Is profitting on ebay as simple as:

Step 4!

Fighting the neggers and converting the possies into upeslls ...good plan!

I've done well with selling 1p items of really good value and plentty of upsells. But eBay make it difficult to sell the very, very cheap stuff.

Avoiding suppliers that don't deliver or produce crap is essential so if you can do it in-house and ensure you have really good quality control ought to be a priority...it's not as easy as it used to be!

My advise would be don't sell something that everyone is selling, find a niche with a big enough market so you can sell to them, and also don't use a wholesaler which everyone is using, find a supplier which less people are using plus giving you a good price so you can sell cheap and yet still making a profit.

Yeah as long as you have good enough suppliers it's an easy, honest business. Problem is no matter what you sell there always seems to be people that are able to sell items cheaper than you!

Also there are so many damn charges!

Yeah, i'm looking into becoming a Powerseller, not sure if its worth the costs... IF i decide to go the way of ebay over an eCommerce site that is

not quite, you will have to know how to write good sales copy, in order to make the offer irresistible, drive targeted traffic, and the real pain in the ass is getting cheap shipping supplies and shipping everything.

The international side of things is the easy part for me! I spent 7 years in the international import/export game as a juinor customs broker. I'm out the industry now but still have a lot of contacts. My passion has always been strength & conditioning, I'm building my income streams to not just include services - I've written 1 ebook, 3 more in the works and am looking at what products I can sell too

Looks like you've read some poor quality eBooks.

1) Terapeak kind of sucks, any data on eBay older than 60 days is almost useless. You can't fully judge the profitability of an item by old data. For all you know, an item might have sold for $29.99 for the past 90 days, but now someone is selling the item for $9.99 currently. Plus, you need to differentiate local data and international sales data (Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, etc) because 70% of buyers are U.S buyers, and the rest is split up among U.K., Australian, and other international buyers. Plus, Terapeak is actually kind of messy for most categories. I actually recommend Vendio's Search, but Terapeaks Title Builder is pretty good.

2) I don't recommend Alibaba. Most people on Alibaba get their items from another website owned by Alibaba. You want to buy items on this other website because its safer, and you'll get much better deals (as opposed to what the middlemen on Alibaba will give you). Most new people on eBay totally underestimate the number 1 rule on eBay. "Buying items as cheap as possible is the most important part about selling on eBay."

3) The cheapest person makes the sale, or the local person makes the sale. This means that you won't make as many individual sales as someone from China selling an item for the absolute lowest price on the marketplace, but you can still make sales by being the person selling an item at the lowest price of your country. For example: Here's a Green Yoshi Plush sold by a Chinese Seller:

New super mario bros green yoshi 7"plush doll toy-M7 | eBay

- 60 sold since April 25th

Lowest U.S. seller:

YOSHI~SUPER MARIO BROS~TOY~8"~PLUSH DOLL~GREEN~GIFT!~NEW!~FAST SHIPPING! | eBay

- 11 sold

However, if you look it up, more of these have sold locally.

And between those two links alone is how you can actually get started on eBay by buying low and selling higher to make a profit, by buying right on eBay.

More Advice, eBay is about volume which takes a while to create trust with eBay to allow you to sell in volume (You cant just list and sell 500 items a month if its within your 90 days, or you've never done it before) - and controlling the ratio of items you are selling for a good mark up which are usually perceived value items and historical data items, such as the ones listed above which allow you to calculate how many to buy based on how many have sold, allowing you to further calculate your expected profits. Selling the historical data items is a lot of work but it allows you to keep your volume high, so that stuff like a negative feedback doesn't shut you down or drag down your ratings or prevent you from TRS status, but the perceived value items, such as a Large Leopard Print Rug or a cool looking glass lamp, are the items that sell for a high profit margin and really allows you to pay yourself but don't have a large market of people looking to buy these items so you can't always rely on them selling. To many perceived items and you will see yourself dropping your prices just to bring in some money for new inventory.

Thanks FaJeeb - my theory dates back to the old Andale days!

I think you are making it way too complicated. I make my ebay money simply by finding an online wholesaler that does dropshipping and then but their items up for bidding. The people buy, I order from the dropshipper and everyone gets what they want. The trouble is finding a dropshipper that you can rely on. Still, I have a good one and I managed to make quite a nice piece of change that way. Plus, there is

1. No inventory to keep up with

and

2. No spending money buying an item that may or may not sell.

Plus, there are a lot of good wholesalers that let you promote their products for free. I would stay away from paying membership fees. I like making money online for free .

I think the starter of this thread is onto something. Any time you can buy cheap and sell for a profit is a great opportunity.

Alfid: Its the same with many things mate eg., Success in shares = buy low, sell high

I would suggest you create a niches for different types of Ebay products you want to sell. But stay away from products that many people is merchanting on.

Not sure about other countries but here in Australia we cannot sell digital products like ebooks or downloadble videos, webinars etc. anymore - I have gotten around it with my ebook though

Another option:
1. Find 'hot' branded fashion items through eBay Pulse
2. Search for the branded items at Craigslist (beware of replica products)
3. Use 0.99 cents bid auction + BIN and no reserve. Branded items usually get a lot of bids.

Steve Foulds glad you started this thread and Thank You FaJeeb for the informative reply.

Ebay sucks! Why:
-After the ultimate changes you have to pay overall 10% fees
-You can not vote the buyer negative
-It doesn't matter what you return policy is-if the buyer wants to return it, paypal always decides in his favor
-they do not favor small scale sales or sale of cheap items

That does not mean i stopped selling at Ebay. I thought even of writing a perfect guide how to beat them at their game. I will when i have more time.

Some, but not all points on how to beat them:
1.Never use and pay for their image and other services. upload one image and include the others in the post , hosted on your server
2.Make a bait listing to point to your external/ hosted by you/ shop

etc... You guys here are smart, can figure the rest on your own. And be merciless!!!

eBay is also now Feebay. It is so difficult to make a decent living on eBay with the excessive fees they charge. Then paypal take their cut. The poor seller is left wondering ''was it all worth it?"

If you get the right product at the right price, done your costings,have a system in place, have great feedback from customers, have sold or bought 100's of items to seem credible, then you have a fighting chance to make it with eBay

Maybe its time the experts from here banded their expertise and funds together to start an auction site that is win-win-win, goes back to what ebay WAS

Find something that people want to buy and sell it at a lower price than all your competitors. Although you won't be making bank at first, you will develop loyal customers who buy more. This, in the long run, will cause you to make higher profits.

Don't always have to be the cheapest! Have a well written and structured description, good feedback and a decent keyword rich title.

It's not always the fact that cheapest will win the market. Another point is, if you can offer at lower price than your competitor, someone else will offer cheaper than you! It will lead to certain lowest point of profit where everyone will stop. It will just reduce everyone's profit margin and business, nothing else.

You might want to check out my wife's book.. She is a TopRated Seller and PowerSeller..

The book is what you need to know and how to do it.. No Fluff..

Happy to Help!!

I used to buy products which were on sale or searching for offers and re-sell the products a bit more expensive. It was working for me but you need to search for sales all the time.

What Tad 100 described sounds interesting, but I find it very difficult to be done.. Selling only one product through ebay needs a lot of promotion and hard work. But those guys must be really happy with the results.

Stay the hell away from alibaba.com thats all i gotta say.

if alibaba is bad what are the other options?

i also gotta say ebay charges too much on fees.

I would stay away from the likes of Alibaba. There are cheaper alternatives and plenty of access to wholesalers that don't require recurring membership fees.

I use a website owned by Alibaba that is mostly only for people that live within China. I get the absolute lowest prices, and 99% of people on Alibaba are middlemen that buy their goods in bulk from this website. Buying wholesale and finding the original manufactures of items within this specific website is easy to know what you are doing. Luckily because you have to know a good bit of Chinese (Google Translate does not work very well) and have an agent in China that doesn't add much to your overhead, you can buy goods at their economic price point. Americanized/Western Market items are super cheap if you can find them, for example, something made by a Chinese manufacturer in Shenzhen that over produced something and doesn't know the exact name of stuff that was originally intended for the store "Hot Topic" in the United States can be bought for pennies above the price it cost to make it. Many of these items I sell for a huge mark up when brought into the States, and most of these items sell really quick because there is no competition from the Asian sellers, and the competition from western market sellers (U.S., Canada, U.K., etc) are usually dropshipping these items at a price that might be only 5% below retail.

I did eBay a few years ago (I think it was around 2004-2006) but as a small seller it got harder and harder to compete. The ebay fees are high and profit margins get lower once competitors see you're doing well selling something.

You'll always find someone willing to sell for lower than you, and when you're up against sellers with actual shops and warehouses etc. that can buy in massive bulk for really cheaply you're pretty much pushed out of the market.

My best success was using eBay arbitrage. I used to find products on eBay US that weren't readily available here in the UK (or were available alot cheaper in the US), get them shipped across, and resell on eBay UK.

Eventually after having problems with Paypal I decided to give it up. Best decision I ever made. I know eBay is good for some people though - particularly if you have the purchasing power (which as a small seller I didn't).

My aproach is a little bit different, I try to find products like in example about dental cameras in my previous post.