Maybe you've been selling things for awhile and would like to make it a full-time career or maybe this is your 1st time and you'd like to just jump in and start a business.
It's not as outrageous as it seems to start an eBay business but you have to have patience and do it right if you'd like to succeed.
So how do you start?
1. Find your Niche!
Here's an example of what a Niche is: Cell Phone Cases can be classified as a niche because it has many different kinds you can sell. Maybe you'd like to sell iPhone cases or Samsung Galaxy S3 cases, they might be different cases, but they're still cases, so Cell Phone cases would be your niche.
A Niche is simply something you can branch off of. You stay within the same category but you sell different items in that category.
Maybe you'd like to sell clothes? Make sure you stay within a section of those clothes, such as baby clothes, kids clothes, mens clothes or even women's clothes and stick with it.
If you decide you want to sell a large amount of random items, people aren't going to be really looking at your store because they'll usually be looking for the same thing if they choose to come back. If you don't have it, they won't come back.
Having a niche will not only increase the number of times customers come back to you, it'll also encourage 'word of mouth' advertising, which is the best advertising you can ever ask for.
2. Advertise!!
I'm not saying go out to paid to click sites and pay to have visitors view your site, although it may seem like a good idea, these people aren't really interested in an eBay sale and may not even be from your country! Paid to Click sites are great for advertising OTHER paid to click sites, but that's about it. To increase traffic to your eBay auctions, you need to look further out there for people.
Forums are the BEST form of advertising for the sale of items. You just need to find the best forum for your item. For example, if I'm going to sell Samsung Galaxy S3 Cell Phone cases, I'm going to advertise on Andriod cell phone forums and Samsung Forums. Those people most likely have that phone and will be more inclined to look into my cases and then, buy them.
If you advertise cell phone cases on a pregnancy forum, you're not going to get very far because those women would be more interested in fertility items and baby items so this would be the best place to advertise cribs, or baby clothes or even pregnancy and ovulation tests.
So don't just advertise 'everywhere' because you'll get 'no where' with that and it'll be a waste of time and energy.
3. Know where to BUY your items!
I'll go more in depth in a separate post but the bottom line here is RESEARCH. Don't go to your local Wal-Mart and pick up an arm full of SD Cards at their 'discounted' price and think you're going to turn a profit with them. Unless it's Black Friday, there's no way that's going to happen. After your shipping costs and fees to eBay AND PayPal, you're going to come out in the negative or barely making a few pennies.
You really need to research what other people are selling things at on eBay because you need to stay ahead of the competition. You might get lucky and sell something at a high price but it won't happen all the time. If people see a cheaper price for a better item, they will take it over yours.
So before you decide to go all out on an item, look at what other people are doing with it.
Afterwards, you'll either need to find the manufacture and contact them to get the wholesale price, (basically buy in bulk) or research online other wholesale companies, such as aliexpress.com to find the best prices for your item!
Those are the top 3 ways to start an eBay business. If you'd like to see more examples of a proper eBay auction, you can review my own auctions right here:
These are just a few examples and I'll go more into depth about what to do when listing an item so look for my new posts!
No comments:
Post a Comment