Advice on how to be a successful merchant on EBay?

Question

I plan to get into the EBay world very soon, and I was planning to get items from garage/yard sales and resell them for a higher price on EBay.

Anyone have advice for me on what items to look for or how to determine what price I should sell and buy at, etc.....

Thanks for anyone who can help.

Answer 1

Hi Jeff,

The garaga/yard resellling is a good start for eBay business and will give you the much needed experience so that in long term you can move on with something new and bigger.

You can use this page http://pages.ebay.co.uk/wantitnow/ to research what people are looking for and what has high demand and little response. This is ideal for niche markets and your concept of reselling old stuff should be well fitting in it.

Another thing is wheter you'll create auction style or fixed price listings. With auctions you can set up a small price and create peoples' interest with that and attract many bidders which will result in higher price. But then you have to have an optimized listing title (1st link below) and get some good looking templates to make listings stand out from the crowd! (2nd link below).

And taking into account that you'll get the items cheap, you won't lose much if they don't sell that well.

HOw to determine price? Just look at similar products on eBay and see how much the merchants ask for them, and for what price they've been sold.

If you don't succeeed with auction style listings, you can create fixed price ones and see how it goes.

Just remember - so much depends on how you've presented your offer, how many images you have (the more you have - from different anges etc, the better), how easy scannable is the listing's description etc. etc.

Oh yes, and you can use Craigslist.org to source such products as well - sometimes people give stuff there away for free! and you just have to pick it up!

On this webpage http://pulse.ebay.com/ you can research what's hot on eBay under certain categories etc.

Hope this all will help you a bit,

Robby

Answer 2

My best advice would be to take a look at website below, it will be much easier to sell their ebay products, than trying to look for items yourself to sell online.

Hope it helps.