Make Money on Ebay – A Personal Experience
Anyone — yes, anyone — serious about making money online should know about eBay, the darling stock of the dot-com boom earlier this decade.
eBay is one of the very, very few online businesses that weathered the dot.com bust. You can guess why, as CEO Meg Whitman puts it, eBay is “transforming the way e-commerce is done.” And eBay has gone from strength to strength since it acquired Paypal, the world’s largest online payment services company.
Can you make money selling on eBay? The short answer is YES, definitely! I have used eBay to make a profit of at least $1500 each month for the past 9 months. And I know for a fact that many people earn more than that. For selling online, eBay stands out from the crowd for 3 reasons:
Their goal is to make it easy for you to sell: ordinary people like you and I can sell to an audience as large as today’s Marks & Spencer, Walmart and John Lewis;
In addition to the major search engines (ie Google and Yahoo), eBay attracts more traffic every day than any other website. Yes, eBay reaches more people than any newspaper and/or television company in the world;
95% of Google/Yahoo users still use them for a simple purpose: surfing the Internet. However, with eBay, it’s just the opposite. 95% of people who use eBay do so with the intention of spending money online. You can make money with eBay precisely because of the quality traffic it generates;
How can you make money on eBay?
There are many ways to make money on eBay. Don’t forget that eBay is like a mall, a marketplace. So all the fundamental rules of supply and demand, pricing, economics, business and simple logic apply! Essentially, it boils down to buying low and selling high, as traders in all walks of life do.
If I’m not convincing you, follow the link below to the “This is Money” website, which states that 70,000 people in the UK alone now earn a second income on Ebay.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money-savers/article.html?in_article_id=406867&in_page_id=5
Here are several ways to make money on eBay. They are NOT exhaustive and I’m sure many people use other techniques. In addition, you must choose the technique that best suits YOUR skills and lifestyle:
Deliberately looking for misspelled articles, buying them cheap and selling them at a higher price after writing them correctly;
Buy an item, then enhance its listing and photo displayed, and resell it at a higher price;
Obtain an item that can be bought cheaply in your area (for example, in local newspapers, at an antique fair, or in a developing country) and then sell it on eBay;
Buy wholesale from wholesalers and retailers on eBay;
Purchase and sale of electronic books;
I personally make money selling eBooks on eBay. The beauty of an ebook is that it’s not like a regular article. If you want to sell, for example, mobile phones, you can only sell as many as you have in stock. Whereas with an ebook, you can sell as many as buyers are willing to pay for it. All you need to do is email the buyer the eBook once you’ve received payment.
For example, I could have easily written all my blogs into an ebook, copyrighted it, and put it up on eBay for $10. With a catchy title, subtitle, and image, it would sell about 4 copies a day. And if I sell 15 varieties of e-books, I would easily make $1500 profit every month.
However, you should also be aware of the following pitfalls:
eBay is only as good as how well you use it. If you don’t master quoting techniques and, remember, apply the fundamental rules of economics, YOU WILL FAIL;
eBay is expensive. It charges you a listing fee and a final value fee of 5.25% of the price your item sold for. On top of that, Paypal, the online payment service company owned and used by eBay, charges 3.4% of the price you sold your item for. This means that at least 10% of the price you get will be paid to eBay or Paypal. So if you’re selling a low-margin item, it’s going to be very risky;
Both eBay and Paypal are trusted brands. Therefore, they invest a lot to ensure trust and security on their sites. They can, and will, punish any user who does not abide by their listing rules and Acceptable Use Policies. These policies can be onerous, so I strongly encourage you to familiarize yourself with them. eBay/Paypal punishments will range from removal of listings, temporary sales restrictions to full suspension and lifetime ban for serious and/or persistent violations;
Irritating, eBay and Paypal can penalize you even if you haven’t done anything wrong! They may feel that they have done nothing wrong or, more commonly, that they have been operating in a “gray area”, but for them, everything has to be black and white. If they don’t see it your way, they will unilaterally penalize you and you won’t be able to do anything about it.
Summary assessment:
Typical monthly earnings of $300 to $10,000, depending on how well you use it. eBay is very open in this regard.
Get rich quick? Maybe, if you’re making $10,000 a month. But I think you should use it as a hobby to generate a second income to start with.
Second decent income? Yes, easily.
Everything from home online? Yes. But you may need to use the mail to accept checks, collect registered items, and go to the bank to cash your checks.
Legal and ethical? Yes, and so it should continue to be. If you violate the rules you will be caught by eBay/Paypal. Remember that they invest millions in enforcing their rules!
Is continuous effort required? I spend about 1.5 hours a day – 7 days a week
Is an initial cash investment required? Variable, although I would recommend that you have around $300 of working capital to start covering your eBay fees. You can’t use this at all if items are selling fast and your buyers pay on time;
Initial time required to set up? max. 3 hours, but you’ll learn new things as you continue to sell and you’ll always have to spend some time setting up each week.
My recomendation
I recommend you give eBay a try if you really want to make money online. Set a budget and start small. Don’t act big at first. To maximize your chances of doing well on eBay, I recommend getting a book on eBay. If anything, you should try eBay just for the eBay experience. How would you feel if you heard that people like you are making extra money every week on eBay and you are not?
Visit my blog at the following link to see the books I recommend.