How To Sell on EBay

I started selling on eBay in February 1998. For the first few years, almost anything that I listed sold and without photos. Like most sellers back then, I didn't upload any photos. I didn't even own a digital camera. I lot has changed since then. Money can still be made on eBay, but a seller has to be careful about what he lists. Even assuming that the seller already owns the items and has no need for them, listing fees for what doesn't sell can cause the seller to lose money on what he does sell. Who wants to waste waste time and lose money?

If you are just beginning, my advice is to don't waste your money on classes or books. Study the eBay site. Pick an area that interests you, and run some searches. Make sure you look at "Completed Auctions" under "Refine Search." Spend a few days doing this, and you will learn more than any book or class can teach you. Once you know what sells and for how much, you will know what to list. Once you know what to list, the rest will come as easy as it did back in the day when there were no classes and books.

If you don't have a feedback rating, it is a good idea to build one before you list items for sale. Buy some inexpensive items and wait for feedback.

Don't sign up with any third party wholesaling companies that claim they can sell you items wholesale that you can make a profit by selling them "retail." The days when you could have done that and not lost your shirt have been over for a decade. Marking up toasters and lighthouse figurines that you buy from those companies only make those companies money - not you.

I would also be very careful about listing products for someone else on consignment. That was once a way to make more money than one could have made by only listing what he could dig up around the house or bought cheap enough to resell. Since one has to be careful on today's eBay about what he lists, he also has to be careful about spending time sorting through somebody else's junk, finding very little that's worth listing on eBay. This is very labor intensive. Even worse is selling the client's priceless heirlooms at a price where he gets mad enough to throw rocks at your car as you leave his home (I'm not joking). Consignments, even if one is working from home, rarely pays nowadays.

Just a few years ago, eBay consignment franchises like iSold It! QuickDrop and Snappy Auctions were super hot. I was at the eBay convention in 2006 and they were selling like hotcakes. In fact, in 2006 Entrepreneur Magazine proclaimed the concept "Hotter Than Hot" and named iSold It! "Best New Franchise for 2007." But by 2007, the franchiser was in trouble and on the path to shutting down operations. It was a concept with almost everything working against it. It was labor intensive and dependent on a supply of inventory that the store owner had to continually beat the bushes for. To get walk-in business, many, if not most, opened in high rent strip centers. Franchisees lost as much as a quarter million dollars and some had to declare bankruptcy. Take away the franchise fees, royalties, and advertising fees that an iSold It! franchisee paid and a typical independent who puts in 12 hour days, seven days a week, might make minimum wage.

So have I made it clear that I wouldn't recommend consignment selling on eBay?

Where can you find product that will sell on eBay? One of the best places that I have found is eBay. I have made money buying "lots," breaking them down, and then listing them individually. My favorite items to look for in lots are collectibles. Old photos, postcards, magazines, and autographs are some of the collectibles that I have bought on eBay and resold. But one can't buy just any of those things in quantity and expect to make a profit reselling them individually. One has to know what sells within categories. Just to pick one category as an example, United States regional scenes on vintage postcards sell well. A postcard might mean nothing to you, but a postcard of my hometown the way it looked fifty years ago would be very precious to me. In fact, I look for them all the time and will pay good money when I find them. Yet generic postcards of unnamed scenes might not sell at any price.

Other places where I have had good luck finding items I could resale for profit are estate sales, flea markets, and auctions. Undervalued collectibles can still be found at antique malls, but I don't find those worth the time anymore; sellers have usually either listed the choice items on eBay or sold them to someone on their buyers list. "Going Out of Business" sales can also be lucrative for someone who has cash.

I never used the method, but cheap ads in local penny saver papers would turn up things. Thrift stores are good places to look for things to list on eBay, but some are much better than others. I also think "Wanted" flyers posted on bulletin boards in restaurants, stores, etc would work.

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