Posted on 28 February 2006 by Gary H
The second general category of products you can sell on ebay are new products that you obtain from a third party. Selling this kind of product is the route I see the majority of new eBay sellers take because it appears to be the easiest way to get started on eBay.
While there’s no question that some people are quite successful on eBay selling this type of product, the vast majority of beginners who take this approach will fail for two simple reasons that most people don’t want to talk about.
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Popularity: 16% [?]
Posted on 27 February 2006 by Gary H
As I’d said previously, there are thousands of thousands of different types of self-produced tangible products being sold on eBay. They run the gamut from fashion accessories to oil paintings. From designer jewelry to fishing lures.
But there’s one kind of self-owned eBay product that stands out head and shoulders above all the others - “How-To” DVDs. You can find “How-To” DVDs being sold on eBay covering hundreds of subjects.
Want to know how to cork your own bat so you’ll be the home run king of your softball league this summer? There’s a DVD available on eBay.
Want to know how to differentiate a real antique Confederate sword from a counterfeit one? There’s a DVD available on eBay.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 25 February 2006 by Gary H
Selling your own product or products on eBay can be very profitable. But to succeed you must have the right kind of product and you need to do it properly. In this part of What To Sell On eBay And Where To Find It we are going to look at some important does and don’ts if you choose to explore this option in your eBay business.
These products can be broken down into two basic types - tangible and non-tangible (or downloadable ) and we will look at each of these separately, starting with non-tangible.
Most non-tangible, or downloadable, products found on eBay fall into into one of four categories - ebooks, software and music or image files. All of these have one major common disadvantage for you as a seller. They are simply too easy to reproduce.
If you sell downloadable ebooks, image files, or music files on eBay it’s only a matter of time before several enterprising lazy no-goods will have purchased your product, stolen your sales copy, and started selling your product for $1 or $2 on eBay. Once that happens, and I promise you it will, your product will be totally devalued and you’re sales will be zero unless you’re willing to sell it for $1 or $2 also, which is not the way to build a sustainable eBay business.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
Posted on 24 February 2006 by Gary H
I’ve been thinking about using a video format for some of the posts in The Auction Rebel and am interested in what you as the reader think of the idea. I’d appreciate it if you’d take a minute and respond to the survey in the left sidebar.
Thanks, Gary
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted on 24 February 2006 by Gary H
What to sell on eBay and where to get it? Those are probably the two most frequent questions asked by people who want to build an eBay business. It doesn’t matter whether they are just getting started or if they’ve been trying for several months to get a foothold on eBay.
Although there are millions of different items listed on eBay at any given time, for an eBay seller trying to decide what to sell on eBay and where to get it, everything there will fit into one of three general categories.
- New products the sellers have created/manufactured themselves
- New products that come from a different source
- Used products of one kind or another
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 23 February 2006 by Gary H
Today’s the last segment of the Building A Strong Foundation For Your eBay Business portion of our 30 day Odyssey. Today we are going to take the actual goals we set yesterday and break them down into the steps we need to take to reach them. When we are done with this step we will have a detailed eBay action plan to follow to build our eBay business for the future.
Before we get started, if you’ve either been selling on eBay, or just trying to really get started, for a while I want you to first ask yourself the following question.
If you’ve stuck in a rut and not making any real progress, what changes do you need to make get your eBay business headed in the right direction?
If your goal is to earn $xxxx a month to pay your mortgage payment and you’ve been selling on eBay for six months but only listing ten items a week, you probably need to make some changes. If you’ve spent the last four months trying to find a wholesale source for inventory without any success, you probably need to change either where you’re looking or what you’re looking for. You’re going to be developing an action plan to reach the goals you’ve set. Don’t allow yourself to remain stuck in the same rut when you do this.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
Posted on 22 February 2006 by Gary H
Yesterday I talked about how having a mission statement for your eBay business would increase your chances of succeeding. If you took the time to actually complete the “homework” assignment you may have found that, at first glance, what you came up with seems totally unreachable right now.
Today, we are going to begin breaking our mission statement down into smaller, more measurable, objectives and by the time we’re done hopefully you can begin to see that it is attainable.
These smaller objective are really nothing more than goals we can set for ourselves. I’ve written about Goals & Goal Setting before, but today I’m going to talk about coming up with goals specific to your mission statement.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
Posted on 21 February 2006 by Gary H
More years ago than I care to think about I was the vice president in charge of commercial loans for a good sized financial institution that was just getting into the business loan field.
One of our requirements from every applicant was that a formal business plan accompany their loan application. We weren’t alone in this requirement. Any reputable lender will as for a business plan before they will consider most business loans and insist on one for any startup loan.
There’s a reason for this. It’s been proved that the success of any kind of business doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens because there’s a plan in place covering why the business exists, how it will be run, where it plans to go, and how it will get there.
I’m not going to tell you that you must have a business plan in place in order for your eBay business to succeed (although taking the time to put together a short one certainly won’t hurt your chances of succeeding). However, I am going to ask that you spend some time seriously thinking about two areas found in any good business plan.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
Posted on 20 February 2006 by Gary H
If you’ve been reading The Auction Rebel for a while you may have noticed the survey feature in the left hand sidebar. Since adding this feature we’ve run two surveys with, what I think, are interesting results.
The first is that 54% of the people who took the first survey make less than $499 a month from their efforts on eBay. The second is that 42% of readers who responded list less than 10 items a week on eBay and an additional 5% normally don’t list any.
During the same period these two surveys were running I’ve noticed an increase in auction forum and newsgroup posts that seem to indicate a lot of eBay sellers seem to be in a slump - loosing their enthusiasm for eBay, slipping in the number of items they list each week, and in some cases talking about giving up the ghost completely.
In a way you could say The Auction Rebel blog has been suffering a similar problem. It’s been 19 days since the most recent post here and prior to that my posting frequency hadn’t been what it used to be either.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
Posted on 01 February 2006 by Gary H
In Finding A Profitable Collectible/Antique eBay Niche - Part III we looked at eBay to see if stereoviews were a potentially profitable sub-niche for an eBay business. We found from our initial research that there were several factors that detracted from their potential as a profitable sub-niche on ebay.
At this point most people would probably decide stereoviews weren’t a good prospect and begin looking for a different niche. However, stereoviews have two characteristics that make me think we should dig a little deeper.
- They are available at most antique shops, malls, and flea markets at reasonable prices
- There appears to be several smaller sub-niches to the stereoview sub-niche that warrant additional research
If you look closer there are some very obvious deeper sub-niches that show up.
The first one, and the one that regularly brings the highest prices realized, is complete boxed sets. Another is stereoviews of anything related to the Civil War. Any early Native American related stereoview looks like it’s also a good seller. Risqué stereoviews also sell well. Stereoviews of railroad locomotives also seem to sell well.
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Popularity: 7% [?]
