Started in 1995 eBay has grown to be the number one shopping destination on the Internet. It’s so easy to sell on the site that over 7 million items are added daily, and by 2006 over 1.3 million sellers make a part or full time living. The opportunity on eBay continues to be robust; a cell phone sells every seven seconds, a car every minute and a forklift every four hours.
With the volume of traffic (buyers) and the easy-to-understand interface for selling, eBay is a great place to get your feet wet. If you’ve new to selling eBay is the best venue for your efforts.
Started as an auction site, eBay has expanded into ‘fixed price’ listings and even offers a virtual store where you can brand your business and create a customer following. This is a nearly perfect way to lower your cost per acquisition. In other words, starting on eBay and building a following that you funnel out towards to your own web site is less expensive than starting with a web site and building a following by purchasing ‘cost per click’ advertising. Be careful though, eBay has very strict restrictions about moving customers away from eBay.
eBay’s roots as a collectible and used goods destination has it’s good points and drawbacks. If you love the thrill of the hunt and don’t mind going to estate sales, garage and yard sales, thrift shops, etc you’ll have a grand time selling your treasures on auction. Some items will net you large gains (buy at .99 cents and goes for hundreds or thousands of dollars) and some items you’ll just break even. There’s nothing more exciting than watching a few bidders in a bidding war all the way down to the last seconds of the auction.
However, because the site has the ‘cheap stuff here’ ambiance many buyers expect all items on eBay to be sold for under market value. That means it’s extremely difficult to make a good mark-up on products that are purchased through the traditional retail channel. It’s even tougher these days as eBay seems to actively court discounters and liquidators like buy.com and continue to try and emulate liquidation.com. If you can purchase your products at an extreme discount, or cut out the middleman you’ll be OK. Many sellers are starting to import directly from China.
Selling crafts and handmade items on eBay may be a challenge as well. The way eBay is set up, and because of the massive volume of products on eBay, buyers use ‘keyword’ searches. If you are a crafter who has a large following buyers may know your name, but most likely you’re only known locally. That means people don’t know to look for your items and sorting through the categories is too overwhelming for most buyers. If you are a crafter, a better place to target your efforts would be etsy.com
To sum it up – eBay still trumps the game when it comes to selling collectibles at auction. However, if you wish to sell products with more traditional retail markup, you may want to check out Amazon.com. And if you know the price you wish to get for your product, but it’s not made or crafted by you, you may want to check out Bonanzle.com.
Check out the other pages for more about etsy.com, Bonanzle.com, and amazon.com
