Have you left your job to soley concerntrate on eBay?

[dead_cases]

Hello all,

Has anyone on here left their employment to concerntrate strictly on eBay and online selling?

If so, can someone give me their experience as to how long it took to stabalize and what was the most valuable lesson you learnt from making this commitment.

I have attended alot of eBay seminars and I am very excited about the prospect of creating an online business to bolster my families income, would love my wife to be able to stay at home to run it.

All stories and bits of knowledge will be very welcomed indeed.

[phorum_junkie*]

If you want to make a reasonable living out of being an ebay seller then I would have a serious issue if I were your wife, she would almost ceetainly be working twice as hard for twice as long to earn less as you would be doing outside the home.

What are you considering selling? If it is still going to be media items then I suspect your returns will decrease steadily over the next few years as more and more people download films, TV boxed sets, books and music.

Whatever you decide to do it needs to be researched carefully and it would also be wise to have more than one outlet for selling, putting all your eggs in one basket with a fickle entity like ebay is a huge risk if you are investing in stock.

You will also have to look into things like tax liability, public liability insurance, if there are any restrictions on running a business from your home and probably dozens of other things to take into consideration.

[a_beautiful_room]

My best advice - start very small.

Decide that you are going to perhaps try half a dozen listings every couple of weeks and see how you go. I have no idea what you are going to sell, but all buying to sell requires some investment, even a small one, so buy things that if you don't sell at a profit then at least you will find easy to sell at a break-even price or give away as gifts because there's no guarantees that she or you will like it or be good at it.

Put your brightest smile and your most charming words there for everyone to see. Ebay is a retail environment and the surly, the rude, the arrogant, the slow to respond, (and sometimes in fact everyone at all) get no where because you need to be able to roll with the punches of unpaid items, buyers wasting your time, ebay picking you up for violations and quite high fees!

Spend an hour or so every week reading questions and answers on the boards so you get a feel for what to do in situations you may find yourself in. Know the rules. Be truthful, but not a door mat. Protect yourself when posting. Always thank people for their business. Get a good book-keeper or work out exactly how you are going to set up your buying and selling accounts to show at the end of the financial year.

That will do for a start. Remember your own business is a 24/7 commitment, and sometimes its easier just to take your money from Safeway/Red Rooster/Myers and go home and put your feet up 🙂

[extra-keen]

Yes it can be a very exciting transition.

I will add some of my own experiences to the great advice already given. I've been selling for a bit over 4 years and have to say you can't rely on a regular income from ebay. They have a tendancy to change the goal posts fairly often - which can devastate sales in 10 minutes. Then to comply you may have to spend many many hours making adjustments.

Then there is of course the economic variations which small business owners endure whether on line or otherwise.

My thoughts would be to not give up a good job immediately to sell on-line, start small and build up and when enough income is generated then consider whether it is worth leaving the job for full-time self employment (that should read over-time full time self employment).

Don't go into debt to buy stock in the beginning. Just manage what you can afford, then if sales stop or something goes wrong you won't find yourselves in financial strife.

Do definitely have other online venues to sell apart from ebay - however ebay at this time generates more sales, more views than any of the other sites I use put together by a considerable margin.

I am here because I was retrenched from very long time employment. However I would not choose to do it that way again. It has been a very hard road. I still work part-time (driving a school bus) and that at least gives me a steady regular income, particularly important if you have children at home.

Good luck, I hope you enjoy the journey.

[davewil1964]

OP is a medium volume seller already. So should have a fair idea of the pitfalls.

As far as scaling up, does the missus know she is going to chuck in a job to sell online? How far are you thinking of scaling up? Double, quadruple, tenfold, more? Have you factored in cost of stock, or are you anticipating dropshipping? If stocking, do you have adequate storage facilities, or will you have to pay for it? Remember eBay is leaning buyer expectations towards instant delivery at less than cost price.

[dead_cases]

Hi Guys,

Thanks to everyone for their input...

My wife is a teacher part time, I am in a very good government job that has a high capacity for earnings so it wont be me that takes the leap of faith but my wife.

Ideas - No dropshipping, but my stock levels for my store are easy and cheap to acquire so I have been puting money into stock for the last few months. I have the ability to personalize items as well so that is my major draw, but I agree no matter the product eBay can not be relied on soley as a source of income.

Every seminar I have attended teach that ebay is not so much a market place but a search engine that has more users a day than Google. It becomes a trick of funneling the traffic into your site into social media or doing the reverse and funnel the social media into eBay.

Both are legal and allowed (at the present) by eBay and can work very well. This profile that I use on this forum is for my personal effects that I sell to create money for stock.

At the moment I am moving towards the new requirements that are needed to maintain a Top Rated Seller status. The income that I need to REPLACE my wifes income is roughly $700 a week. Which is extremely do-able, my mother who has a home business sells on eBay and brings in close to $600 a week, but her market is not only her passion but is very limited in Australia.

@davewil (I apologise for past dealings) I have seen this trend towards people wanting items for below cost, its worrying but yet exciting as the products must be manufactured somewhere and customers will spend the money if the item is available. I mean I still sell a good deal of VHS tapes, I'm guessing nostalgia plays a big part but money is still to be made.

My brickwall is the question of using eBay for my advantage rather than eBays advantage, using social media or a stand alone website. I have an understanding of all these things yet tying them all together into a functioning machine should be simple but eludes me.

[digital*ghost]

The most valuable lesson I learned is that a profitable business doesn't = a sustainable business. I made a lot of mistakes the first year I had a store by thinking that a sustainable business = a profitable business. 

Social media can be invaluable, if you understand how and why other people (not businesses) use it. 

I have a website (basic function at the moment, runs more like an online portfolio), a blog, a Facebook page, a Tumblr and deviantART account, all poorly underused, but they have all contributed to my business in their own little way. Each one operates independently and attracts people to the site in general for different reasons, so while you can have all these things functioning and working for you, they each have a different purpose and in my opinion it's not to drive business to your store - that's just a welcome side-effect, if you get my drift. 

In other words, people come to eBay to buy, but they don't go to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumbler...etc to shop. If you want to engage people on those sites, you need to offer something more than advertising. 

For example, running a blog - people look for articles online to solve problems, become informed about something, or be entertained, so the best use of a blog is to primarily fulfil those needs (product reviews, tutorials, informed opinion articles etc.

With Facebook, it's a social site, and a business FB page typically functions pretty much like a customer service centre (PR, handling complaints, answering questions, posting updates and announcements). Successful or thriving pages engage people by getting them to participate with the page, not just like it and post advertising.

And just to put the above into proper context, I've been running my eBay store for 2 years, and I'm a low-volume seller of handmade jewellery. I do not make a living from eBay (but I could make a living from my craft).  

[myoldestuff]

.. bear in mind that a single ebay policy change can turn a profitable ebay business into a complete waste of time .. and also consider that the ebay cassini search engine (cantseeme) favours ebay insiders/gamers and can be tweaked without notification so in all honesty I would only consider ebay as viable if I didn't actually need to rely on it as my primary source of income .. hope that makes sense .. in short ebay is extremely risky business and many serious/reliable/fair sellers have found out the hard way that ebay is not a reliable sales partner .. I wouldn't bother unless you have exclusive rights to an exclusive product that sells itself with a high margin of profit with no fear of a competitor or ebay insider/gamer destroying your business .. I see ebay as a reasonable place to offload household stuff that would otherwise be given away or sent to the dump .. at this stage (until ebay decides otherwise) many have occasional successes with antiques and other objects of high artistic/collectable value and that is about it .. I certainly wouldn't pay to list here and would never ever under any circumstances invest in more inventory than could be reliably offloaded through other venues in a timely manner .. do not under any circumstances fall for the mistaken belief that ebay is a level playing field and that they are not playing favourites, they have a stack of insider programmes running and even those people/businesses subscribing to those programmes could have the carpet ripped out from underneath them at a moments notice ....

[myoldestuff]

.. if you perchance decided to click on my "view listings" link you may notice that "cantseeme" is currently hiding all my listings .. nice .. hence no way on earth I would pay to list here!!!

[trulyspecialgoodies]

That happens because when you click on 'view listings' you get magically transported to the US site (ebay.com) - so if you don't sell internationally no listings will show