How To Make Money On Ebay

The internet has been flooded over the past couple of years with people looking to make money online. Along with this flood of hopeful internet users with big dreams, there has been a flood of scam artists promising these users a way to make easy money online. Unfortunatley I still havn't found an easy way to profit on the Internet, but I will share my experience with making money on ebay.

I will try to make this short and simple, but to be honest when it comes to making money on ebay there are so many tricks of the trade, it will be hard to sum this up into a short article.

In any type of business its very important that you are in the right mind-set. If you are planning on making a business on ebay or you are just selling a few things on ebay. It is important that you are not running an ebay business, you are running a business and using ebay's massive amounts of shoppers to advertise your business.

Obviously ebay wants you to sell only with them, and they have done a very good job at getting it in its sellers heads that they work for ebay.

Don't put all your egges in one basket. There are many other sites such as craigslist, ubid, ebid, ecrater, and amazon that you can use to sell your products. Eventually creating your own website should be your main goal.

A great way to start selling on ebay is to find a few products around your house to list. As a new seller you will recieve fewer bids, but by listing products that are just wasting space at your house you can afford to sell them cheap and build your feedback..

Paypal is a must if you are going to sell on ebay. Most bidders will not even click on a product that doesn't accept paypal as a payment. Paypal is not a bank but works the same way. Paypal allows buyers and sellers to exchange money, with fraud protection.

Here are a few things you need to know from the start:

• Accept paypal as a form of payment This protects you from fraud, and many bidders will not even give you a second look if you don't accept paypal.
• Check your messages often How quick you answer a email could be the difference between a sold product and an unsold product.

• Take note of frequently asked questions You may find that many bidders are asking the same questions. If so than go ahead and answer the question when you write your next listing.
• Be as truthful as possible. If your item has even the smallest problem or abnormality, describe this in detail and take pictures for the bidder to see.
• Describe the entire order process from start to finish. When you ship, how you ship, how you package the item, and ect.
• Do what you say: If you describe in your listing that you ship in two days, make sure you do exactly that! Ebay shoppers are ruthless with feedback.

• Avoid negative feedback at all cost especially in your first 100 sales. Problems will arrise with a few customers who are impossible to deal with. The best thing to do is discount or refund the price if you have to, to avoid a negative feedback. Your feedback in the ebay community is very important to your business, anything below 98% will cause you to lose sales. Its better to take the loss on one order than recieve a negative feedback and lose future customers. After the order is complete you can block these bidders from bidding on your items in the future.

Research is a crucial part to any ebay business. You need to know what products are selling on ebay, how much they are selling for, what the best time of day, and the best day to sell. Ebay recommends that you to use eBay Research by Terapeak.

The most important part of your research is knowing what to sell on ebay. You might find items that you think are a great deal, and buy a ton of them, list them on ebay and never get a bid. Other times you might be scared to purchase wholesale items because its a large investment, but those products may have sold for twice what you paid for them. This happens all to often, and is the #1 reason ebay sellers fail.

You can then simply find wholesale items for ebay, and look it up through Terapeak. Then you know exactly what these products are selling for, and you can even estimate profit and how soon you can expect to have the profit. Wow! Where else can you start a business and know this from the start? This takes out 99% of the risk factor, which is why selling on ebay is simply the best way to start an online business.

Finding products to sell on ebay probably isn't as hard as you think, however there are a few things you should avoid. You can find products to sell on ebay simply by doing a google search, but of-course there are "wholesale companies" all over the Internet that prey on ebay sellers.

Follow these steps and you should be fine.

• Avoid buying bulk wholesale lots for ebay that doesn't provide a list of the products you will recieve. This happens especially with dvds, they will offer you an unbelievable price and then you recieve a box of movies from 1942.
• Avoid the unbelievable wholesale prices. Generally retail stores have a 40% mark up on the products they sale, and they are purchasing products by the truck load. If a wholesale website is offering you new wholesale items less than 40% of the retail price, you should be very cautious.
• Research the wholesale websites. You can look up the website on www.whois.com - pay attention to how long the website has been online, how long the website is regestered for and, if there is a phoone # listed if so call the number just to make sure its correct. Another good place to check is www.ripoffreport.com - do a search for the website and see if there have been any complaints. Use common sense when reading the complaints because as we know some customers are impossible to satisfy.
• Avoid buying wholsale lists.There are plenty of people who will promise you the secret ebay wholesale list. Trust me there isn't one, don't get suckered into it because you will recieve the same list from a google search.

A few wholesale websites that I recomend:

• Global sources direct offers a great selection of electronics
• www.liquidation.com offers a nice selection of overstocks.
• Salehoo Find just about anything you can think of with these guys, I have used these guys for 3 years with no complaints