Starting an EBay Business

If you are thinking about starting an online EBay business there are many thing you need to know to so you can be successful. A lot of people I know have been successful in EBay and some have even given up the corporate life in order to do eBay full time. Now EBay is work, don’t kid yourself.  But if you want a stay at home business this is one that has been around for some time and it has made a lot of people like yourself successful.

First thing first, be smart and do some homework before diving in with both feet. Explore around and find the power sellers, check out their sites. Power sellers are very successful EBay business owners, look at they are selling and see how they set up their item descriptions and their about me page. Find out what is working for them and take some good notes. They would not be power sellers if they did not know what they are doing.

Now open up an EBay seller’s account. There are a few pages of information you will need to set up with EBay, you will also need to setup a PayPal account in order for your customers to pay you. PayPal is one of the best and easiest accounts for people to pay you through especially with a credit card.

Find items that are in high demand, this will take some research on your part. This is where you do some investigative work on power seller’s sights, and check out the “hot topic area” on EBay. What I did was I started selling items that were lying around my home and items that were cluttering up my garage and my shed. I started with these because these items were pure profit for me; I also had some old college text books that were in the closet doing me no good. I listed these on EBay and sold them for two to three times more profit than what I would have gotten for them at a yard sale.

Once you have your EBay business up and going and you have learnt the basics of what to do and how to do it. You will want to think about opening up an EBay store. An EBay store is a great place to show off all the items you have listed on EBay. People may be searching for one item and then they go to your store and find something that they just can’t live without, they would not have known about that item if they did not see it in your store.

One of the power sellers that I know uses Google “Trends”. Trends finds out what people are searching for on the internet. Google searches for hot topics that people all over the world are searching each and every day.  What my friends do is explore the list and see what they can get their hands on in order to sell on EBay. Just keep in mind that EBay is international, so if something does not sell in your area does not mean it may not be a hot topic in another part of the world. Stay positive and don’t get discourage, EBay takes work and commitment, treat it like a business and it will provide an extra income to you.

In a future article we will look at some of the finer details of how to run an EBay business. We will look at deeper of how to list items, how to add pictures, how to ship the best way, how to track your feedback, and good customer satisfaction ratings.