10 Best Strategies for Selling on eBay

So you want to be a successful seller with your own eBay business, do you? Here’s a simple, ten-step path to eBay enlightenment.

Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You’ll probably see the ‘sweet spots’ quite quickly – those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Step 2: Watch the competition. Before you invest any money, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and beat them at their own game.

Step 3: Find a product: Get hold of a supplier for whatever it is you want to sell, and see what the best rates you can get are – don’t be afraid to ring round quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you’re set.

Step 4: Start small: Don’t throw thousands at your idea straight away – get started slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and learn as you go. Remember that it’s very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!

Step 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies until you find something that works, and then don’t be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche.

Step 6: Work out a business plan: A business plan doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the market opportunity you’ve spotted, your strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.

Step 7: Invest and expand: This is the time to throw money at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.

Step 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Don’t worry, it’s not expensive or hard to do – a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.

Step 9: Automate: You’ll probably find that you’re writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. 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: Even when it looks like it’s all going wrong, don’t stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you’ll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.

Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling part time. But it’s not always as easy as that – there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider.

Click Here to Watch The Video, “How to Find What eBay Buyers Want”

Affiliate marketers everywhere are reeling from the recent eBay Quality Click Pricing email we all received this week.  I was stunned to say the least.  It’s not that I was making tons a money or a living off of eBay since they moved to their own affiliate program from Commission Junction.  I make anywhere from $10 to $40 a month with the program.  I post their RSS feeds into my Squidoo pages, and I have one website with products that I use exclusively for eBay because of their price points.

Let’s face it, eBay sells used items most of the time, and in this economic downturn where almost everyone is out of a job, people turn to deals.  The thing that I am not really getting about eBay’s Quality Click Pricing is why???

The truth is that I have stopped trying to figure out the magic formula to making money with affiliate programs.  I was dumbfounded and totally silenced into humiliation by one major company when I found that my stats had ballooned to over 30,000 in 15 days, and I made a whopping 3 sales for a little over $3.00 in commissions.  It was not eBay, but mind you, if they are going CPC on me, I will be changing up many of my links very shortly.

That being said, it might be wise to start really optimizing your websites to get the best click through rate possible. You have to be flexible as an affiliate marketer, and go where the money is.

I would start doing many of the same things to draw traffic as with Google Adsense.  I would look for popular products, and optimize your page accordingly.  If you use Wordpress blogs, set one up for a certain niche, and let it go.  Draw quality traffic by using very targeted long tailed keywords.

You might be surprised and find that it is easier to generate a decent income with eBay now that they have changed the game once again.  I like challenges, what about you?