Before you go all out and decide to make a million bucks selling on eBay...
You need to take a quick tutorial on buying and selling on online auction sites.
Everyone wants to make big money selling on eBay. Of course, eBay is a great auction site, but you need to understand that it is NOT a money-making enterprise for the minimal dabbler like it is for the big sellers. In order to make money and keep your prices reasonable, you have to offer something that people want or need badly. Selling your old used housewares or records or movies or what-have-you will cost you more than you get for them on eBay. eBay is a HUGE auction site, search engine driven, and unless you are offering merchandise that everyone is looking for and everyone needs, you play a waiting game, paying for that store month by month, hoping somebody looks for your offerings. To get high in the search engines, you can't have a small, cheap store...you must have an expensive store. And then you must pay even more to get your listings shown as highly-visible, professional listings.
If you are selling new items, you can't sell just a couple dozen. You must sell hundreds...even thousands of items, to make a good profit. You must buy your stock cheap. It seems to be all about volume. Sellers who use drop shippers make great money. They buy 10,000 items for 50 cents a shot, have the crates shipped to them, and then sell thousands of items for a few cents profit. The time it takes for a low-volume eBay store owner to load his/her items, and the money he/she pays out to own that store and meet the PayPal and eBay final value fees makes a small store useless. Face it...eBay caters to the big boys.
Since eBay is online, there are many things a seller must factor into that price. eBay listing fees are fairly reasonable, but the final value
fee, the PayPal fee, then S&H and insurance must all be factored in.
Even the box/envelope you ship your item in must be purchased. That is why so
many folks sell and ship via Priority mail or ground ship UPS. It costs the customer more,
but the seller gets all the shipping supplies free, and the seller doesn't need to run to the Post Office or UPS office because they offer pick up service in most areas.
Folks who simply want to sell of a huge bunch of old books for instance, will get pennies on the dollar, and spend more money feeding the eBay fee system than it is worth.
I was online shopping for meat grinders the other evening. I checked out eBay, and found the exact same meat grinder on sale for prices ranging from $19.99 to $79.99. The sellers were charging between $15.00 and $50.00 S&H. Since these meat grinders are drop-shipped to the big sellers, they all cost about the same. Many sellers had dozens listed in one day, so you know they are volume sellers. Many had the Buy-it-Now price set at around $65.00. The sellers who started the bidding at $1.00 had a much higher S&H price, guaranteeing that they would not take a total loss if that price didn't get bid up to the true value ranges. Although that is not good eBay seller policy, many get away with the practice.
As you can see, selling on eBay is highly competitive. A buyer will often check out a dozen auctions before finally buying. So a seller must offer a reasonable price, offer competitive S&H, and guarantee that the product will be accepted for return if it is a dud. Sometimes even a penny difference in price will tip the scale. RESEARCH your item, and sell things that in great demand.
If you are looking to make big bucks, you must have the money and the energy to spend a lot of both on setting up your business. The more ethical you are, and the more thorough you are in making sure you are selling a good product that will not be returned when it breaks the following week, the better your business will be. Returns can kill you on eBay or any other site. Selling sub-par stuff can destroy your rep.
I only sell items in small batches. So I don't make much money. I don't list 1,000 lightly used books that I bought for a dime a book, and sell them for a buck a book with $4.00 S&H. I have obviously not learned how to make big money on eBay, right? I sell excellent quality stuff, but others who buy in the thousands can undersell me by half. It's a gamble to try and make money on eBay, with all the thousands of sellers out there trying to do exactly the same thing.
Go for it if you have the guts, the patience, and the wherewithal. But whatever you decide to sell, however you decide to sell it, be honest and ethical, and RESEARCH before diving in headfirst. The pool might not be as deep as it appears, and that can make for a big headache.
GOOD LUCK!
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