Selling on eBay

I would focus on Amazon. eBay sucks. I had a business on eBay a few years ago selling about 25,000 units a month. 99.9% feedback. Had 10 employees running an amazing business. Shut us off for BS reason that had nothing to do with us. Dump eBay.

Michael

I would go with Amazon they sell everything these days so lots of niches you can get into.

Anne L

I want to sell electronics or electronics accessories. Selling replicas of name brand stuff has not worked for me on eBay, so I want to try to stray clear of that. How can I sell otterbox or life proof cases on amazon? Or any name brand items?

Good thing you asked the forum members for advice before embarking on your ebay journey. Ever thought of selling your products on your own website? May seem daunting, because i understand that ebay already has the traffic that you are looking for. But if these are products that people are specifically typing into a search engine... you could probably make a killing (if you promote them correctly). Unlike "ebooks" where people type in things like "how to" or any information of such sorts.

Learn how to bounce back on ebay. Even though people complain about it, you can't compare the traffic it gets. For starters, look into this forum for assistance:
eBay Suspension & Paypal Limited Forums

I have been selling on eBay for years and I never heard of your story before. But I did have my paypal account for several years before I started selling on eBay.

Both amazon and ebay is good , people have different experience on both of them. Personally I have good experience with ebay and i am getting lots of visitors to my store and lots of orders from ebay. Sometimes their customer care support sucks but summary of whole thing is that i am getting good sales from there.

I am slightly biased in this answer in that I work for a repricing and multichannel software provider but one marketplace isn't better than the other per se. It's really down to what you're selling, what terms and margins you need and what long term strategy you have.

The one big worry for many online sellers on eBay and Amazon is their ability to simply suspend your account or close it (as you have experienced)—whilst they may have good reason to, the truth is, your business is exposed to their changing policies and terms—you're not in full control really. Here's a good article from a colleague of mine: Coping with Rising Amazon Seller Fees | SellerExpress

I do recommend a multichannel approach so that you don't put all your eggs in the one basket and have the opportunity to see what areas of your stock sell best on what marketplaces—there can be big differences, where customers see stock selling well on eBay and not at all on Amazon, or vice versa. Others see greater margins on their own online webstore but the traffic is not as great.

Test different marketplaces, see what works, refine, and repeat. We're in a prime position online to split test our marketing, split test our sales strategies and to continually gauge what's working and what's not—but we simply don't do enough of it.

Hi, I had a lot of problems with both - Amazon and eBay in the past. They make money of fees and commissions and do not care about your losses. This is the reason, why I think you should open your own online store. I've created two online shops and have good sales on them. I am using freewebstore. com (it's a cheap google site for creating e-commerce pages). I've also been using ebuyersreviewedto screen my buyers before I ship recently and I like it.


I wish you a successful and a rewarding online selling week.

I would guess that if you bought Otterbox and Lifeproof cases from China, they were knockoff counterfeits. 100% of it, actually. Otterbox and Lifeproof aggressively police their brand. All reputable distributors are forbidden to sell them to known online sellers (such as myself). If you bought them cheap from China, they aren't authentic, and as a result, this will get you banned not only on eBay, but Amazon, or any other marketplace.

As others have indicated, you cannot sell knock off products or you will get your accounts banned (or worse, you could get sued by the company that holds the trademarks).

If you are trying to source a known brand and getting it from anyone besides the manufacturer, or an authorized distributor of that manufacturer, you are almost certainly going to get counterfeit product.

You really only have these 2 options when it comes to buying wholesale products for the purpose of retailing them:

1) Buy name brand products. After you've identified a niche, you can figure out what brands are selling well and then attempt to source those brand name products using the steps shown here.

2) Buy "generic" or unbranded products. This is typically the approach folks buying in bulk from Asia are taking. You can often times get the factory to print your OWN name on the products & this is referred to as "private labeling".

So you have to choose one of those two approaches and focus on that. I hope this helps!