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@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.....
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 ๐ ).
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.
