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eBay Challenge

leono

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Alright so, I've been looking for a way to earn an income without getting a job when I stumbled upon this thread, which by the way is greatly inspiring and motivating. It's so inspiring that I've decided to make it my new (and only!) challenge for now! Ultimately, I want to earn $10,000 per month on eBay. However, I know it's going to take me a good while to get there. Afterall, how can I make $10,000 per month, if I can't even make a $1 per month?

So, my first goal for this challenge is:
  • to create 1 new listing everyday for the next 30 days
And the goal here isn't to earn any money off these listings (though if I do, that'll be awesome!). Instead, it's to get myself into consistently working on eBay everyday. From there, then I can focus on earning an income, but not yet, it's too early.

Anyway, so far I have registered an eBay and Paypal account, confirmed with Paypal that I do have authentic bank account, bought a new camera because my last one was terrible, and made 2 listings!

This thread will be where I log all of my progress. So, here we go! The official start date for this challenge begins tomorrow, April 13, 2012!
 
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Vigilante

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Here's a little tip for you as you are just starting out. Experience = credibility on eBay. You will garner higher bids if people think you are trustworthy. So, buy 50 $1 items --- specifically to get people to leave you feedback. At first glance, it doesn't matter if you are a BUYER or a SELLER, as positive feedback is positive feedback. So fast start tip #1 - quickly build your feedback profile by buying a few dozen extremely low ticket items. Good luck!
 

psaco131

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Focus on the customer service aspect. I can't count how many times I asked a seller a question only to get a response two days later after I already bought a similar item from a different seller because he answered sooner. Make their experience smooth & simple as possible.
 

HsrJames

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If you are going to make this a real gig I recommend you buy yourself a Brother QL-570 thermal label printer and the generic 2 3/4" label rolls of off amazon. This has been the best thing I've ever bought for my Ebay business. It saves you so much time and you get a shipping discount when you buy your postage online.

Another benefit is the the ladies at the post office know when they see me walk in with my huge bags of packages that I've paid online and they let me cut in front of the line of waiting upset people.
 
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leono

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If you are going to make this a real gig I recommend you buy yourself a Brother QL-570 thermal label printer and the generic 2 3/4" label rolls of off amazon. This has been the best thing I've ever bought for my Ebay business. It saves you so much time and you get a shipping discount when you buy your postage online.
How does the Brother QL-570 save time?

Speaking of which, I don't understand shipping at all! I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but how do I package the material to ship? For my first 2 listings, I went with Media Mail because it was the cheapest and that's what I saw someone else who sold the same product as me did, but I'm just so confused on how I would actually ship the two packages. Am I suppose to go find/buy a box to ship 'em in?
 

psaco131

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Your local post office should have boxes/packages of various sizes. You pick one out & select shipping service, in your case, media mail.
 

Kak

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Whatcha gonna be selling? Ebay takes like 17% in seller fees plus paypal. Good luck wholesaling anything in a competitive market like that where your marketing channel takes 17% of revenue.

Im not saying it cant be done im just saying it will be very hard to make a profit consistantly.

I guess a dedicated site that buys things like laptops and specialize in that niche that you then turn around and sell for a profit would probably work but then you have to factor advertising to that site to buy peoples stuff.

I only use ebay on cell phones (im never satisfied) and some electronics. I sell my used crap to help fund my new crap, i never make money.

Making money on ebay would be as hard as running a business in a tax structure that makes you pay for inventory with taxed income.


If you buy a widget for 100 you must sell it for 118 just to make a dollar, then you ship it and lose money.....

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leono

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Day 1: Complete!

I set up my first listing and even managed to add a photo! Lesson Learned: Save the images as .jpg in lower case letters and not .JPG because eBay won't recognize it unless it's in lower case letters.
 

leono

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Whatcha gonna be selling?

I'll be selling a variety of things (mostly old videogames though) because I'm listing all of the things I no longer use. I plan to start buying things as Vigilante suggested, and possible trying to resell them, but first I gotta figure out how to move money into my Paypal account, which I didn't get to today.

Ebay takes like 17% in seller fees plus paypal. Good luck wholesaling anything in a competitive market like that where your marketing channel takes 17% of revenue.

Im not saying it cant be done im just saying it will be very hard to make a profit consistantly.

I'm not entirely sure how much Paypal's cut is (really eBay because doesn't eBay own Paypal?), but I'm looking at this from a more "business" perspective, where businesses have expenses that must be paid, and for me those expenses will be the eBay fees, Paypal fees, purchasing products to sell, the Brother QL-570 thermal label printer, and so on.

Making money on ebay would be as hard as running a business in a tax structure that makes you pay for inventory with taxed income.

I don't understand this example. Could you explain it?


If you buy a widget for 100 you must sell it for 118 just to make a dollar, then you ship it and lose money.....
As far as I know, the customer pays for the shipping, so it doesn't really factor as a win or lose.
 

leono

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Day 2: Complete!

Second Listing Done!

Lesson learned: Taking pictures and getting them all sorted out and ready is a very tedious process to do for one item at a time. I think it'll be alot easier to just take pictures of all the items I want to sell for the remaining 28 days, get them all sorted and ready, and then work on each individual listing.
 
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HsrJames

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Yes, are correct about doing things in batches. I normally will spend a couple hours taking pictures and then have enough item done to work on their listings for a couple days.

As a tip, you can search for only the "completed listings" on ebay to see generally what your item will sell for. That way you can see if it is worth your time.

When I was talking about the label printer earlier, I thought that you were going to be moving a lot a volume ($10,000/month) is a lot. You obviously don't need it until you are shipping several items a day, until then you can handwrite your labels.
 

Kak

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I'll be selling a variety of things (mostly old videogames though) because I'm listing all of the things I no longer use. I plan to start buying things as Vigilante suggested, and possible trying to resell them, but first I gotta figure out how to move money into my Paypal account, which I didn't get to today.



I'm not entirely sure how much Paypal's cut is (really eBay because doesn't eBay own Paypal?), but I'm looking at this from a more "business" perspective, where businesses have expenses that must be paid, and for me those expenses will be the eBay fees, Paypal fees, purchasing products to sell, the Brother QL-570 thermal label printer, and so on.



I don't understand this example. Could you explain it?



As far as I know, the customer pays for the shipping, so it doesn't really factor as a win or lose.


Understood buddy but if your expenses are 17% plus the price of the item you had to first purchase in order to sell it will be hard to factor a margin.

Customer pays a market price for your item, in fact you pay for shipping. If you charge 10 bucks for shipping youll probably get 10 less in the auction.

In the american tax structure you can "write off" expenses this means that if you paid 90 dollars to sell something that you sold for 100 you only pay taxes on the 10 dollar profit not the 100 dollars.

But in the ebay setup if you buy a 90 dollar product and sell it for 100 they dont care that you paid 90 and only netted 10. They hit you with fees on the entire 100.

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sam22

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Fun idea for you leono: try changing the copy, description, photos, etc. and test to see which variation sells best. :)
 
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Kak

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I like the ebay app on my tablet PC. It helps you shoot pictures directly on to the listing. Good way to save time!

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gfrye13

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I have a tip for you leno, go on ebay and get an app they have called ebay turbo lister. It will allow you to create more adds faster. You can make all of your adds today and you can decide when you want them to post. Also google, "ebay niche finder" this is a great tool that tells you what niche items are being heavily requested. Just thought I would offer some good advice. 10k a month is easy on ebay with the right items. The thing you have to remember is ebay gives you a monthly limit. so unfortunately you have to start slow till you build up ebays trust. Hope this advice helps you some. Also ebay does not take 17% the percentage is based on how much your item sells for. the highest percentage is 9% and thats usually for items 1000.00 or more. Paypal will hit you with a 6% fee.
 

Vigilante

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eBay Fees Calculator 8.2 by Ryan Olbe (updated July 12, 2011)

Find a good eBay cost calculator to take the mystery out of it for you. If you KNOW on the front side what your profit/loss potential is, you can go into it eyes wide open. Early on, I would force myself to use the discipline of cost analysis so that you always know what your P&L looks like at the item level. If you want to be serious about building a successful business model, even if you are just a one man band use serious tools like you might use if you worked for a corporation to really understand the metrics and measurements of your business.

I haven't used a cost calculator for a while, so this was just the first one that popped up on Google. You probably can find a better one than this. Point being, find one that allows you to enter in all of the variables that affect profit (all options you can select on eBay, and imbeds Paypal fees).

eBay is easy to make money on. There's 100,000,000 registered buyers on eBay, more than I will EVER have visiting my personal web sites. However, the key to any business you own, including an eBay business, is knowing what products make money and what don't. And the ONLY way for a newbie to eBay to really understand these metrics is by forcing the discipline of using a profit calculator.
 
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Kak

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I have a tip for you leno, go on ebay and get an app they have called ebay turbo lister. It will allow you to create more adds faster. You can make all of your adds today and you can decide when you want them to post. Also google, "ebay niche finder" this is a great tool that tells you what niche items are being heavily requested. Just thought I would offer some good advice. 10k a month is easy on ebay with the right items. The thing you have to remember is ebay gives you a monthly limit. so unfortunately you have to start slow till you build up ebays trust. Hope this advice helps you some. Also ebay does not take 17% the percentage is based on how much your item sells for. the highest percentage is 9% and thats usually for items 1000.00 or more. Paypal will hit you with a 6% fee.

9+6 is 15 i was dang close.

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gfrye13

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9+6 is 15 i was dang close.

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I have never been charged 9% thats for very high end stuff. The most I ever was charged was 6% and that was on a intem i sold for 220.00. Now the messed up part is that paypal hits you on top of ebay even though paypal was bought by ebay.
 

PatrickP

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Fun idea for you leono: try changing the copy, description, photos, etc. and test to see which variation sells best. :)

GREAT advice.

IMO the more pics, the more clear the pics, the more detailed the pics the higher the ending price.
 

BeingChewsie

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You can set up templates for your listings so they go quicker. I second using turbo lister and get either a service for your images or use photobucket. Make sure you add several photos, make them clear, show tags and so on.

I sold all unique items so listing was a total pain and took forever, but if you focus on selling just the same items over and over, it can be an easy way to make a couple bucks to fund another business that you fully control. Ebay was very good to me and I wish you the same good fortune with it.

Sue
 

leono

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Day 3: Complete!

Third Listing Done!

Lesson learned: Angles! It's all about the angles when it comes to taking pictures. Angle the camera wrong, and ya get too much glare. Angle it right and voilà, beautiful picture! Now if I could just get those dang on angles right more frequently... Also, I don't know if it was just me being terrible at holding the camera or what, but during the day, none of my pictures were coming out right because there was just too much glare. Waited a couple of hours for it to get dark to try and take pictures again, and they came out much better that time. So, I'm not sure but I'm thinking that I'll need to take my pictures either early in the morning or at night to help avoid my glare problem.
 
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leono

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Fun idea for you leono: try changing the copy, description, photos, etc. and test to see which variation sells best. :)
Copy? What is that?

Thanks man! I'll need to go buy multiples of an item, so I can test this out! I would've never thought of that!

My average fees last year were 14.58%. This includes ebay fees, paypal fees, and image hosting with auctiva ($9.99/month).
Image hosting? So, eBay is going to charge me money for uploading pictures onto their site?

You can set up templates for your listings so they go quicker.
Templates? Can this be done with turbo lister?

I second using turbo lister and get either a service for your images or use photobucket.
Am I not suppose to directly upload them to eBay?? eBay says the first 12 pictures added to each listing are free, so why would I need something to host my pictures?

I sold all unique items so listing was a total pain and took forever, but if you focus on selling just the same items over and over, it can be an easy way to make a couple bucks to fund another business that you fully control.

That's what I want to do with this eBay business: first learn how to run a business at least in general, and also use it to fund my fastlane business, which at this point I have no idea what it is. However, I do already know, I want it to be something that has lots and lots of barriers.


Ebay was very good to me and I wish you the same good fortune with it.

Sue
Thanks! And I wish you good fortune as well in whatever your current endeavors are!

And I want to thank everyone who has posted on this thread offering suggestions, tips, and advice. You guys are awesome! I've already learned so much thanks to you all!
 
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Kak

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Copy is basically advertising jargon, what you say to make your product sell. Check out Cashvertising, it is an excellent book that largely addresses copy writing. (dont confuse it with copyrighting)

It looks to me like you have your work cut out for you buddy. All the best! Keep us posted.

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leono

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So, this morning I got my first question. This guy wants to know if I would be willing to ship internationally, but I don't know how or if I should. When I tried to edit the listing to change it to allow me to ship internationally, it wouldn't let me do it (the checkbox is grey). Is there a way around this? Is it possible for him to pay the additional cost for shipping through Paypal even though it's currently set for shipment within the US (and as such the current cost is much lower)?
 
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Kak

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International shipping requires lots of additional cost and filing a small customs form. It takes longer to get there so you wont get your money as fast.

I would definately require at least 20 extra dollars to ship a small item internationally.

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gfrye13

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So, this morning I got my first question. This guy wants to know if I would be willing to ship internationally, but I don't know how or if I should. When I tried to edit the listing to change it to allow me to ship internationally, it wouldn't let me do it (the checkbox is grey). Is there a way around this? Is it possible for him to pay the additional cost for shipping through Paypal even though it's currently set for shipment within the US (and as such the current cost is much lower)?


Yes it is possible for you to ship internationally but it is a headache. I would not do that on your first couple of sales. You dont want your first sales being messed up because of customs and impatient buyers
 

leono

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Kak and gfrye13, thanks! Based on what both of you have said, I've decided to hold off on trying to do international shipping for now, and as such declined his offer.
 
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leono

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Day 4: Complete!

Fourth Listing Done!

Lesson learned: Be helpful. It feels good to try and provide a solution to a customer's question even though I know he/she won't be purchasing from me.
 

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