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@iamalabel wrote:Packing, posting and process isnt a problem, I can do that + family members. The problem is the listing and photographing. I do take the photos with a canon 550 D and then photoshop it for size, which takes time. Plus the listing and the organization of the items, at the moment the items are all over the places. I usually buy clothing items under $5 or about $10 for a special item.
The other resellers on ebay US do about 50 listings per day and if they sell it for $20 gross they still can cover the cost of hiring someone, but our minimal wage is $18 here in Australia so that kinda cuts deep in the profit if usually items sold are like $20 on average.
Fifty listings a day is pretty easily achieved and with simple, similar listings you could get well over 100 in a good day. .
I have used an assistant to handle the whole selling process aroud five years ago. I supplied the items with a brief description and the assistant did the rest. She was a stay at home mum with a small baby and was looking to make a few extra $$$$. We split the sales price 50 / 50 but she paid all of the ebay and paypal fees. She also printed off statements showing all items sold, price etc. It worked really well for both of us. Average mark up was 400% so even giving half of the selling price away, I still doubled my money on each item sold. These where popular items that sold well, so the mum still made quite good money, with no capital outlay.
A couple of years ago when I was selling full time on ebay our store sales peaked at a reasonable level. We had reached the maximum number of sales I could realistically handle, but the business was still expanding. I trialed an assistant to handle listings for a few weeks. I paid them $1.50 for a simple listing that would take a few minutes and a higher agreed price for more complex listings. This also worked OK. but sales then started to decline as reported by many sellers and we didnt take it any further.
The only problem is no-one knows your product like you and if you are employing some-one and they make mistakes, it reflects on your business and bottom line.
The other issue is if the employee can see that you are buying clothes from an op shop for $5 and selling them for $20, it is not going to be long before they decide to do this themselves and become your competition in your local area for stock.
This was a major concern for my business as it was a highly specialised field and we had developed a couple of unique business practices which gave us an edge against oposition ebay businesses. These where "loopholes" in ebays system that we had discovered. ( still using them today 
) If someone else figured out our secrets, we would have lost this competative advantage and would just be competing with every other seller in a race to the bottom on price and profit..
