How to buy and sell on ebay

When making your listing, make it stand out. Go download Turbo Lister for free, or one of ebay’s other seller tools. These will give you templates, designs, allow you to adjust size and color of your fonts, etc. – all without having to use HTML. Also, you can save and organize your listings. Organize them into folders and save them. It will allow you to find the listings you want, and upload them all together quickly rather than one by one. It saves a ton of time. Also, if you sell lots of different items, you can save your listings so that if you get an item that is similar in the future, you can take your old listing and use it as a template, again saving time. I would say that Turbo Lister is an essential tool if you plan on selling much on Ebay.

When uploading your listings, keep in mind that they will end at that time, x days later. 1,3,5,7, and 10-day auctions are your choices, use them all. It's good to have auctions ending every day, at least a couple, but the best day to end them on is Sunday. A good chunk of your listings should end on Sunday. You may want to have the same item ending at 10 am, noon, 2 PM, 5 PM and 8 PM. Experiment with times and see what works best for you. I have found Saturdays to be the worst day to end auctions. Also keep in mind the different time zones. 6-8 PM seems to be a prime time, but it is 6-8 PM on the East Coast when it is much earlier on the West. Experiment with this in mind as well.

It’s key to know what sells when. If an item regularly does not sell on a particular day, you are wasting money listing it. Don’t get the wrong idea, however. Items seem to sell in cycles. If you only try to sell an item once or twice, you may have caught a bad part of the cycle. You can also try changing the title, the picture, the price, the shipping, etc. All of these things matter, although you may not believe it right now, you will realize it later. Also, some items you will not sell every one you list. If you sell a lot, shoot for one out of three or four. If you can’t sell more than one of three or four, you probably should not order more of that item.

Another matter to consider is international shipping. Decide if you want to do this. If so, make additional money on that shipping. You may have to fill out customs forms and physically go to the post office and wait in line. You will sell more items if you ship international, but be sure to be compensated for that extra time. Decide what you want to do, and make it clear where you sill ship in your listing.

Shipping will become one of your main jobs once you have built an inventory, and probably even before that. Get a system. Get your shipping supplies on Ebay; they are much cheaper there than at a local office supply store. Bubble mailers are my favorite way to ship items; they are protective, light and inexpensive. Jiffy-Lite is a pretty good brand, they are light and the seals are consistently sticky. Also, you can get free shipping supplies form the USPS. Try to use flat rate envelopes a lot. The cost is always the same regardless of the weight. And the envelopes are free. They also have various sized boxes and other envelopes as well, all free and delivered to your door. Go find a rate map and a postage scale. Anything under one pound is easy. You can drop these in any mailbox, or give them to your postman. Anything over a pound is a bit trickier. These go priority mail and must be taken to the post office counter. The exception, however, is at your fingertips. You can print out labels with postage from your Paypal account. Now these packages can be dropped in any mailbox or picked up by your mailman. You can ask for a pickup for free one day in advance online at usps.com. You also get free delivery confirmation when shipping this way through Paypal. For money order payments, you can go to the USPS website and, after registering, do the same. This will save you an incredible amount of time if you ship heavier items, as there is usually lines at the post office. Anything over a pound that fits should go in a flat rate envelope. Everything else gets weighed and then you can input the weight manually and let the proper postage be calculated for you. This is nice because it keeps your business expenses in one spot and you can monitor them yourself online in your Paypal account.

Over time, you will develop your own system, and as this happens you will streamline this process. You will have plenty of practice with which to work with. One point to make here, however, is that this is an expense you have some control over. Find the best and the cheapest way to ship. If you can save a dollar on shipping, that’s great. What’s better, though, is when you can save that one dollar on shipping five hundred items a month, giving you an additional $500 in profit. Even if you can save only twenty cents on each item by buying your packaging in bulk, that will add up once you begin selling with a purpose. There are not many costs that you can have control over, take advantage of this one and always look for ways to save, even if it is only a penny here and a penny there.

Returns is a subject that I won’t say much on. Decide for yourself what your policy will be. A good policy is to take almost anything back for almost any reason. Really try to take everything back because bad customer service leads to negative feedback.

Be sure to keep track of all your sales. I log in the item number, the buyers address, what they bought, how much I received for it (including shipping charges) and if sales tax was paid. If you live in a state that collects sales tax, you must collect it on every sale in that state. Laws vary state to state, but generally you have to collect sales tax on the total amount collected, which includes the shipping. So if you sell a $40 item with a $10 shipping charge, you must collect tax on the whole $50 collected. Don't take my word for it, go find out your local laws.

Also keep receipts for everything. Postage, supplies, inventory, mileage, etc. You can write this off, but its best to keep track of it all with receipts.

Feedback. Once you have some, it’s nice, but don’t get too upset if a negative is left for you. No matter how hard you try, you can’t please everybody all the time. Respond to the negative and forget about it. Unless you have an over-abundance of negative feedbacks, they will have little or no effect on your sales. Be an honest seller, make your customers happy and the feedback will take care of itself. If you get a high percentage of negative feedbacks, say more than 2 of 100, that could start to hurt.

Finding your items to sell. The least expensive, most immediate way to sell is to use a dropshipper. These companies will ship brand new items directly to your customer. It is best to find a large resource of many dropshippers as you will have to look through many products to find the ones that can truly make you money. Check out this huge resource of dropshippers here. The drawbacks are that the companies charge a small processing fee on each order, and you have to keep on top of their on hand inventory. That being said, this is a good way to start with little start up costs. The positives are that you have many new items to choose from, you don’t have to ship, you don’t have to buy an item until you have sold it, and you don’t have to carry an inventory.

If you want to carry an inventory, you will want different sources. I believe this is the only way to really make money. Build an inventory, add new items, and continue stocking old items that sell well and over time you will have built a successful business. You can find sources online. Use a search engine and type in items you may want to sell. If you don’t want to wade through everything out there, you can check out some of my sources, visit my website for sources at www.makingmoneyresources.com, I update sources pretty regularly, visit often, I have my favorites set up on a rotation.

Another avenue you may want to explore is a relatively new concept, but has great potential. I like this product a lot, and it will also allow you to make money on Ebay without having to sell anything! Check out this new and innovative idea here.