Posts tagged Sales

There are countless ads and websites for making money online that end up being plans for how to make money on ebay. Most are delivered as e-books or in some other form of marketable media. Sure you can make money on ebay, anybody can. But, before jumping off and buying into one of these programs, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by considering just a few things.

As you most likely already know, ebay is an online marketplace where you can either auction or sell just about any kind of product. The main thing you have to decide first, is just what sort of product you are going to sell and how much you are going to charge for it. Many of these plans and strategy guides really gloss over this part of the process and continue along assuming you have some marketable product. This is where most people fail on ebay. Before you can continue with any sort of sales strategy or plan, you have to find a product that will sell and that can make you money. This is not as easy as you might think. I will try to give you as much helpful information as I can here, so you can at least know what you need to do, and the best part of it is, it is free. I am not in the business of selling information. I already have a successful ebay business and have been a powerseller for many years. But even though it is successful, and I have had thousands of sales, I haven’t really made any huge amount of money, in fact, I haven’t even made enough to make a living on from ebay. But still, it is a good source of extra income, so it is a money making plan worth looking into.

So, the first thing you want to do is to decide on what kind of product or products you want to try to sell on ebay. This is going to take quite a bit of research and work, no matter what you do. Once you decide upon some product, you need to research on ebay to see what sort of competition exists for that product or products. Ebay has millions of listings at any point in time and no matter what product you want to sell, there are already probably plenty of people selling it. So, you will need to come up with some way to compete with them. Just setting a low price isn’t enough usually, there are plenty of sellers who will sell anything at starting bids of 99cents or less and use inflated postage charges to cover their costs. This is against ebays policies, but they do it anyway so it is a fact of life you have to deal with. As you can see, finding a product to sell isn’t easy, and to make matter worse, after deciding what to sell, you need to figure out how to price it all taking into account ebay fees and other charges.
Ebay is in the business of making money, and they do so through all the various listing, final value and other charges they have for their subscribers selling on ebay. You have to factor all these fees into your sales. As a very rough estimate, you can expect to pay anywhere from 5 to 10% of the price of your product in listing and final value fees for each sale. But that isn’t all, in addition, you also have to pay listing fees for all the items you decide to list that don’t sell. As if that isn’t enough, if you get payments through paypal or some other payment processor, you have to pay them fees as well on each sale.
One very important thing you should know is that you should not under any circumstances try to sell ‘fake’ or ‘replica’ products of famous label brands on ebay. They have very strict policies on this and if you are caught doing so, your account will be closed, all your listings cancelled and you will find yourself banned from selling on ebay both by your id and by your IP address. You can always look on ebay and find plenty of fake Louis Vuitton handbags, or Tiffany & Co. Jewelry fakes or replica Rolex watches and such for sale. But all this means is that the sellers have not yet been caught or noticed, but sooner or later they will be.

Another thing to consider is the current ebay customer feedback system. Customers have the ability to leave you either postive or negative feedback comments on any items you sell to them. While 99% of the customers are reasonable and friendly people, easy to communicate with, there is a small percentage of customers who will use any excuse to give you a negative feedback. On ebay this is like a glaring red light on you, you could have 1,000 glowing and great postives feedbacks, but it only takes a couple of negative marks to damage your reputation and sales. The main problem is you don’t really have much of a chance to correct or respond to these negative comments once they are posted for the world to see. In fact, it can be so damaging, that there are even customers who use threatening of negative feedback to blackmail you. Incredible demands like ‘send me another one for half price’ or ‘give me back half my money and I won’t give you a negative feedback’ even though there is no problem with their purchase to begin with. Once again, this is against ebay policy, but they do it anyway.

That’s all I have for now, but if enough people are interested in this sort of information, i would be happy to post a lot more detailed informational articles in the future. Despite all the problems, I would still recommend selling on ebay to anyone interested in trying to make some extra money.