topic Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth? in Selling

Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

skipinandjumpin — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 11:04:42 GMT

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,

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

skipinandjumpin — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 11:05:11 GMT

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

kopenhagen5 — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 11:11:01 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

skipinandjumpin — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 11:29:04 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

padi*0409 — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 11:40:15 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

chameleon54 — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 12:18:17 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

jellybirddesigns — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 13:15:07 GMT

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".

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

jellybirddesigns — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 13:18:20 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

skipinandjumpin — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 20:43:01 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

clarry100 — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 21:55:48 GMT

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.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

chameleon54 — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:39:04 GMT

@skipinandjumpin wrote:
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.

It is probably a lot harder to establish a full time ebay business now, than it was say five years ago. Reasons for this are complex, but one of the biggest is ebays decline in the total online market share. Five years ago ebay was a dominant online sales platform. Today the company is facing competition from a range of competitors and the online sales market has become much more fragmented.

Recent Ebay policy changes such as returns policies and commission charges on postage costs have made it much more difficult for small sellers. Many sellers believe ebay is actively preventing smaller sellers from growing their businesses by giving much higher listing visibility to large companies at the expense of small sellers. It may pay to have a look at threads on "throttling" to gauge the effect this appears to be having on sellers.

A really important consideration if you are going to leave your day job and start a full time ebay business is your personel financial position and ensuring you have some serious financial reserves. To generate a full time living selling new items on ebay, you may need to sell $4000 - $5000 worth of stock a week. This might give you an income after costs of $1000 per week. To sell this quantity of stock you may need to have $60,000-$80,000 worth of stock ( minimum ) on hand to cover all of your listings etc. You will also need many thousands of dollars in reserve to carry you over the inevitable ebay slow sales periods when you will be spending much more money keeping your business and private life going than you are making from ebay.

Our family where full time ebay sellers for several years, up until two years ago. We had around $100,000 invested in stock. The business was based in a dedicated room in our house with listed items stored in commercial storage systems. We also had stock stored in our garage and a seperate rented storage shed, all stored in proffesional storage systems purchased from auctions of businesses that had shut down. We had a skid steer loader fitted with pallet forks for handling pallet loads of stock delivered on trucks. In the last 12 months we have purchased a shipping container to store surplus ebay stock and no longer rent a shed.

Currently I work on ebay 2.5 days per week. We run three seperate selling accounts with a combined 2000 listings. This is about all I can handle on my own and it keeps me quite busy with 1.5 days spent just packing and mailing sold items. The rest of the time is spent answering questions, managing stock and listing new items. When selling full time we made enough money to make house payments, run two reasonably modern cars, pay all of our bills and send the kids to private school. Basically we where genuinly making a living from ebay selling. We where on the point of hiring an employee to assist us in our ebay business when we did some serious soul searching and came to the conclusion our that ebay was too unpredictable to invest into further. Since then we have not put the same effort into ebay and our business is now in slow decline.

If I was looking to start a full time ebay business now, I would only sell new items. Ebay is slowly phasing out sales of used items and there may come a time when these are no longer sold on ebay. I would look for a specialised niche market, such as spare parts for something that is going to be sold for a long time. This could be computers, industrial equipment, automotive or maybe even aviation. Stuff that is going to be repaired, not just thrown out when it is broken. ( you mentioned you have some experience in this field ) I would steer clear of anything that is made or sold out of China, simply because it attracts too much competition and the quality can be suspect at times.

I would ensure I followed ebay policy regards including product identifiers in my listings as this is part of ebays long term plans. Start small, re-invest profits into the business and grow stock levels over time. By doing this your business will not drain money from your private funds and your ebay experience will grow as your stock levels, sales and business grow. It is still possible to build a full time ebay business but you need to be very flexible to meet ebays constantly changing policies and the online market in general.

Good luck with the venture.....

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

digital*ghost — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 02:02:29 GMT

I'm not sure many sellers would actually be willing to provide a guided tour of their day to day business operation, as such. Lots of sellers definitely are willing to provide insight, advice, tips etc (as you can see), but there are other aspects they're less likely to want to reveal (as you may also see 🙂 ).

I think you'll find most eBay sellers who are doing it full time now (unless previously established elsewhere before they set up shop here), started small scale and built things up over time, so what you'd wind up seeing is the end result of (usually) years of hard work, dedication and learning, which is not generally something that can be imparted, but rather has to be experienced (more particularly because each business will be unique in many ways, even if the stock isn't).

The best tip I could possibly provide would be... Be prepared to re-evaluate your business model on a consistent basis. eBay often introduce new policies that - in some cases - enrage and frustrate many sellers, and/or thwart their operations. When it comes to how to deal with those things on a practical level, don't pay attention to your emotive reaction, pay attention to what it looks like eBay is trying to do. When you understand that, you can then try to see how to adapt your business in a way that works for you (if needed).

Not everything will work for you, eg when I started, I listed exclusively pre-owned items at auction. eBay introduced more favourable store packages (obviously an encouragement to sellers such as myself to switch to stores), so I opened a store. They then started focussing on things like how many items on the site were brand new in their advertising to buyers, so I started trying to source brand new things, which were few and far between where I was sourcing my items. Then they introduced best match and made it so that items with sales history did better in the rankings, so I started trying to source brand new items in multiple quantities. At this point in time, one of the things I realised is that if you're going to be a seller of cheaper items in a well-populated category, you need a massive range. If you're going to be a seller with a smaller range, you need uniqueness, so I started learning a new skill which meant I could make my own, brand new, multiple quantity items. This lead to me trying to find some things that were a dime a dozen all over eBay, but not in the material I wanted, so I started looking further for it, and when I found it, stocked it myself. (And yes, most of them are sourced in China, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another seller anywhere who stocks some of the items I do, more recently I had some stuff custom made, which turned out beautifully).

Eventually, eBay made it so that sellers with free post got a boost in best match rankings, so I tried free post. That was a failure, both times I tested it out. So my point there is pay attention to eBay's incentives towards certain things, but recognise when they don't suit you, your business, or customers.

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

yourshoparama247 — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 03:49:07 GMT

Finally someone who tells it like it is thank you

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

davewil1964 — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 04:11:55 GMT

Ah yes, but is what chamo said THREE years ago what it is today?

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

collect247 — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 04:38:51 GMT

Am I right in saying that you have a store?

Am I right in saying you haven't sold anything in a year?

Am I right in saying why are you paying for a store when you don't have anything to sell?

Re: Any full time ebay sellers in Perth?

imastawka — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 05:00:06 GMT

They must like making a monthly 'donation' to ebay.