Costs

An important thing to always keep in mind is your cost of doing business. When you are selling on eBay you will have eBay insertion fees, eBay final value fees, PayPal fees, inventory costs, auction management costs (more on that laterd), office supplies, internet connection, postage, TAXES and much more. The MOST important cost that you have however is your time.

I can not really list all of the fees for eBay or PayPal because they change semi regularly (always in an upward way). Many of the other costs vary as well, but in order to tell if you are really making money and to deduct it on your taxes you will need to keep track of your costs and expenses.

It is a common mistake for people to simply take the winning auction amount, minus the cost of the item and label that their "profit". In truth though, there are a lot of other expenses that go into it.

In addition to the winning auction amount or the sales price, there is a shipping & HANDLING. This can be whatever price you want to charge amd does not have to be just the price of a stamp. There are eBay rules on this though and that is simply that you can not be doing a "final value fee avoidance" thing where you sell a printer for one penny and $40 s&h. This is commonly done by people who want to avoid paying eBay a percentage of the money.

If you do decide to have a handling charge, keep in mind that there will be customers who will complain that it is more than the cost of the stamp. This is rare, but they will sometimes leave you negative feedback. Now though, eBay has a rating system that includes a rating for shipping, so many buyer frusturations are taken there instead of just negative feedback.

What to Sell? - DVD's

One thing that I researched quite a bit was selling DVDs on eBay. I had about 30 DVDs to sell and was able to sell them for about $7.00 each plus about $4 shipping. Since they were my own DVDs, that was good enough for me. After this I started looking into getting them cheap so that I could sell them all of the time. It turned out that there were about two places that seemed best.
The first place that looked promising was a DVD buying co-op. It was free to become a member and they could get all of the new releases. They mainly catered to small video rental places, but just about anyone could join it seemed. The biggest draw back was that there was a minimum MONTHLY order. The minimum was only $200, but I was not sure that I was ready to commit to that. The other problem was that the DVDs were not super cheap. I was looking to get these DVDs for about $3 to $4 each, and there seemed to be only one way to do it.
Bulk used DVDs. The best price per DVDs seems to be buying a lot (as in large group together, not "a lot" as a general quantity) of used DVDs for about $300 to $800 at a time. These would have 100 to 200 DVDs and the price would be right, but some would never sell. You never have your own pick of what is in there. Some will sell well, but others will cost more in eBay fees listing it than it will put in your pocket.
I came to find that one of the most popular types of DVDs were television boxed sets. These would sell for thirty to forty dollars a season, but would cost me about $20. Then I noticed some sellers selling a complete nine season set for about a hundred bucks. These however are bootlegged ones from China. A word of warning: this will get you a visit from the FBI if you sell them.
Anyway, I never went past selling several of my own DVDs (and I eventually bought some of them again later)
I do think that there is potential here though and I have found that there are places like the CD Exchange stores where you can buy select DVDs and make some money on the side. There is surely money to be made in bulk.

What to Sell? - Your Old Junk

The best place to start selling if you have never used eBay before is to find some things around your house that you are no longer using and to list them on eBay for sale. You would be surprised as just about anything will fetch a price, even if it is just a few dollars. One thing to remember with this though is that whatever you are selling is usually used. Yes, you may have paid $1000 for that treadmill that you used two times, but did you ever want to buy a $1000 clothes rack? Would you rather just have $200 in your pocket and some more space in your house?

Don't be too proud of what you paid for something. The money has been spent and is gone. The best thing you can do is get what you can for it and that will be both a little money and EXPERIENCE.

Another thing to remember is what people on eBay are looking for. They want a deal, just like anyone else. EBay buyers are not shopping at an exclusive store, but rather a world wide garage sale.

Good luck!

What to Sell?

When people find out that I am a long time power seller, nine times out of ten, they mention that they would like to start selling on eBay but that they do not know what to sell. The beauty of eBay though is that you can sell most anything, but that does make it a bit overwhelming.



My advice is always "Sell whatever you can get cheaper than people will pay for it.". Buy low, sell high. It is that easy. Figuring out what will give you that price differential is the key though.



The best thing that you can do is to come up with a list of at LEAST 30 things that you would like to sell and then research how much you can get those things for. Next you need to research how much these items sell on eBay and, more importantly how many sell compared to how many are listed. Keep in mind that you want history on this, so look at completed listings, not open listings.



Andale.com has an awesome research tool that you can use for about $8 a month. I would recommend though that you make your list then narrow it down with eBay first though and take your short list to andale.



Anyway, look out for more articles detailing things I have researched. If you have any you would like to add, email me!

First Post

So, this is the first post to what will hopefully become a long lasting eBay blog.

I have been thinking of writing many of the eBay tips and ideas that I have into a book, but I do not have time to sit down and be coherent for long periods, so I will do this instead.

Because of my busy schedule, I will be doing most of this from my Blackberry, which unfortunately, does not have a spell checker. :(. I will do my best to spell check it occasionally, but it is pretty likely that it will be a little rough around the edges, but will hopefully be beneficial to you.