Over $44.3 billion in gross merchandise has been sold through eBay last year, if you take all the other Auction web site into consideration, you can imagine why making money with online auctions has quickly become one of the most profitable business models available. And definitely, you can find your shares from this huge market..

In below, you will find six steps to start your eBay home business:

6 Steps to Start Your eBay Business

Steps 1: Open Your eBay Account

Open an account in eBay is free, In eBay, you can use the same account to buy things and sell product, so if you have bid on eBay before, then you can use your old account to start your eBay business.

At the top of the page, there is a toolbar with a ‘Sell’ button there. Click it , then choose ‘Create a seller’s account’, eBay site will then guide you through the process. For security, this may involve giving card details and bank information.

Step 2: Decide What to Sell for Online Auction

This step is to find out some hot and profit products to sell them on eBay. This is always a challenge for new sellers. “They’re hopped up to sell, but don’t know what to sell,” says Jim “Griff” Griffith, dean of eBay Education. Decide What to Sell on eBay will help you go through this step..

Step 3: Where to Find What you will Sell

Obviously, getting the product at a low price and selling for a high price is the “meat and potatoes” of this business and is also the most complicated part. There are a number of wholesale warehouse that sell items for the specific purpose of allowing you to resell the products on online auctions. In How to Find Wholesale Merchandise to Sell on eBay, you will know where to find items with up to an 80% discount.

Step 4: List Your Items on eBay

Now, you can list your items on eBay. By clicking “Sell” button, you’re on your way to listing your item.

Want to know more skills about how to list your item in a way that can attract more prospective bidders or get the best profit, you can refer to:

• 11 Ways to Write an Attractive eBay Description
• Increase eBay Selling Margin with Auction Analysis Tools

Step 5: Wait for it to sell

This is just a matter of sitting back and letting eBay do its thing - buyers will find your item and leave bids on it. Some bidders might email you with questions about the item, and you should do your best to answer these questions as quickly as you can.

Remember that if your item doesn’t sell then you can list it again for free.

Step 6: Collect payment and post it

Paypal is the basic payment method on eBay, and we highly recommend you to use it because of the benefit in security and speed (this is almost no delay in receiving money).

Once you’ve got the payment, you can start planning shipping the products:

If you get the product from drop and ship wholesaler, you can start to place you order to them and request them to ship product to your customer. If you stock the inventory by yourself, then you need to pack the item for posting (make sure to use some bubble wrap), take the buyer’s address from the confirmation email eBay sent you, and write it on the parcel. Put some stamps on, post it, and you’re done!

What’s Hot on eBay

It’s a challenge for new sellers to figure out what are the hot eBay selling! “They’re hopped up to sell, but don’t know what to sell,” says Jim Griff, dean of eBay Education. Actually, this is the most common question new sellers have.

“eBay attempts to provide as much information as possible to help people spot trends.”,It’s Seller Central give out very comprehensive guide for new sellers to start their eBay business. You can find the the hot items by category there.

By being charged a small amount of fee, you can access eBay Marketplace Research, where you can see up to 90 days of historical information on completed items as well as active listings data, including average start prices, average sold prices, top keyword searches, and more! All those will be very powerful tools for you: by looking at the keywords, you know what’s selling. And it’s a leading indicator of how you should be selling it.

Lutwak, eBay’s director of Seller Development, sees strong growth in all of eBay’s major categories. To become a better trend spotter, keep track of eBay’s hot categories, items and search words, Lutwak advises. Then be a pioneer in your sales strategy. “Try new things and become a trendsetter,” he says. “That in itself is a best practice.”

Don’t just Sell what You are Experienced with

If your goal is to make a profit—and it should be!—then you need to be selling things people will buy.

Based on the list of hot products in eBay, you can start with what you have experience with and you know where you can find very low price wholesaler. Choose things that have demonstrable market demand (that is, you know people are buying them). Don’t make the mistake of selling only things you like, or the trendiest, coolest things you can find.

If you are considering selling an item, do a search on eBay and see if that product or similar ones are being offered for sale. If the market is saturated, you may want to reconsider trying to sell that product. At the same time, if absolutely no one else is offering the product for sale, you need to figure out if that’s because no one else has thought of it, or if it’s because no one will buy the item.

Depending on the category, seeing a lot of similar items up for sale may work in your favor or against you. For example, you may see a lot of the same item pop up in response to a search because people are buying. Or, observes antiques seller Sue Rudolph, “It might also mean the market is flooded and nobody wants it.” You have to do more than just count the listings, she says. Look at the individual auctions and see if people are bidding on the items—that will give you an indication of the strength of the market. Then check the completed auctions for the item you searched for. That will tell you what the item is selling for (if, in fact, it’s selling at all).

Considering the Seasons and Holidays

eBay’s holiday or season sales is just like what’s in the offline business – November and December are the hottest months of the year. List out more gift items will help 7 Ways to Increase eBay Sales During Holiday Season.

Bidz.com

How to Bid

Bid in Bidz.com is quite different with what you have seen in eBay. The whole auction process is not closed at a specific given time, it’s stopped after 15 seconds no one bids on it. So you are always competing with someone else. You can place the bid until you feel the new price is exceed your expectation. You need to be patient and have no need to rush to get one since the new items are listed out for bid continuously. When you fail in one deal, you can change to some other deal. Probably you can be very lucky in next time and compete with someone who don’t want to pay more than you. You experience in Bidz.com is very close to in the real world auction.

Feel interests, want a try, you can join Bidz.com and start your first bid now:

What’s Drop Ship Wholesaler

A drop ship wholesaler is a wholesale company allowing you to sell a range of products of the company without even touching the products. You don’t need to pay money to purchase goods in bulk from the drop ship wholesalers. You just place an ad on ebay or display products pictures on your online store. When a customer pays you to order a product, you’ll then pay the drop ship wholesale company at wholesale price for the product and the drop ship company will package and ship the product on your name to your customer.

So, we can say that drop shipping means selling for someone else. You will not have to buy anything or stock any products.

Reliable Drop Ship Wholesalers List

Below is a list of drop ship companies that you can use to start making money on ebay. Some of these companies are recommended by ebay sellers, experienced Internet marketer and bloggers. They are real company. But before you start dealing with any of them, you should do some research on the company to find out the company background, their reputation, history record and comments from people who have used the company.

Click here to sign up for 14 Days free trial from BidFuel

Cost

You need to have a clear understanding about the cost of your items. There’s more to cost that simply the price on the item—do you have the cash required to make the purchase or are you going to have to borrow money (and therefore pay interest) to acquire the inventory? Will there be any additional expenses, such as shipping to you or repairs if the item is not in saleable condition? Finally, don’t forget to count the fee eBay.com will charge you.

Storage

Do you have room to adequately and safely store the item while you are waiting for it to sell? or you want to leverage the ship-and-drop wholesaler to store the item and ship it to your customers.

Shipping

What are the labor and cost issues associated with shipping the item to your customer once it sells? Is it very fragile, an unusual shape or extremely heavy? These are issues that can make shipping a challenge.

You can checkout the Shipping SideKick, this is a great site which will allow you to compare the shipping fee within the top 4 package delivery companies. Save 30+% shipping cost are common via it. If you are big eBay seller, the saving will be considerable.

Product life cycle

How long can you expect the demand for the item to continue? You may have something that is wildly successful today, but next year you won’t be able to pay people to take it away from you. Especially for the high-tech items (such as Laptop, iPhone), they are at risk of having a short life cycle due to technology advances. If you pay attention to product life cycles, you can maximize your profits while the item is hot and avoid getting stuck with excess inventory when the demand declines.

Season

When you put an item up for sale on eBay, consider the time of year. Heavy coats and sweaters don’t sell well in the spring and summer. Lawn and garden equipment is not going to move as well in the winter as it will in the summer. If you have room to store items, you can make a nice profit buying off-season items and holding them until they sell.

And don’t forget the holiday period, list the item can be used as “Gift” will bring you a lot of profit. See more in 7 Ways to Increase eBay Sales During Holiday Season

Purchasing

The concept of eBay business is very simple: buy a product from cheap and sell it for a higher price. Finding wholesale price items is playing very important role during it. How to Find Wholesale Merchandise to Sell on eBay will tell you how to find very low price items.

1. Create a headline by repeating some of the keywords you used in your title, and add a one-line phrase or summary that describes your item in general

2. Follow the formula “best-good-better, or strength-weakness-strength). Describe the best features of your item, then describe the good features, then describe the better features. Keep in mind that readers are most likely to remember the first thing in a list, then the last thing in a list, and finally, whatever was listed in the middle.

3. In you description, remember to include a clear and high quality picture which can best present your item. “A picture is worth a thousand word”

4. Don’t forget to note brand name, color, size(e.g., M, L, XL) or dimension(e.g., 24″ diameter, 18″ high), publication date. and condition. If you know the history or background of your items, put it there, this kinds of content will largely raise the bidder interest to buy it.

5. Make your shipping policy clearly to your prospective bidder. Do mention if you have shipping restriction (e.g., you don’t ship on Saturday or Sunday).

6. Your font face selection should be kept to the basic fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Vedanta, or Comic Sans MS.he reason to choose them is that almost every computer will support them. As a global business, you have to make sure what you write can be viewed by majority of the people.

7. The larger font sizes are used for headlines and sub-headlines. Larger fonts create emphasis and draw attention for the eye to view. And if your items targeted to seniors often have a larger font throughout the presentation since their eyesight might not be very good

8. Most font colors you will see on the auctions will be black. There are a couple of exceptions to that, especially, when you want to create emphasis and draws attention to some key points of your items. The two most popular font colors are: Red and Green.

9. Colors in Templates, Backgrounds and Layout Areas. Color can give the visitor to the auction a feeling about the auction and the item(s). Remember many people buy emotionally. But don’t abuse the using of color.

Here is a review of colors, some you have seen before and some additions.

10. Do encourage buyers to look at your other listings, but include a link that opens a new window so you don’t send them away before they place a bid on your item

11. Last and the most important one. Put yourself in the position of bidder. Review your own description carefully to see whether it’s attractive enough, whether you want to make a decision to bid on it after reading it. If not, then think about from bidder’s mindset again to see what kinds of improvement you will need to make.

1. Before you list a particular product, spend some time researching on other similar products on eBay. Pay special attention to what the big merchants do. Big merchants are also known as “PowerSellers”, those are people who have high sales and at least a 98% positive feedback rating. By doing research, you will know the listing price, interest of your product as well as how to distinguish your product with others.

Marsha Collier, a Southern California PowerSeller and author of “eBay for Dummies,” suggests that beginners buy things from PowerSellers. “See how they handle business,” she says.

2. Give a large and professional quality picture to your product, this is worth a thousand words. People like to see things before they buy them, and a clear picture is also a good way to attract their attention

3. Write a title that accurately describes your item. Get manufacturers name and model number included if applicable.

4. Write a detailed and accurate description to your eBay listing as to your picture. The content should be good enough to make prospective bidders to make a decision about purchasing the items.

Try to make your description to be search engine friendly so that when people search for something related to your list in Google, your eBay items can be shown in the search result

5. Offer the most popular payment options, such as Paypal, credit cards. Considering eBay business is a truly global business, the more payment options you can offer to your prospective bidders, the more sale you will generate on eBay.

6. Provide the appropriate shipping options for your product. Although shipping is under the control of the eBay seller, some methods of shipping are better than others when you’re selling on eBay. You need to find the best method of shipping for your product in terms of expense and reliability and then specify that shipping method in your eBay listing. The shipping policy need to be very clearly to your prospective bidders.

If you don’t know what’s the best shipping options for your product, a good method has been described in the #1 tip in this articles, do some research on the “PowerSellers” and learn from them.

7. Take special pains to treat your customer and get positive feedback first. The high level of trust is one of the important factors when the bidders make the purchase without seeing the vendor. And a consistent record of positive feedback will be the most important way to gain the trust from the prospective buyers. Before you establish enough positive feedback on eBay, you may want to hold back on placing higher priced products. It’s quite hard for people to decide to pay a lot to buy something from someone without enough credit.

8. Understand your cost clearly. I assume you have known your own operation cost and the purchasing cost of your list. But you still need to understand the cost with eBay.com. All the fees eBay will charge have been listed in eBay.com Fees, please make sure you have read it carefully.

9. Utilize the holiday season to increase your sale. There is no difference between eBay business and offline business. November and December are the hottest months of the year. You need to think about the different selling strategies in different period. Here are 7 Ways to Increase eBay Sales During Holiday Season.

10. Treat your eBay business as a true business. Actual, you have to if you want to be successful on it. Act professionally, provide the kind of superior customer service that will build your reputation, and make sure that you’re following all the business rules that apply, such as registering your business and properly charging and remitting taxes. Selling on eBay is just like any other business; to become an eBay success, you need to follow the rules and provide the kind of customer satisfaction that will translate into increased eBay sales.

Find Out What Sells and for How Much

A lot of eBay sellers set the price by referring to the information from “PowerSeller” in eBay. If those so called “PowerSeller” set a wrong price, then you will be wrong as well. Increase My Margin will change this situation by giving you some very useful information so that you can make decision based on data instead of guesswork.

Below is diagram of a given product, from which, you will see how many listings are in eBay, the percentage of them has been converted to sale (”Listing Success Rate”) and the average sales price.

Those information are important in helping you understand risk of selling a product on eBay and its profit. Considering eBay will charge you for each list, you need to consider the Listing Success Rate when calculating the eBay fee. The right formula of the cost from eBay for each sale is Final Value Fees (1.5% to 5.25% of the closing value) + Listing Cost/Listing Success Rate. So, if your Listing Success Rate is low, then your cost will be much higher than other, and your profit will be low likewise.

How to Sell Your Product on eBay

Below is another table from Increase My Margin. It will tell you the best way to sell your product, the data in it can be explained as:

• Fixed-Price auction has the best chance of selling (61.76% sold), but Auction listing have the highest selling price up to $456.6
• If you list your product on Wednesday, your product will have the highest sales conversion rate to 51.52%, and the best end day for an auction is Saturday, 55.93% of the list will be sold.
• If you auction is listed to be ended in one day, then 87.5% possibility they would be sold, but if the auction last for 10 days, then you can get very high sale price at $700.3. You can choose the right length every time—one that’s long enough to gather interest, yet short enough to create urgency
• A starting price range from $0 to $0.99 will have the best Listing Sales Rate.

Why Increase My Margin

Increase My Margin is a tool developed by those who really understand the eBay auction business. Above are just 2 examples from Increase My Margin. In below, you will see what you can get from it:

• Best day of the week to start & end your auction
• The best start price to create a bidding frenzy
• The most attractive listing features for the product (gallery pictures, bold, etc)
• Keywords that get your auction found
• The best category to put your listing in
• Seasonal trending of the product
• Manage product life cycle.
• Never end functions enhancement, and the super support.

Try Increase My Margin for 14 Days

You will never know the power of Increase My Margin until you take it for a test drive. Why not join Increase My Margin, and get 14 days to try this best auction analyst tools on the market. You will see how the tools take your eBay sales to the next level.

Buying From eBay Wholesalers

Buying from wholesalers is the ultimate solution for finding lowest price merchandise. This can be very profitable, but only if you choose the wholesaler wisely.

There are 2 types wholesalers you can leverage: traditional wholesaler or drop-ship wholesaler.

Traditional eBay Wholesaler

For traditional wholesaler, you will have to purchase merchandise in bulk, then manage the inventory by yourself, and ship them to your customers once it’s sold. If you have resource to handle all those activities, purchasing from the traditional wholesaler should be a good choice, since their prices is lower than Drop-Ship wholesaler.

You can use Google to find the traditional wholesaler out, but it always time-consuming and sometime, the result is not ideal enough. To find those traditional wholesaler out, you can check out Salehoo, which is the largest reliable wholesaler directory in the world, by which you can find wholesaler for almost everything you want to sell on eBay. And you also get 56 days money back guarantee from Salehoo, if you can not find the appropriate wholesaler from them, you can ask for 100% money refund. It should worth a try.

Drop-Ship eBay Wholesaler

Drop-Ship wholesaler is a wholesale company allowing you to sell a range of products of the company without even touching the products. You don’t need to pay money to purchase goods in bulk from the drop ship wholesalers. You just place an ad on ebay or display products pictures on your online store. When a customer pays you to order a product, you’ll then pay the drop ship wholesale company at wholesale price for the product and the drop ship company will package and ship the product on your name to your customer.

Drop ship wholesalers have been widely used by ebay sellers. If you plan to start using a drop ship company for your ebay business. You got to make sure that the drop ship company is reliable. Dora is one of them.

Dora has very good reputation in the industry, supplying a list of retailed products. You can find wholesale price for more than 1 million products. It’s also recommended by eBay as eBay Certificated Service Provider. Dora will give you 6 days free trial period, which is good enough for you to find the low price products. Recommend to renew your service with it only after you find the appropriate wholesale price product.

What’s the Other Channels

Besides buying from wholesaler, you still can find some very cheap items by below traditional method. This might be a little bit hard or won’t bring you a lot of items, but it really count some.

Your home

Start by looking around your own home at the stuff that’s collecting dust on shelves or stashed in the back of closets, or in the attic or garage.

Flea markets.

Flea markets can be a tremendous source of bargain-priced merchandise that will sell on eBay.

Garage and yard sales.

Savvy eBay sellers can make a comfortable living spending one or two days a week shopping garage sales for items that will fetch many times what they cost when auctioned on eBay.

Estate sales.

If a professional is already handling the estate sale, you’re not as likely to get really great bargains. But if you have access to a truck and storage, you can advertise that you can buy entire estates. When you make such a purchase, select what will sell best on eBay, put those items up for auction, and then sell the rest through other channels.

Established retailers.

Stores need a way to move items that aren’t selling. Once Gotham City Online, a eBay company that focuses on clothing and accessories with sales exceeding $1 million annually, was established, co-founder Jonathan Garriss was able to approach retailers and offer to help them solve their overstock problems by selling those items on a consignment basis on eBay. Eventually, he began purchasing that inventory outright.

Discount stores.

Look for clearance items at discount department and drug stores. Cindy Mayer of Cindy’s Collectibles routinely buys infant’s and children’s items at the end of the season and stores them until the following year. “I buy out of season, and I have found great sales in drugstores,” she says.

Friends and family.

Tell people you know not to throw anything away. Laurie Ayers says that members of her church will give thing they are going to throw away or donate to charity, and if she can sell them on eBay, she does.

Other Online Auction Web Site

It might be surprised that you can buy some lower price products in one auction web site and then sell it in the other auction web site. There are around 5 very famous auction web site in the world. In order to attract the people to their web sites, some of them provide very low price product in some of the categories. What you need to do is to bid the item from those categories and resell it in the other web site. Such as Bidz.com, this is a place to find very low price Jewelry, Watch, and Eyewear..

Summary

Buying from wholesaler and sell it on eBay can be very profit, and the best ways to run this home business is to find the items from wholesaler. Depends on what you could do, you can find items from traditional wholesaler or drop-ship wholesaler. But don’t forget to find the cheap stuff around you, they will always bring you some extra surprise!

1. Make a Plan for Your eBay Sales Campaign and Start it Early

Holiday season actually goes beyond itself. Taking Chrismas as an example, the holiday buying season starts on November 1st, and peaks from November 20 to December 19 and end on January 20th.

A research shows that during December 11-17, even you increase the price of your items 10%, you still can get 10% increase in sales compared with the other week druing November 20 and December 19. The main reason is that this week is the last chance for people to find gifts on eBay, and at that time, people just want to get one as soon as possible instead of comparing the price again and again.

2. Focus on “holiday-friendly” items, and Provide Gift Service if Possible

Item can be bought as a gift should be the main thing you are supposed to sell on eBay during holiday. If you sell items other than it , reduce the supplies of those items since gift purchase is the main reason for people to go to eBay during holiday. And considering the nature of it, gift services such as Ship to Gift Recipient, Enclose a Gift Card or even Gift Wrapping can increase your holiday sales a lot. Gift wrapping can also be part of your eBay profit center.

3. Line up Your Suppliers or Stock up on Hot/in Demand Items

Line up your suppliers. Make sure you have reliable suppliers lined up in advance so you have the product you need to maximize your eBay holiday sales. You can join some of the top eBay wholesale we list in Top 3 eBay Auction Wholesale Providers to make sure you will get enough supply.

Stock up on hot/in demand items. What’s hot in the world at large is what’s hot on eBay, too. For example, if you were selling Ipods on eBay during the 2004 holiday season, you did well. One way to increase your eBay holiday sales is to add popular items to your product listings.

Find out what’s hot on eBay itself by using the tools eBay offers. On eBay’s What’s Hot page, you can view Hot Items by Category or use eBay Pulse to check out current trends and hot picks. If you can be ahead of the curve (or even in the first wave) with some of these hot items, you’ll increase your eBay holiday sales dramatically.

4. Use more “Buy It Now” listings.

The holiday season is prime time for impulse buys – and impatience. Using more eBay Buy It Now listings rather than auction-style listings will give your products an edge with those impatient, impulsive online shoppers who don’t want to wait for your auction to end and increase your holiday sales.

5. Explain Your Shipping Policies Clearly and Provide Some Discount on Shipping

Offering free shipping on Buy It Now items have been proved to be a very powerful way to increase your holiday sales. Research shows that this method can increase the sales anywhere from 12% to 40% depending on the product category.

And you can increase your sales by offering combined shipping or giving out some special discount on shipment, such as when buying 2 items, customers will only need to pay 1 item’s ship fee.

The last points about shipping is that always offer expedited shipping to your customers during holiday season, a lot of people just rush into eBay and buy the gifts right before the holiday, they want the items to be delivered as fast as possible.

Finally, you will need to explain your shipping policies clearly in your list. Online shoppers don’t just want to buy gifts; they want to know when those gifts are going to arrive. When you make sure that your shipping policies are clearly explained in your listings, you make it easier for them to decide to buy your product. Otherwise, they have to take the time to email you and ask – or just buy someone else’s product.

6. Give your eBay pages a holiday theme.

Giving your pages a holiday theme will help put online shoppers in a holiday buying mood. And also give the online shoppers that this is a place to find hot holiday gift.

7. Leverage the Promotion from eBay during the Holiday Season

eBay runs a lot of free and reduced cost promotions during the holiday season. This announcements is easy to be missed if you don’t visit its message center frequently. Recommend to change your Notification Preferences to get an email from eBay that gives you a heads up on the promotions. Go to My eBay. Under Account, click on Preferences. Then edit your Notification Preferences. Under Newsletters, Promotions and Event Notifications, just select the Seller Promotions check box to opt in.