Ebay-A Business or a Hobby?

by Keith Anthony

1. First you need to decide if you want to make a business out of selling on Ebay or not. If you do then you do not want to be greedy in trying to make the biggest profit all at one time. By this I mean the reserve price. The reserve price is a price that you set at the beginning of the auction that you will only sell if your bidders reach this price. By setting the reserve to high, most likely you will not sell the item. Another error in alot of sellers is no reserve but the starting price is to high which will run buyers off. If you have to put a reserve on the item, start low and hopefully it will hit your realistic reserve price.2. Determine what products you want to sell. Research different products that you might have an interest in. This could be sporting goods, clothing, jewelry, electronics or a number of items. Finally narrow it down to one or two different items. I decided to just stick with the electronics field which seems to do very well consistantly.3. Suppliers are going to make you or break you. I found this out years ago. You need to find a good reliable supplier with good prices and hopefully dropshipping available. I try to find a supplier where I can make 10-20 profit off of each item after my Ebay fees. This is what I was talking about earlier. You don't want to be greedy and try to make it all at once. Say you are selling a $100 camera, and you make $15 profit after your listing fees. Selling 10 of these a day calculates to over $1000 a week. It just keeps adding up if you don't try to get it all at once.4. Finally I would like to talk about customer service. On Ebay, quite a bit of customer contact takes place before a sale is made, and it mostly is answering questions by people who have placed a bid or are considering placing a bid on your item. Customer service on Ebay, to a large extent, is a matter of checking your e-mail and responding to it in a professional an timely manner. After a sale, customer service means making sure the merchandise is sent out quickly and that it arrives in good shape as described. One last piece of advice I would like to give is--1. Try to sell things that you know a little something about. 2. Try to sell items for which there is a demand on Ebay. 3. Always be there for the customer to answer questions. I hope some of these tips will help you get started in the Ebay business. Just remember to have fun with it and don't stress yourself out. Below is a website address that will help you out with your product source.

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