Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

[skipinandjumpin]

Is there any full time eBay sellers who are based in Perth who have setup their own eBay store/ warehouse? I am Looking to start selling full time on eBay and setting up a store. I would like to see their setup, warehouse (if have one) and how they run day to day and get some tips and feedback on making it work.
Thanks,

[kopenhagen5]

Before jumpin into it, , and spending money, sell a few things on your account.

You get 40 free listings per month, sell some things you don't need from home or garage.

Learning how eBay works from experience will steer you in a better direction later on. 

Warehousing, stock control etc. are secondary to types of products and sales.

Many are experiencing very slow sales and declining.

[skipinandjumpin]

Thanks for the reply. I have sold things before and understand that. I am after the the next step to starting a store and ideally wanting to visit and talk to to someone that has one, but thanks.

[padi*0409]

You'll be limited to 10 listings per month as a new seller which will increase as you show successful sales. Stores don't really become viable until you can list at least 100 items per month with a reasonable sell-through rate.

As Kopes says, start selling a few bits and pieces first until you get the hang of eBay - it can be disheartening sometimes and pretty difficult to find a niche to sell in that will be fruitful for you.

Edit. Your sales at first will have a 21 day hold on the money until you can prove delivery as well.

[chameleon54]

Have you had previous retail experience, either with a bricks and mortar store or very extensive online selling experience ????. If not you would be best to start part time and build a business over time. There is a lot more to running a full time ebay store than buying stuff, storing it and selling it.

You need to find suppliers and build ongoing supply relationships with them, so that they will look after you. This takes time. You will need to find products that you can purchase at competative prices which allow reasonable profit margins and prefferably in areas without too much competition, as competition drives prices and profit margins down. You will also need to develop extensive knowledge of your products in order to be succesful. This takes time and experience.

You will need to learn how to manage your stock inventory including re-ordering in new stock, before selling out of existing stock. You may need a freight contract with a major courier company. You will need proffesional storage systems, possibly in rented premisis if dealing in large quantities of reasonable sized items.

You will need to learn book keeping, basic accounting and taxation recording skills and establish a suitable system that works for you. If you are full time, an accountant with relevant online sales experience can be beneficial. You will need to do annual stock takes and record stock depreciation.

You will need to learn to manage difficult customers. Theres a few of these on ebay and it only takes a couple in a short period of time to sink your business. you will also need to know the ins and outs of dispute resolution, return policies, defect policies etc. You will also need to learn how to work within a rapidly changing ebay system. What worked last year may not work this year.

You will need to develop quick and accurate listing techniques and learn how to photograph your items to best present them.

Most of all, you will need to have the personel drive to work consistent, regular hours. Start work at 8.30 am. an hour for lunch finish at five. Work means work, not browsing the internet. When you are full time, you may need to spend all day Monday, just packing parcels as fast as you can and racing to the post office half an hour before closing to process the mail. It is not always exciting. After 6 hours of packing it can become a bit boring, but you may not have time to stop. In fact if you are succesfull you may spend all day busting your butt packing as fast as you can and still work overtime to finish.

Good Luck with your new venture.

[jellybirddesigns]

Very well said, Chameleon. 

Taking on Ebay full time is not for the faint hearted.

I've been on Ebay since 2003 and only went into it full time about 2 years ago (I'm in Perth, OP).

It takes time (and I don't mean days) to learn to do a good listing, take good photographs and fine tune everything so that EVERY listing looks appealing to buyers.

I cannot tell you how many times I photographed and re-photographed my listings when I started selling the cushion covers full time. Figuring out how to present them in an appealing setting, then finding a place in the house which offered better lighting, then moving home altogether into a place which offered an even better set up. Not much fun when you have over 300 listings with 3-4 pics - we're talking THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of photographs to get things to exactly how I like them.

Having said that, my risk is low because I make everything by hand at home, so I don't have to worry about running a B&M store or a warehouse. Everything I've learned about Ebay processes has been bit by bit over the years.

Personally I would not venture into the type of thing you are possibly looking at doing until you've had a few hundred sales. From your feedback, you've sold less than 5 items and the last one was more than a year ago (unless you have another Ebay ID with different figures). Without a strong background in Ebay selling, I think you'll come unstuck quite quickly as it can be a fairly harsh environment sometimes and today's buyer is not like the buyers of 10+ years ago.

I work 7 days a week on this little business for what amounts to very, very decent hobby money, but not enough for a "salary".

[jellybirddesigns]

I also wanted to add that as soon as you make more than $10,000 in a financial year, that figure is sent to the Tax Office, so you will need to work with an accountant to get your taxes in order. Prepare for trouble if you don't report it.

[skipinandjumpin]

Thank you all for your feedback. Don't get me wrong I am that naive and I understand it would take a lot of hard work and there would be a lot of trial and error and learning along the way. I have had experience with selling via eBay but it has been listing items for sale for my work for their spare parts department as another way for them to generate sales, it sold a few parts but as it was not their main business It wasn't a priority.
I would start small, sell what I was intending to and grow and learn from there. It would be from home and see where it would take me if it was successful. But it's always good too meet and see people who have been through it all and see what has worked for them and what hasn't.

[clarry100]

My wife started making baby headbands at home as a hobby when our son was tiny. That was some 6-years ago now.

She decided to see if they would sell on ebay and so set up an account and tried listing a few. They did sell and it gave her some encouragement. Gradually she built it up putting any profit back into new materials stock. She opened up an ebay basic store after about 12-months.Over 12-18 months or so it was showing a steady growth.

Then she opened another ebay store and three auction IDs as well.

She started selling on E--Y. We also built up our our website. I did that myself.

It was all going swimmingly until this past 12 months or so when the ebay rot set in.

Now we are about 65% down on sales volume from where we were at and were heading. And still steadily decreasing.

The website and E--Y seem to be holding their own a bit better but still in slow decline tho.

We are not entirely sure exactly what has happened but we tend to believe the huge numbers of Chinese sellers in our particular category are snuffing us out. We can see our AU based competitiors are also losing sales  going by their feedback rates.

We have now started another venture which is looking promising and if ebay has not picked up by the end of the year we will close out of ebay altogether. We will likely keep E--Y and the website going but focus more on them once we close ebay down.

We might have a look into Am--on when it arrives here too.

We think ebay is being taken over by cheap Chinese junk and soon will become a rubbish marketplace along with it. Already heading that way IMO.

I don't know what your product line is, so be cautious and really research your marketplace thoroughly.

Good luck with it all. Hope it works for you as it once did for us.