Making money from Ebay without Selling

It's no argument that Ebay is the one place everyone looks to find collectibles, DVDs, and miscellaneous things. Millions of shoppers flock there every week. You can quickly clean out your garage in one week, then fill it back up again by buying and selling on Ebay.

Statistically, Ebay boasts more than 200 million users world-wide, with 130 million in the US. More than 700,000 US sellers said that Ebay was their primary source of income.

Worldwide, Ebay helps people sell their merchandise, while collecting a hefty fee for the transaction. Whether or not your item sells, you pay a listing fee. This is accepted as just a part of doing business online.

Selling on Ebay in low volume usually requires just interacting with their complex Item Listing form. If you want to sell higher volumes, you should use the Ebay Power Listing tool or some other third party listing software to make your life easier.

If you have been wanting to get into Ebay selling but feel that you do not have enough product, there are resources for you that drop ship or sell wholesale. You may even have a wholesale marketplace in your city or metro area that you can browse for ideas. In the Dallas area, there is a large wholesale center on Harry Hines Blvd just south of the 635 freeway. This is about a two mile stretch of Harry Hines that is just jam packed with importers and wholesalers. You can buy in low volume and sell these items on Ebay every easily. The trick is to find items that are in steady supply, and sell them before you buy them, that way you don't have to have inventory sitting in your garage.

There are other ways to make money from Ebay that do not involve selling, that is the Ebay Affiliate Program.

There is a little known secret to making a lot of money from Ebay, and that is the Ebay Affiliate Program. In this program, you place Ebay listing 'ads' on your site, these work much like Adsense, it is a simple javascript that you place on your website. If a customer clicks an item, and then makes a bid or later comes back to Ebay and bids on any other item (tracking lasts 7 days), you will get a percentage of the Ebay fees for that item.

Since the default Ebay affiliate code is Javascript, it will not help with your search engine rankings or search engine visibility. Your affiliate pages on your website will not get much notice from search engines. However, there is yet another, and better, way to do this.

Enter the BANS script

BANS means Build a Niche Store. The idea behind this is that you build niche store websites around a category or group of products on Ebay. You could build hundreds of stores if you wanted. The elegance of this script is that the content is actual HTML and is indexable by search engines. Therefore, you can promote your BANS sites, drive traffic to your niche stores, and reap the rewards.

It’s only now that the eBay affiliate opportunity is beginning to be properly explored by the mainstream make money online community and it will be many years before it has been properly understood and exploited. No other affiliate opportunity combines the width of product inventory, such an established brand name and a high affiliate commission structure like eBay does.

Many website building software applications build sub-standard websites which border on being search engine spam but with BANS you have the ability to build a website that is as professional looking, as content rich and as search engine friendly as any other website building platform with the added benefit of having a built in means of making money from your site visitors – the eBay listed products.

There are of course other ways to accomplish this without using a BANS script. One would be to setup a Wordpress blog site and import products from Ebay's RSS Feeds. However, this will require some tweaking and a bit of technical knowledge. Other blog software packages can also import RSS feeds, so you could look there as well.

The moral of the story is that Ebay is a wonderful way to make extra money online, and with the Affiliate program, you don't even have to sell products now.