 | There are nearly 95 million
eBay users who spend $894 per second. |
| Most eBay sellers are
individuals and small businesses who sell everything from porcelain
dolls to DVD players to Mercedes convertibles. |
| Every day, more than 2 million
new items are added to the eBay marketplace, more than 10 million
bids are placed, and more than 100,000 new people register to buy
and sell on eBay. |
| At any given moment, eBay is
conducting some 19 million auctions, divided into more than 45,000
different categories. |
| About 2 million new items are
offered for sale every day. |
| One company is grossing more
than $5 million per year selling brand-new pool tables on eBay.
Their eBay store is so profitable that they've closed their retail
location and now sell solely online. That's right, they're making $5
million by selling pool tables—proof that you can sell just about
anything on eBay if you know how to do it. |
Incredible isn’t it? Seems like a
panacea for all your woes? Not hardly. eBay is about scope, eBay is
about reach, eBay is about marketing your product worldwide at the
click of a button. It is NOT EASY. Any eBay Powerseller will tell you,
building a business on eBay is much like building a traditional brick
and mortar business. You need a great business plan, inventory
purchasing and management, order fulfillment and customer service. Ok,
I lost about 30% of you readers right there….. The readers that want to
be instant eBay millionaires and sell 40 bazillion filet knives and
Chinese watches for a huge profit hit the back button on their browser
right there.
The hardest thing about doing
business on eBay is the competition – PERIOD. You might be the only
store in town selling the latest electronic Super_Gizmo but on eBay a
simple search shows 400 other Super_Gizmo’s for sale and most of them
will be priced lower than what you bought your for wholesale. D’Oh. I
have a whole garage full of Super_Gizmo’s -- what do I do now?????
eBay competition is brutal, pricing is cut throat and the virgins are
quickly sacrificed. Don’t let this be you! Study the market, look at
your competition, know your demographic and if you feel comfortable, try
a few trial eBay auctions. Remember, doing business on eBay is NOT
free. They charge a myriad of different fees and most of them are due
and payable whether your item sells or not. Listing hundreds of items
can quickly mount up to hundreds of dollars in eBay fees.
So for those of you that have read
this far, let me reveal the “Secret of eBay Success”. eBay in most
cases is a Buyer’s Market. When you do your research and see
many multiples of the same item offered for just a small difference in
price, you are seeing this Buyer’s Market in action. Most of these eBay
Sellers will be making miniscule profits on these items. As a matter of
fact, their profit may lie with inflated shipping charges. Great way to
do business, huh? You have to think of something you can sell where
the item is in a Seller’s market. “What in the world could this
possibly be??” you scratch your head and ask? I don’t know. Remember
the guy with the pool tables? He found a Seller’s Market. I recently
was looking for a roof rack for my Suburban. I had a picture in my mind
of what I wanted and I went looking for it. I couldn’t find it
locally. I didn’t find it online at any of the truck accessory places.
I did find it on eBay. Some giy out west who made each one by hand and
it looked exactly like the one I had pictured in my mind. He
was more expensive by $100 than the other roof racks but I bought his
fro a premium price. He found a Seller’s Market and used the reach
of eBay to market it. I doubt he could sell one roof rack a year in
Boring Desert, Arizona but he had a one month backlog on his eBay
orders.
I committed the ultimate eBay no-no
last year. My parents had a stack of old record albums. You know, the
old LP’s that came in the cardboard sleeve the size of a dinner
platter? I thought I had found an eBay goldmine! I spent hours taking
the pictures and entering the item descriptions and then I sat back to
watch the bids roll in. it didn’t happen! I think I sold afew albums
for just a few dollars, paid MUCH more than that in eBay fees and then
found out that shipping these fragile items was an expensive proposition
as well. If I had just looked on eBay, I would have seen
hundreds if not thousands of albums listed and none of them selling.
My girlfriend has hundreds of these little Norman Rockwell figurines and
plates she inherited from some departed relative. Hundreds, I tell ya.
I know these items were pricey when they were purchased and her
reasoning was that if they were costly when new and “Collector Items”,
we should be able to make a killing on eBay. Not so – that old Buyer’s
Market bites us again. We just boxed everything up ( lots of boxes) and
took them to the storage shed.
How about a mini success story
instead of all the gloom and doom scenarios? My 25 year old son makes a
decent bit of side money on eBay selling diecast cars. You know, like
the Matchbox cars. But let me tell you, he works at it! He makes the
rounds of every Wal Mart and Toys R US in the area several times each
week. The receiving managers at all these stores know him well and some
of them even CALL him when a new shipment comes in. He knows the
collectability of individual items. Some of them aren’t worth the
original purchase price and some of them that he buys for less than 5
bucks fetch a price over a hundred dollars. He is using eBay’s reach
to market his collectables. Another bonus is the small blister packs
are easy and cheap to ship. Let me add, he never, ever buys on eBay –
ever. The most desirable collectibles go for top dollar. Remember our
definition of a Seller’s Market?????????
This ended up being far longer than
I intended so let me close by summarizing the main points:
