Making Money from Ebay

Ebay is a wildly popular site. Since its founding, it has grown to become the number on online auction sites on the internet, with outlandish auctions selling millions of dollars each day. Along with this wild popularity, however, has also come lots of get rich quick schemes, how-to guides, and knowledge bases you only have to shell out 29.95 a month for seven months to own! These offers promise thousand dollar a week incomes with little or no work. Unfortunately, the majority of these plans, resources, and guides are overpriced scams. They lie.

That's not to say, however, that money cannot be made on Ebay. And you can get started, right here, for free, exclusively on E-Money's site.

For starters, here's the deal: Ebay is a buyers market. For those who haven't taken a small business or economics course, a buyers market is one in which the number of products exceeds the demand for said products, increasing competition and decreasing prices. This is a buyer's market because it's good for those doing the purchasing, but bad for those doing the selling, because fierce competition can keep your profit margins at a bare minimum. Wholesalers can outdo you in most product categories, and their shipping rates are probably rock-bottom as well.

Do not despair, however! You can overcome this! The secret is to find a niche. We at E-Money have conducted research for years on the subject now and it seems as though the more quirky or rare an item is, the better chance it has of going for a good profit. Selling cheap, used books will not earn you much money. However, if you know a lot about books, you can go to cheap, used book sales and pick out the ones you know to be particularly rare, old, or appreciated. Pick an area of merchandise that YOU have a lot of interest in, and go with it! A bunch of factory-made dreamcatchers will sell for four or five dollars a piece. However, if you go to a flea market and find a high quality, authentic or handmade dreamcatcher, you can sell it for a considerable amount more. The author of this article has personally seen such dreamcatchers going for hundreds of dollars.

Another big secret is presentation. The average person does not have much knowledge of web design or coding. See if you have a friend or relative who does though. Often a neighborhood kid would be happy to set up an ebay auction for you for five bucks as long as you specify what you want it to look like. You have to provide the raw materials though. Take good pictures of your items against a nice background(a white bedsheet is a good, low-cost backdrop). You can get these developed and put on a CD at most developers now, if you don't have a scanner or digital camera at your disposal. Provide high-quality descriptions, and make sure you know what your talking about. Spelling and grammar checks never hurt either. Make sure your title is descriptive and succinct, and try not to use crazy characters and all capital letters that make garish, unnattractive auctions.

Your first few sales will be the toughest, as you do not yet have any kind of feedback rating. Quick shipment, good communication, and leaving feedback for others are three of the best ways to get good feedback for yourself. Generally the longer you've been selling for, the easier it will be, provided you are responsible and have good Ebay etiquette.

Now another question that comes to mind is where to get your material. If you are good at making things, it's possible you could just sell your own merchandise. For this you could open an Ebay store, which is a permanent storefront instead of an auction. These are catching on rather quickly and can be hooked up to paypal accounts for easy and secure payment. If you are not the actual producer of your merchandise(be it for auction or for store), you can peruse local flea markets, garage sales, library sales, and rummage sales. These are all excellent sources of quirky or rare items. Also see if you can get permission to rummage through friends' attics or basements in search of good stuff to sell. You could also get items from our Free Products page. The electronics there would get you a nice profit since you're getting them for free.

Another option is to find a company that dropships items, and resell these on Ebay. This is a slightly more complex approach, but can pay off well. The basic theory is that you find a company that will dropship items for you. You post the item on Ebay, and when it sells, you send notification to the merchandise company, and they ship it to the customer. This can be risky for two reasons. First of all, you need to find a legitimate company to dropship though. Make sure you call them up and establish a personal relationship with at least one of their sales representatives. This will help you avoid the second pitfall, which is slow shipping. If your dropship company takes too long to ship out, or ships faulty merchandise, it's your Ebay rating that takes a hit. Dropship reselling is extremely profitable, however, and this is where much of the big money is to be had. It allows you to compete with big wholesalers without having to maintain a warehouse and inventory yourself. Just be careful in picking which company you represent.

At the time of this article writing, the following sites are legitimate dropshippers:
http://dropshipdirect.com/
http://idropshipper.com/
http://glitterdirect.com/
http://tngdirect.com/
http://nugin.com/
http://www.directbuyvideo.com/
http://www.ckbproducts.com/

In conclusion, it is possible to make respectable amounts of money through ebay. Thousands of dollars a week? Perhaps. But realize that if you wish to do this, you would probably have to spend as much time and hard work on it as you would a normal job. The nice thing about Ebay, though, is that you don't have to if you don't want to. Just want to make a couple extra bucks on the weekend? That's fine! Want to roll the dice and see if you can make it big? That's fine too. Just make sure you conduct ample research on your market before hand, and have backup plans and contingencies in case it doesn't quite work as you planned.

Until next time!

Team Benjamin