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Can a Home Internet Business Begin With eBay? How We Began on eBay I made my first real money online by selling oneBay. There are thousands of niche markets one can profit on eBay with. I have listed here a case study of just one which we were successful with. Anyone can repeat what we did. We are not selling much on eBay right now because our websites require our time. But if we wanted to, we could start back up with what I am going to describe at any time. Anyone who chooses to do so, and is willing to work at it, can spend six months building the following ebay business and easily make a few thousand dollars per month profit. Although I have cut back on my eBay selling significantly (and replaced it with a website), I feel eBay played a crucial role in our online success. We knew almost nothing about online marketing when we started with eBay. Several years back my wife decided to take an eBay night class at a local tech school. Shortly after her first class we stopped at a garage sale and purchased 3 small glass rabbits for $2.00 each. (It turned out they were a popular collector’s item…Fenton Glass) My wife helped me figure out how to put one on eBay, and 7 days later it sold for $26! I put the other two up in the next two weeks and they too sold for over $25 each. I WAS HOOKED ON EBAY! And as it happened, eBay was a GREAT place for me to start learning the basics of selling online! I highly suggest pure beginners get their feet wet with an online business by selling on eBay. The experiences of taking orders, dealing with PayPal, shipping products, ordering products for resale, etc. will be great training for you as you progress to selling on a “real” website. Garage Sales 101 After those first sales we went to several more garage sales. We purchased new stuff, old stuff and sometimes just plain junk and we made good profits on all of it…overall anyway. I then decided to get serious about eBay. One of the things we sold early on was an old night gown. It was orange and looked like a robe my grandmother used to wear! But it had an old looking Vanity Fair label in it (which I took a picture of for the auction). I think we paid a quarter for it at a Salvation Army thrift store. Who would want it? But on eBay it went for over $15 plus we got $5 for shipping! WOW! This was just too cool!! Thrift Shops and 1000% Profits This was when I started thinking of a niche to focus my efforts in. A small town near us had a thrift store which had “Dollar” days on Tuesdays. They had paper grocery sacks which you could stuff as full as you could and the whole sack cost only one dollar. We went one Tuesday and spend $5 dollars on five sacks full of old pointy shoes, old belts, old ladies hats, old scarves, old slips, and an old dress or two. We both sort of had the idea that we must be crazy. Three months later, we knew all the thrift stores within 50 miles quite well! We not only sold everything in the sacks, but we sold almost every piece for more than the whole lot had cost us! WOW! We were talking hundreds and hundreds of percent profit and often well over 1000% profit if we figured our per piece cost! We couldn’t believe it really was that easy! Vintage is Always In We continued visiting the thrift stores and garage sales for “vintage” clothing. We became very good at “seeing” the things which would sell well. We had discovered a HUGE niche on eBay…Vintage Clothing! And many times, “vintage” simply meant anything from the late seventies and earlier. It was simply amazing to us that people were paying so much money for these things which we were buying for sometimes pennies each! Remember the old polyester look from the seventies? We made out like gangbusters when we found complete suits for a few bucks. There is a very active market on eBay for vintage clothing even from just 30 years ago. Then we stated looking on eBay to purchase things to resell on eBay. Here is where we hit the Mother Load! We found a lady who had a whole case of BRAND NEW Dixie Belle slips. These were from the sixties and STILL HAD THE TAGS ON THEM! We got the whole case of over 100 pieces for just $2.25 each…including the shipping charge. We put the first one up and it sold for $18! And then another and then another; they all sold for $15 to $25 plus $2.99 shipping! This was unbelievable! Over the next year we sold all the pieces in that case at a rate of about 2 per week (We found we could get more money from each one if we limited the sales to just two of them per week). All in all we made over $2,000 on that $225 initial purchase! Wholesale Lots After that great find, we spent much time searching eBay for more wholesale lots. Many are available and we became quite good at choosing lots we could split up and sell individually for good profit. It would have been entirely possible for us to simply buy wholesale lots on eBay and break the lots up to sell individually on eBay. Do a search on eBay for “anything wholesale lot”. Substitute “anything” with some niche area you area interested in. For example, if you do a search for “watches wholesale lot” or “hats wholesale lot” or “dog collars wholesale lot”. This would be great way to get started. Once you find a niche area, you can focus on finding other sources. Simply doing a search on the web NOT “Easy” Money! During that last year on eBay we easily profited over $1500 each month. However…it was a LOT of work. We were selling about 150 items each month. I know that only works out to about 5 items each day. But trust me; this is a LOT of work on eBay. We would spend most of the day every Sunday getting the auctions for the week ready. You will be more successful on eBay if you scatter your auctions out to end on various days. However, we were both working full time and needed to streamline as much as possible, so we always started each auction for seven days on Sunday night. We staggered their starting times out throughout the evening. This made it easier for people to bid on multiple items. Many of our customers would buy multiple items in order to benefit from the generous combined shipping policy we offered. We were happy with the money. But we got really tired of being tied to eBay every Sunday. And the numbers of questionswe received all throughout the week was unbelievable. When you offer clothing for sale on eBay, it is impossible to describe each item enough. You will have many questions from possible buyers which must be answered. Also, with eBay, if you don’t put auctions up, you don’t make any money. So you have to constantly work at it. With a website, once you do the work on a page, it is finished. Our website, http://www.CactusCanyon.com requires very little work to maintain but attracts many orders every day. I worked very hard at first in order to get it listed well in the search engines, but now I simply keep adding a page to it here and there, keep adding a new product every few months with several pages of descriptions, and the search engines LOVE IT! An online business with a website is much easer than one with just eBay. eBay Can Teach You the Basics of Online Marketing But if you are happy making $1500 per month working part-time, eBay is the place for anyone with a good work ethic. It is also a GREAT place to learn the basics of Internet marketing. Marketing your product, dealing with customer service issues, and fulfillment of orders are all basic skills which will carry over to the Internet world and make the transition to selling on a website easier. eBay vs. Your Own Website Fortunately we saw the greater potential of an Internet site compared to eBay. We slowed down on eBay and started developing a website selling nutritional products. It was a whole different world and took much work to learn what was required to get good listings in the search engines. The site was doing well in six months. There really was no comparison as to the amount of work required from a static website compared to ever-changing eBay auctions. Compared to selling on eBay, making sales on a website with a robust shopping cart is a piece of cake! Plus, the eBay fees took a significant amount of would-be profit. Our credit card fees on the site are about what the PayPal fees were but we have no listing or selling fees as with eBay. Start Selling! Before you jump into building and hosting a website, why not get your feet wet with eBay. There are many Are you wondering what you might be able to sell on eBay? Start small. Check out as many garage sales as you can. You don’t have to know exactly how you will make your $1500 per month income at first. Just start selling something…anything. You simply need to start getting the experience of selling. What About an eBay Store? Don’t bother with an eBay store for a while. What most people don’t realize is that traffic to an eBay store is directly proportional to the number of auctions you have running. eBay searches only display items in regular auctions or Buy it Nows. A search will only display store items if there are very few auction or BIN items. Therefore, most traffic to a store will come directly from auctions. Your auctions can have link directing people to your store or people will click on your “other items” to see your store. Others will actually click on your store link near your user name. Until you figure out what your niche will be, it makes little since to have a store. If someone is interested in belts and they find your auction for a cool belt, it will do little good for your store to contain toys, books, cd’s, etc. Your store must contain the same category of items which you are auctioning or offering as Buy it Nows. Find Your Niche There are thousands of niches people are taking advantage of on eBay. Most niches are large enough that they contain multiple sellers. In rare cases is a niche saturated. But even if it was, all you have to do is to start satisfying the niche in better ways and you will find yourself enjoying its rewards. What would I do if I someone took away my websites and told me I HAD to go back to making money on eBay? That is an easy question; I would not even hesitate to go back to selling vintage clothing. There is no doubt in my mind I could spend a few months getting back up to speed and be where I was at the height of our old eBay days. In fact, I am sure I could now do far better than $1500 per month with vintage clothing now that I have more online experience. Good luck! P.S. When you decide to "take the leap" from eBay to operating your own site, one of the most important ingredients for success is your ability to get traffic to your site - No Traffic Means No Sales! - Free traffic from the search engines is so important in the beginning. Read more here about "How To Get Free Traffic" to your website. |
