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Dec
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Now myself, I started part-time on eBay while I still worked my regular full-time job. As I made this big, long three-and-a-half hour commute each day, I kept thinking, “Man, you could make a lot of money selling full-time on eBay.”
Finally the commute got to the point where I said, “I just can’t do this anymore. I’m going to make my full-time eBay business work.”
That’s a wonderful thing. Not many businesses allow you to start slow and build it gradually at your own pace. Normally when you start a business you have to hit the ground running because you have a large investment that you need to recoup very quickly.
That’s another advantage of having an eBay business.
Now some people reading this have zero eBay experience. They haven’t sold; they haven’t bought. We’re even going to cover the basics of doing that.
Many reading this are familiar with the basics. They’ve probably bought a lot; they’ve sold a lot. That’s good experience to have.
The first thing that you want to do in getting started on eBay is you want to go sign up for eBay. There are some good courses right on eBay’s Web site on the basics. They have some online videos that will show you the basics of buying and selling.
That’s the first thing you want to do is go through and look at those videos so you can learn the basics.
Also what you need to do is sign up for Paypal. For those who are not familiar with PayPal, it is the number one way of paying for items on eBay. PayPal is a way of transferring money from person to person via e-mail. It’s the quickest way to purchase items or have somebody buy items from you.
In my business where I’ve sold over 15,000 items at this point, about 85% of my business is through PayPal. About another 10% is through a credit card. Another 5% is checks or money orders. You can see how major PayPal is. PayPal is now owned by eBay so they keep entrenching it deeper and deeper as a payment service. If you’re going to do anything with eBay buying or selling, you must, must, must, must, must have a Paypal account.
From eBay Zero To eBay Hero 8 of 50 The next thing you might say is, “Okay, I’m ready to start. I want to start selling.”
Buy Before You Sell!
Actually, you don’t want to start selling. What you want to do is you want to start buying.
Most people just want to jump in and start selling. I’m going to explain to you why you do not want to do that.
The way that you rate whether or not to trust a seller (or buyer) is by the eBay feedback system.
Think of this yourself. Although you are reading this because you want to be an eBay seller, you’re probably still an eBay buyer.
So, when you’re looking for an item to buy and you see that somebody has a zero feedback, does that give you a comfortable feeling?
Do you want to go and buy that item from this person? Probably not.
Actually, you’re probably more likely to NOT buy the item from them. Chances are you will search for someone else having better feedback who is selling the item you want.
In fact, you’ll probably even pay more for somebody who has a good feedback rating. Why? Because you feel secure. It’s the same for you in the role of eBay seller. If you’re going to be selling at a zero, you’re not going to be getting as much money for the item that you could if you had a better
feedback score.
Some people will think, “What I’ll do to get my feedback up and to get practice is to start selling all the junk that I have around the house.”
Now, I have nothing against selling your junk around your house, but not at this stage of the game. What you want to do at this stage of the game is you want to start getting your feedback up first.
Here’s the problem: some people think that they have stuff around the house that they could just sell like an old VCR, old DVDs, old CDs, old comic books, things like this. They say, “I don’t care if I get a dollar or two for it because it’s going to give me my experience.”
What you need to consider - and we’re going to focus a lot on this later on – is the value of an hour of your life, the value of your time. So you might sell a VCR for a dollar and then what you do is - it took you maybe an hour to take a picture, to write an ad, maybe a half an hour to find the old box and your packing peanuts, do the label and get it to UPS or the post office. You probably lost money and had to spend valuable time!
This is a fairly poor way of building up your feedback. So don’t in the beginning sell junky items. You’re probably better off just throwing them away.