Making money Online with Ebay

Ebay is a cracking place to make money. It is utterly different from most other online money making schemes - in that you actually sell real physical stuff intead of the virtual bartering that makes up most online money making schemes. This doesn't mean however that Ebay is free of scams.

Countless websites out there are happy to sell you expensive ebooks and guides that promise to help make you ebay millions. They are, in the main, talking rubbish. Now, I'm not knocking ebay. Ebay is a great place. For most of us it is essentially the world's greatest car boot sale. We all have "stuff" and "junk" cluttering up our houses. Much of it will sell on Ebay! Sometimes only for a few quid, but, hey, a few quid is prefered to a bit of clutter you keep tripping over.

However, some folk want to be very serious ebayers - they try to buy stuff and then sell it on ebay. The aforementioned ebooks will try to tell you good places to get merchandise to sell cheaply. The trouble is, like all money making schemes, this one is super-saturated. Almost any niche product area is stuffed full of professional sellers, who have cut their margins to the bare minimum. Therefore, to make any serious money online with ebay you either have to have something very unique to sell, or, more usually, you have to sell a heck of a lot of stuff. This consumes valuable time actually running your ebay business, and therefore you rapidly find you make more money if you simply took a part time job.

There are some hilarious deals on ebay. If you go looking for something, maybe a popular electronics item, you'll doubtless find somebody based in the far east who will sell it to you for 99p. Plus of course, £45 postage and packing. Ebay frowns on this practise, but it is very common. Instead of asking a reserve price for an item, the seller just bumps the postage up to the point where it covers costs, and anything else is a bonus.

Ebay is now 99% populated by business people. Personally I am in the business of consulting with retailers on IT issues. Most of them are "bricks and morter" shops. However, all of them have an ebay shop, and sell a few items on ebay. Normally these items are something they took in part exchange 2 years ago and it is just cluttering up their stock room, but for many Ebay businesspeople, shifting huge quantities of stuff on ebay a way of life. Much of the time this is great for us, the consumer, as prices are controlled by extremely stiff competition.

The sad fact is, the "genuine" seller, the car boot sale people, those of us just trying to shift the unwanted xmas present get lost in all this hard selling. Unless you have got something unusual to sell, it is very hard to get bids - especially if there are 300 other examples of the same thing being sold. I sell on ebay, ususally it is old and classic car parts that I have cluttering up my garage, or that my mechanic friend has a remarkable propensity to aquire. These sell quite well, but they are rare and unusual items - and there is normally no other examples on ebay - or maybe just one or two.

So, ebay is a great place to make a bit of pocket money selling stuff on line, but trying to get into it full time is, like most other online money making schemes, possible, but very very difficult unless you have a very very unique approach.

I think my best tips for selling stuff on ebay are these:

• Number one, always, always include a picture and select the Gallery option to get the image in the listing. Take care with the pictures, especially if it is an unusual item.
• Number two, don't make the ebay page overly pretty, with masses of fonts and colours, like a website, this makes it off putting and hard to read. My first rule of websites: The value of the content on a webpage is inversely proportional to the square of the number of fonts and colours used.
• The third point on Ebay is time your auctions to end about mid evening. About 8.30pm is best. People have got home, had their dinner, put the kids to bed etc. Most of the bids on Ebay items come in the last few minutes, so don't make those last few minutes happen at 4am, because not many people will be awake!
• Don't try and take the piss on postage. Be very exact about this. Weigh the item and visit the post office etc website, they will tell you the postage. People get turned off very quickly if the postage looks wrong. I once had a guy in germany send me an angry email because I'd charged him £5 postage, and the package turned up with £4.50 of stamps on it.
• Don't set the starting bid high. Nowhere near your hoped-for-price. The lower the starting bid, the more inclined people are to start bidding early.
• Don't sit in front of your computer at work logged into ebay pressing the refresh button every 5 seconds to see if you have a bid. The boss will get annoyed. In fact, go out to the pub or supermarket when your auctions are about to end. This will prevent you wasting large amount of your life sitting there pressing refresh.