eBay has created a revolution in online trading, selling products and services is now feasible for everyone. Even many successful businesses, including mine are using eBay to promote their products and services and drive traffic to their site.
Here are my top ten tips for successful selling on eBay.
Step 1: Identify your market
Watch some auctions and determine what is selling and what is not. You will soon find a few items than consistently sell for a good price. Find the right product/service and establish your price.
Step 2: Watch the competition
If there is a particular trader that consistently sells their items for a good price then take a look at there ads. What are they doing that the others are not. Consider their titles, layout of the ad and the text and images that they use.
Step 3: Find a product
Having found your product, call as many suppliers as you can and try to beat them down on price. Remember ordering in bulk will normally secure a lower price but don’t tie up too much capital in stock. Make sure that you make a decent margin, find something that you can sell for a lot more than you paid for it. This may seem obvious but a lot of people waste their time making pennies so it is worth reiterating, the bigger your margins are the less you have to worry.
Step 4: Start small
Don’t throw money at bad ideas. Start playing around with different ad text and images. It doesn’t cost a lot with eBay to try the most outrageous ideas, some will work and some won’t. Best still you will know the results of your trials very quickly.
Step 5: Test and repeat
Once you have found a strategy that works keep doing it! But also keep testing new ideas the more strong sales strategies that your find the more reliable you sales will be. Step 6: Work out a business plan:
This doesn’t have to be a professional document, just an outline of the market that you have broken into and possible opportunities. Identify your strategies that work and the items that are selling. Work out based on your current ROI (Return on Investment) what sort of budget you are prepared to risk. Remember with budgets it is all about risk assessment: what is the risk of losing everything weighed against the likely returns.
Step 7: Invest and expand
Introduce your money, investment means profit. Start buying inventory, but not more than you can sell in a reasonable amount of time. The last thing you want is unsold stock lying around because that is tied up capital that could be used for marketing. Make sure you get the lowest price possible. Buy in bulk and try to catch the supplier at opportune times such as the end of the month when they may be looking for the extra sales. Also try buying at the end of the day when they just want to get home and may be inclined to just close the deal. As you establish a relationship with your suppliers, secure further discounts on account of your continued custom and increasing quantities.
Step 8: Make it official
Once you have made a thousand pounds or so in sales, get your self registered as a business. Build a website and link your ads to the site. Visitors can then find out more about you and importantly find more of your products and services. Start to advertise in different places, on and offline, after all you should know what sells now and should be an expert of marketing your products and services.
Step 9: Automate
Create auto responders for emails to save you answering the same questions and to give quick responses to customers. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.
Step 10: Never give up
It is not just skill or knowledge that enables people to succeed. There are loads of skillful and knowledgeable people that are not working for them self; it is perseverance that wins the day. When it looks like it is all going wrong, chances are you are about to make a break through and when someone says it can’t be done, you know that you are getting closer!
If you really are trying to build a successful company, then go for it and work hard.
Good luck!
Paul Hudson has more resources online at
http://www.iso-design.co.uk/resources.htm
