-priced store front. Its companion sites like Kijiji and StubHub offer other goods like online classifieds and event tickets, and eBay also owns PayPal.
If you’re not already familiar with eBay, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to make some extra money by selling items to collectors all over the world.
While Craigslist can help you connect with local buyers, eBay reaches a massive audiences of would-be consumers. With so many people buying and selling things through the site, there’s a lot of demand for even strange or generally hard-to-sell items.
You might not be able to sell everything immediately through eBay, but you can certainly increase your chances of turning a profit on items that might otherwise sit unused in your house or garage.
For auction hunters, eBay provides an especially valuable service. If you sell goods through the site, you don’t need to worry about maintaining a regular store-front.
As long as you have a place to store your merchandise, a digital camera and a little bit of time, you can run a successful online store through eBay.
Ebay Store: Basics for Beginners
The basic format if eBay is pretty simple. Buyers list items for sale and state whether they’ll be sold via auction or by a straight “buy now” price, or the item can be put up with both bids and a buy-out price.
Buyers search for items by name or category and can find auctions alphabetically, by price or by the date that the auction is set to end.
Before you can list any items on eBay, you’ll need to create an account. Take some time to create a good username and fill out your profile with relevant information.
Buyers will scope out your account before bidding on items, and you’ll want to appear as professional and trustworthy as possible. You’ll also want to build a bit of a reputation on the site by getting buyer and seller feedback.
Basically, every time you buy or sell an item, the other person involved can leave feedback over how trustworthy you are. Many people are unwilling to buy items from sellers without any positive feedback, so you’ll need to build this up before you can start really making sales.
The easiest way to build up your feedback is to make a few small purchases on the site and pay swiftly. The seller will generally leave positive feedback and help build your overall rating. In the long run, this will make you more attractive to buyers.
Once you have an account set up, it’s a good idea to do a bit of research before putting up your first items for sale. You’ll want to have a good idea of both how much the item is worth and how much others are selling it for.
If you overprice your item, you won’t get any takers; however, if you under-price your item, it will sell quickly but you’ll lose profits.
You’ll also need to decide on a way to accept payments. The easiest may be to use PayPal, but you can also take payments by bank deposit or even checks and money orders.
- When you list an item for sale, you’ll need to upload a few photographs and write a description of the item.
- You’ll also need to set the starting bid, bid increment, buy-now price and auction duration.
- You can also set a reserve on the auction if you wish.
- Once the item is posted, people on the site can see it and make bids.
- In most cases, auctions won’t start to get active until the auction is winding to a close as more people will bid at the last second than early on since they’ll all be wanting a good deal.
Once someone makes a winning bid or buys your item outright, eBay will alert you. It’s then your responsibility to make sure that the item gets shipped or delivered appropriately.
The faster you get the items sent and the better condition they’re in when they arrive, the better your reputation will become among buyers. You can also choose to sell an item to local buyers only to arrange delivery or pickup in town. Just be sure you specify this when you list the item to prevent faraway bidders.
Tips for Selling on eBay
Although using the site is very straightforward and intuitive, getting the most out of your eBay business takes some time and strategy. Here are a few tips for making more money on eBay:
- Take high-quality pictures of your merchandise and write up engaging descriptions. You’ll want to entice people to buy the items you post, and nothing will achieve that faster than a great description and photo. Try to infuse your listings with a little bit of personality while providing all of the information a buyer needs to know about the item’s condition, use and value.
- Comparison shop among other people selling similar products to you. See what prices they’re asking for, and decide whether you can undercut them and still make a profit. See if you can highlight any benefits that your product has over what they’re selling.
- Consider offering items on a certain theme through your shop. While you can certainly make your eBay shop a grab-bag of miscellaneous items, picking a cohesive theme can help make your shop a frequent destination of people looking for specific items.
- Recognize that some things are better suited to being sold on eBay than others. For example, extremely heavy or bulky items can be prohibitively expensive to ship, so you may want to put them in a local-buyers-only listing or find a different venue to sell them through.
- Check eBay for items that are under priced. You may be able to buy these and resell them for a profit, which can increase your overall profits and also take more of your competition off the market.
- Bear in mind that just because something is listed on eBay doesn’t mean it will necessarily sell. When looking at other people’s items, be sure to check how many bids they’ve gotten, not just the asking price. Someone might put a worthless item for sale at a high price, but it’s only worth something if it actually gets bids.
These are just a few strategies that can be used to make money off of eBay. The website itself has several other step-by-step guides that will enable you to get started.
You may want to sign up with an account and do some buying on the site first to get a feel for how it works. Once you’ve become more comfortable with buying on eBay, you can begin making sales.
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