Buy or Collect the Following Items:

1. A digital camera that will take close-up and crisp pictures including the items you want to sell.

2.A white sheet and a black bed sheet- Put your objects in front of these sheets to get clear pictures and make your product stand out. If possible take these pictures outside, because the light is generally better outside.  If not possible, shine a light or lights on your product.

3. A scale- This will give you an idea of how much to charge for shipping.

4. Packaging Materials

Set Up a Few Accounts:

2. Paypal- Allows your customer to purchase items with a credit or debit card and adds trust to your site.

3. Flickr- This site allows you to host your eBay pictures for free since eBay charges you to host your photos.

Research:

On eBay- Look at the categories that other sellers are selling under. Look at the very top of the eBay page after typing in a search inquiry.  Find the category and sub category the product was listed under. It will look like this:

picture frame lot,  collage picture frames,  vintage picture frames,  wooden picture frame

This should give you some ideas in terms of what category in which to list your product.

Now take a look at pricing.  What is that specific product generally selling for?  Can you even compete?  Can you perhaps include shipping in your overall price to make it more attractive to the buyer?  If there’s too much competition, consider finding a product to sell in a less competitive category.

Also, take this opportunity to look at the titles and descriptions the sellers are using. A product description can make or break a sale.  Is it new and still in its original packaging?  Be accurate.  Be specific.  Put your product on a pedestal. Every product has a story, so tell it.  Remember, besides the title (which is crucial), the first two lines of your product description will help spark the buyer’s interest so give it thoughtful consideration in describing it.

Give Your Items Strong Titles:

You only have so much space when you create a title so think seriously about Erica’s tips on the subject. Using a man’s dress shirt as an example she said :

“Here’s a little secret: in as few words as possible list the size, color, sleeve length, gender, and brand. Then put USED or NEW at the end. Do NOT put things like Excellent Condition, Like New, Beautiful, Barely Used, etc. People are not going to search for “Excellent Condition” or “Barely Used,” they are going to search for “Men’s Long Sleeve Blue L.” Using “Like New” is against eBay policy.”

When you come to the subtitle option, it’s your choice. It costs extra, but it may be worth it.

Now it’s time to list! Make sure and list all the details you can about your product. Be honest and make it unique. If their is a small stain, or a missing part make sure and list that. Erica suggests that these details be listed in small red print. Remember if you don’t list these details you will hear about it by means of poor feedback scores. So be upfront.  Customers will appreciate you for it.

Shipping:

Make sure you charge a fair amount for shipping. Get estimates of shipping costs using the weight of the product and the size of the box or envelop you will be using.  You don’t want to lose money here. Ebay even offers a service where you can print out your shipping labels and pay for the shipping costs through Paypal. It doesn’t cost extra and will save you a trip to the post office.

Better yet,  if you don’t want to bother with the pains of postage and shipping products consider drop shipping. When you drop ship you buy a product from a manufacturer, who then ships the product from their warehouse directly to your customer. You can even purchase a drop ship directory which will list thousands of suppliers in one convenient place. This directory will give you access to millions of products.

With some novice and expert advice you’re ready to get started. Don’t lose momentum. You won’t need to be an expert to enjoy selling online, all you’ve got to do is take the first step.

Visit Erica Mueller’s and the HubPages sites for even more eBay selling information.

For more tips on starting your eBay business and even more business ideas follow us on twitter: @gogodropship

Ebay

How do I Know What to Sell on eBay?

This is a fair question. There are some guides for potential sellers, but the truth is that a little creativity and a lot of research are what will really help a seller do well on eBay. Ebay Pulse is a guide that will give you an overall idea, but remember that many of these products are within markets that are already over-run with sellers. Categories like electronics and phones have so much competition, it’s almost impossible for a new seller to compete. So how can you compete?

Find a Niche Market

Niche markets are the key. Are you involved in social media? What topics are trending? Justin Bieber  has been a popular topic as of late. Could you sell a product based on a celebrity or news? You bet.

I  had a professor suggest that his students sell shirts with funny slogans about the latest celebrity scandals. By watching what key words are popular on Google, he said we’d know what kind of shirts to sell. Looking at current trends and news may inspire you. Just remember that in this type of business, you have to know when to stop selling. You don’t want your product to be old news.

Stay Ahead of the Game

Trending products can be the same way so don’t wait until you see that an item is gaining popularity in retail stores to move forward with it. Why? 1. Retailers will be hard to compete with because they buy in bulk and can get lower prices than the average seller. 2.The fad will be ready to end and you’ll get stuck with unsold merchandise. You have to stay ahead of the game.

My alma mater allows the business program to sell items on campus as part of their entrepreneur curriculum every semester. For some students, it’s their most dreaded semester.  For others, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity they’ll never forget.  Some of them included things like stick-on covers for laptops and cell phones, and wood plaques with etched poems, photos, and pictures on them.  But some of the most profitable businesses included a hot dog stand, a sunglasses booth, and a garbage service.

The less saturated your market the better.  But then you’ll have to create a need for your product. You’ll need to advertise your product extensively to create awareness. But if competition already exists, don’t worry. Let them open the door of awareness and you can enter the market as another, perhaps, better option.

There’s a rule of thumb in advertising that I’ll call the “Business Triangle.” Each corner of the triangle represent three things. 1. Price 2. Quality 3. Speed. Like the principles above, you can’t have all three without at least one corner of the triangle suffering. If you pick speed and price, quality will generally suffer. If you pick price and quality, the speed will be affected. Think about this and use this to market your products. If you take more time because you are looking to deliver quality to your customer, advertise this on your website. Pick two of these qualities and apply the principles to your products and your website.

Lastly, if you want to be innovative, be innovative.  Retail chains like Walmart do well because they offer everyday items, but there is something to be said of the smaller company that offers unique, handmade, or one-of-a-kind items.  There is value in it.  Take Etsy for example.  They have become a popular website for this very reason.  So although there is plenty of thinking and products to offer “inside the box,” don’t be afraid to venture outside of it.

So as a recap, remember:

Be fair to yourself and sell a product that can be successful. By doing your research and taking into account these tips, you can build yourself a profitable business on eBay. Good luck, but then again, with the right product you won’t need it.

Want to get more tips for having a successful online business? Visit us on Twitter: @gogodropship or read other posts on our blog.

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is also no. Feedback is going to effect us on eBay in a variety of very real ways. Let’s first talk about the positive effects of Feedback.

High Feedback helps us in the following ways:

• First, you need at least 10 Feedback to have access to many of the more advanced listing options.
• You need at least 100 Feedback to become an eBay Powerseller.
• Consumer confidence; high feedback means high sales. People can trust you, and they’re not going to be afraid that you’re an unknown seller, and will shop with confidence.

In addition to the Feedback requirements, a Powerseller needs to have near-perfect DSR, which means you need to score perfectly whenever a buyer of yours rates how well you did as a seller. The positive feedback will help confer the multitude of powerseller benefits, and is a key part of accomplishing your long-term eBay goals. You should always strive to reach powerseller status if you are working on eBay, and feedback is an integral piece of that game plan.

Bad Feedback can hurt us just as much as good Feedback can helps us. Bad Feedback:

• Can cause us to lose our Powerseller status. You need near-perfect DSR if you want to be a Powerseller, and once you start slip and getting back Feedback, you can lose it all.
• If you gain more Negative Feedback than Positive Feedback, you will actually be blocked from seeing a lot of listings!
• Buyers are not going to be interested in buying from us if we have a proven bad track record. They can see our Feedback history, and if it isn’t pretty, they’re not going to stick around and try to deal with us!

We are going to live and die based on Feedback on eBay. If we have positive Feedback, we will be rewarded. If we have negative Feedback, we will be punished. It is as simple as that. We should strive towards perfection as much as possible with eBay, as it will be to our benefit. Stay tuned next week, and we’ll continue our crash course on eBay!

First and foremost, when you think of eBay, the savvy customers out there think feedback. We had talked about feedback before, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on Feedback, and its significance to us as new eBay users.

eBay, as we know, is a behemoth on the internet these days. There are literally tens of thousands of transactions going on hourly, and eBay quickly came to realize that it was fast growing infeasible to try and track all this information on a case by case basis, if not outright impossible. In this position, you typically have one of two options available to you: let chaos reign, or try to keep some semblance of order. eBay opted for the latter.

The concept of Feedback is simple: you have a “pass/fail” metric by which you rank a transaction, and the buyer and the seller involved both get to have their say. By keeping things strictly as Positive or Negative, there is no guessing. There is the eBay DSR rankings that allow us to get more in-depth, but as far as the transaction itself goes, you either did your job, or you didn’t.

It was a great way to keep the buyers and sellers on eBay in line; you were at the mercy of whomever it was you were directly working with as far as Feedback was concerned. Your reputation itself was at stake with each and every transaction, so it was very important to uphold your end of the bargain, and ship promptly and as outlined, or pay promptly as promised. It helped impose some order onto an otherwise unwieldy environment, and it took off well.

Reputation is well and good, but what practical effect does that have on us as eBay sellers? Find out in our next article!

In order to prevent such failure, always contact the dropship companies you intend to work with before assuming that they dropship the particular product you want to sell. When you contact wholesale dropship companies, make sure that you also ask about any fees associated with drop shipping with that supplier before you get in too deep.

Some of the fees associated with dropship companies are price mark-up, same price, and monthly fee. A price mark-up occurs when the wholesaler marks up the product after getting it from the manufacturer. A second way to charge a fee is by selling the product for the price they were able to get it from the wholesaler but then charging a fee for each time a product is drop shipped. A third way is to be charged a monthly fee and then you can sell the product as often as you wish that month at the price of the wholesaler, without any extra fee associated with it. The dropship companies you’re working with may use all or none of these fees. If they use all of them, the chances of making a profit off the products are very low.

I cannot stress enough, the importance of contacting the dropship companies in advance. You would never want to post something on eBay, for example, and make a sale only to find out that the dropship companies you are dealing with plan to charge you extra fees. For more information please visit GoGo Dropship.

Ebay members are asked to rate the people they are doing business with. Both the buyer and the seller have an opportunity to rate their counterpart with positive, neutral, or negative feedback scores. This feedback score appears on the users feedback profile as well as by the users name.

Positive feedback adds one point to the feedback score of the recipient. A positive feedback usually results from great customer service, shipping on time, quality products, and the quality of the experience in general.

Negative feedback takes away one point from the recipient. Too much negative feedback may result in a horribly negative score which would prevent anyone from wanting to do business with you. Too much negative feedback may result in the failure of your eBay drop ship business so be very careful and give great customer service.

Why is eBay feedback so important?

Your feedback score is so important because it gives your counterpart an impression of your business dealings. For example, I have a friend who started an eBay drop ship business with a good friend of his. My friend decided to sell his portion of the company to his business partner. Unfortunately, my friend was the one keeping up the good feedback score. Once he left the company, the feedback score plummeted and the company was in trouble. Eventually, nobody wanted to buy products from them.

Long story short, good standing is very important if you want to eBay drop ship. If you do not have a good standing, you may as well give up on drop shipping on ebay.