About |
Selling on eBay is a lot of fun. Nothing beats the thrill of getting that sale, be it the first or the thousandth. My first experience of eBay was when I had just finished building a kitchen and had a few things left over. I decided to place two items on to eBay just for a laugh and to get rid of them.
There was a tap and a carousel that was huge. I set up an eBay account, took two terrible photographs and got them on to eBay. I took time to describe the items properly and checked the other prices. I pressed the magic button and we were on our incredible journey.
After one day they both sold. eBay sent their congratulations on getting our first feedback. Packaging the carousel was a nightmare. But eventually I got it completed, took it to the Post Office and off it went. Then the next feedback arrived with one happy customer.
My wife and I decided that this was great fun so we started scouring eBay for the best thing to sell. Eventually we decided to give batteries a go. The next problem was to find a wholesaler who stocked batteries. We tried Exchange and Mart and lot of other trade magazines that were full of “unbelievable offers”. Eventually a wholesaler was found and we purchased some batteries determined to make our fortune.
We worked out the cost that we had to sell at and put on the batteries. At first nothing, by now we had worked out how to count the number of visitors to our pages. Then people started looking. Nothing sold, so we changed the description and tried again - nothing. Checked the other sellers, made more changes, still nothing sold. Then we dropped the price and ‘hey presto’, someone bought a packet of batteries.
We had taken into account the cost of postage in our calculations but little did we know that these sellers had online business accounts with Royal Mail. On getting to the Post Office it was a bit dearer than it was supposed to be. But we got more feedback. Kept on playing with the items on eBay just finding out what would make them sell and what wouldn’t. The aim was to find out about eBay not to make a profit. Eventually we found out that if you have a good description price does not matter. People want to buy today and receive the next day. Lower the price too much and people do not buy as they think it must be a fake.
We then went mad and bought some sunglasses and sold the lot, bought some more and not one sold, we still have them today.
Eventually we fell into cosmetics, found a local wholesaler and off we went on our adventure. We gradually learnt how to do our marketing before buying and we started to get better. We were buying the right products and getting the sales. One thing that we learnt very quickly was that if you used a good description it certainly sold the product and price did not always matter.
We passed the magic number of feedbacks on eBay and we were allowed to sell internationally. The first order came in from Sweden, it was posted and nothing more was heard. You learn very quickly that if something is wrong you will usually hear back very quickly.
Now I am still selling on eBay to more customers. I have become known as the eBay Guy a best selling author and I help people to source, sell and buy on eBay